Take Care of Your Kids

"My mother and stepfather drank constantly and they would pass out.  My brother and I will go out and do whatever we want.  We would stay out all night and they wouldn't know or care.
"If you don't take care of your kids, they are going to be bad."

This is a retrospective realization of a man who in his teen years ran with violent skinhead gangs.  He has graduated to counselling troubled kids.  And he puts the responsibility for the fact that young boys turn to casual crime for something to do - preferring the excitement and adventure of it all to continuing their education - directly on the neglect they received from their parents.

All towns and cities now have their problems with teen gangs.  Young men - and sometimes women, but primarily the men - with little else to capture their imaginations than to seek out socially-adverse activities; theft, swarmings, break-and-enter, gang-on-gang violence, drug dealing.  If their parents didn't care enough to hand down values to them, why would they care that they have none?

Dealing drugs is easy money.  Young boys in their mid-teens begin small and become convinced it's the lifestyle for them.  Earnings of $20,000 a month simply bear no resemblance to a starter-job if they are even available.  The young men are raised and grow to maturity in low-income neighbourhoods where it's everyone for themselves. 

Being part of a gang means acceptance, and it makes life far more interesting.  Young men who look at crime and find it appealing are responding to the emotional appeal, the romance of it as it appears in their imagination.  They prefer not to linger on the thoughts of those they know of in their gang communities who reached the ripe old age of 20 and that represented their longevity cut-off.

Studies indicate that the average life expectancy of an active American male gang member is just a tad over 20 years of age.  Those studies pinpoint the fact that 95% of gang members do not manage to complete high school, while 90% will have been arrested by age 18, and 60% wind up corpses or in prison by age 20.  Not very encouraging aspirationally.

The money to be had, and the peer respect that being part of a crime gang elevates those activities to the position of glamour, romanticizing the gritty squalor of life in the fast criminal lane.  Graduation is swift from joining to participating to earning credits and money to the finality of prison or death.  The glory that is temporarily theirs trumps the nasty reality of their familial poverty.

"Gangs today are about drugs and making money, and it doesn't matter what your religion or ethnicity is if you want to be part of a gang" explained Staff Sgt. Mark Patterson, head of the Ottawa police guns and gangs unit.  Ottawa, while considered a "safe" city, has its share of gangs, an estimated dozen to 15 where members are occupied by drugs and guns.

"Gang members have moved from doing swarmings a few years ago to doing drive-by shootings".  The estimated entire population of the combined city's street gangs come out to 473 associates and members, over 130 of whom are full-fledged members while most of the violence is committed by roughly 25 to 30 hardcore criminals.
 
In Ottawa the average age of young adults in the city's gangs is 23, the majority men, a handful of women.  They inhabit the south end, the south east, Lowertown, Vanier and parts of the west end of the city concentrated around community housing projects.  Many of the gang members come from immigrant communities emanating from Lebanon, Kuwait Pakistan, Congo, Somalia and Ukraine.

The dysfunctional home situation, with family brawls, drunkenness, no adult supervision, sometimes physical and mental and sexual abuse all conspire to entice young men to look to escape the wretched conditions they are most familiar with.  And their path through gang membership to criminal activity takes them on the circuitous path back to what they fled, in spades.