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Youth Violence (London)

I will keep my remarks as brief as possible, as you have suggested, Mr. Olner, as a few other colleagues would like to speak. This is an important debate. I will start by saying that Upminster is part of the London borough of Havering, which as an outer London borough does not suffer the same level of youth violence as some inner London boroughs. Nevertheless, we have had a mercifully small number of tragic incidents. Each and every incident in which a child dies is a tragedy for the families concerned. If there has been no successful prosecution, those families find it almost impossible to grieve properly and move on because they are unable to feel the sense of closure or of justice being done that would enable them to at least cope with—they can never get over it—the loss of a child. There are two aspects to the debate. One relates to the reasons young people get involved in gangs and violent behaviour, and the other, which flows from the first, is what action can be taken. The reasons why young people get involved in gangs are wide-ranging, and those involved often come from homes in which there is no order or support from parents. Children often turn to gangs for a sense of belonging, and the gang leader is often a charismatic young person who might have suffered violence or a lack of order in their own lives. They gain self-respect and self-confidence by intimidating, bullying and manipulating other people, sometimes weaker, young people, who will feel safer within a gang, in the knowledge that they are less likely to become a victim themselves. Friends of mine who are criminal barristers have said that some young people will attend court having got into trouble without really understanding where they are, or why they are there, and that sometimes their parents do not bother to turn up. I ask hon. Members to imagine a young person who has committed an offence and ended up in court, but who does not have the support of family members. That is the case with a small proportion of them.