An Introduction to Gangs and Serious Youth Violence in the United Kingdom

Shift Happens: Towards a New UK Gang Research Agenda

As Muncie (2014: 33) said, ‘America owns the street gang, while Britain has traditionally been the home of youth subcultures’. This one line succinctly captures the crux of the debate so far this century – the operative word being traditionally. Even if no gangs existed in Britain’s past (and some contest this too; see Davies, 2013), gangs can still exist Britain’s present. The subculture-gang division separated ‘them’ (America) from ‘us’ (Britain) (Campbell and Muncer, 1989), and for decades this became an idée fixé – a calcifying adjudication which tied the hands of UK scholars seeking to adapt to the ‘evolving’ presentation of UK gangs (Densley, 2014; McLean, 2018; Whittaker et al., 2019).

Muncie’s dated assessment is constantly re-produced, rarely questioned. Hence, why initial discussions on UK gangs frequently commence by citing interesting vignettes of early 20th-century social life (Downes, 1966) that speak of homogeneous White working-class communities (not modern British multiculturalism), of class control and deference (not the fluidity of identity and status), of state intervention (not state absenteeism), of structured employment (not the gig-economy), and of a baronial press monopoly on news creation (not user-generated and public-mediated information). Such is a world quite distant from the ‘glocal’ violent street worlds of today (van Hellemont and Densley, 2019), where the boundaries between gangs and organised crime are blurred (McLean et al., 2019), criminal groups use smart phones and social media (e.g. Storrod and Densley, 2017), and gangs venture into exploitative county lines drug dealing outside of traditional territorial boundaries because of increasing drug market competition (e.g. Coomber and Moyle, 2018; McLean et al., 2020; Robinson et al., 2019).

It is true that post-war Britain witnessed a plethora of resistant youth groups (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), but into this nostalgic world of fashion, music, and subcultural tribes, steps one of Huxley’s (1870) ‘ugly facts’ – in recent years, young men who see themselves and are seen by others as members of ‘gangs’ have been killing each other with knives and firearms at unprecedented rates (HM Government, 2018). Sufficient to present a challenge to ‘normal science’, this harsh reality has begun to overturn the stock of ‘old truths’ still circulating in the UK academe (Kuhn, 1962). Shibboleths are difficult to set aside, but times have changed – the Mods and Rockers of a bygone era belong in newsreels and freshman sociology lectures. More than simply what is old is new again, the United Kingdom has experienced a true paradigm shift. Well, Shift Happens!

Preview of the Special Issue

Given the intensity of the academic debate about gangs and serious youth violence, and the unprecedented levels of public and political concern about how best to intervene and prevent violence from escalating further, this special issue brings together some of the United Kingdom’s leading and emerging scholars to share insights into the very latest research pertinent to these issues. The papers included in this collection examine the role of street gangs in UK society through the lens of knife crime, the emergence of county lines drug dealing, child criminal exploitation, and other correlates of youth violence. The utility of interventions such as police gang databases is assessed, so too are new harm reduction and contextual safeguarding strategies. Pathways to violence and desistance also are discussed, with an emphasis on mental health and wellness.

In the first article in this collection, co-editor James Densley and his colleague David Pyrooz draw attention to the wide-ranging controversy associated with Scotland Yard’s database of purported gang members, termed the Gangs Matrix. They observe how technology has ushered in a new era of intelligence-led and ‘big data’ policing, and police gang databases are part of this paradigmatic shift. Drawing on evidence and examples from a wide range of sources internationally – gang legislation, surveys of young people, police gang records, and research on gangs – Densley and Pyrooz put common validity and civil liberties critiques of gang databases like the Matrix to the test. They find merit in the civil liberties concerns and, to a lesser extent, claim that gang data are invalid and unreliable, but conclude that eliminating gang databases entirely could have the unintended consequence of making it more difficult to understand and respond to violence in communities. The authors offer a blueprint for improving gang databases by better codifying gang criteria, changing notification rules, contesting designations, and standardising sunset periods.

Co-editor and NCGR lead Simon Harding’s contribution to the special issue draws on qualitative interviews with knife carriers and users in London. Harding finds that carrying a knife in public provides young men with a sense of authenticity within the ever-evolving social field of the gang and that stabbing permits a release, both from the pressure associated with the potential for revenge or retaliation on the street and the constant need to perform in front of peers to accumulate ‘street capital’. For Harding, knife-enabled crime is normalised by the ‘habitus’ of the street, where it is literally expected and validated, which explains in part why knife crime has become more frequent and more deadly in recent years.

County lines drug dealing is a new and rapidly evolving illicit drug supply model which sees urban drug dealers cross police borders to exploit provincial drug markets (Coomber and Moyle, 2018). Two papers in this special issue examine county lines in detail. First, Chris Holligan, Robert McLean, and Richard McHugh explore the lived experience of county lines in Scotland, where little has been published about the subject, sharing new insights into this form of ‘venturing capitalism’ as gained from field interviews with serious drug offenders. Second, James Windle, Leah Moyle, and Ross Coomber review the academic and official research on young people’s participation in county line drug dealing and identify critical knowledge gaps. They draw attention to the way in which the literature suggests that young people involved in county line networks are often ‘looked after’ children or children known to social care or youth offending teams.

Once involved in county line drug dealing, Windle et al. argue that young people face a number of serious risks, including arrest, sexual and physical violence, emotional abuse, and absenteeism. Drawing upon their own empirical data, Windle and colleagues explore the evidence that suggests that many young people are initially drawn to county lines by financial and social incentives, yet experience more coercive control once embedded within these networks. Both county lines articles in this collection describe a blurring of the ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ categories, and Windle and colleagues conclude by suggesting that while police, media, and political narratives currently frame young people as vulnerable victims of exploitation, in reality they are frequently met with the full force of the law.

Continuing with the issue of child victimisation, Jenny Lloyd and Carlene Firmin’s article draws attention to the way in which England’s child protection system is intended to safeguard young people at risk of significant harm. They argue that when young people are victimised in extra-familial settings, they ultimately experience harms greater than or equal to those experienced in familial settings, thus have a right to the same statutory response from child protection services. Using data from referrals and assessments into children’s social care, Lloyd and Firmin explore the extent to which this right is realised in practice. Drawing parallels with previous critiques of social work responses to child sexual exploitation, their work finds that to a certain extent ‘no-further-action’ decisions, where they emerge, are aligned to the cultural and procedural parameters of social work and child protection practice. When the context in which abuse occurs is foregrounded in analysis of decision-making processes, however, the structural limitations of traditional child protection practices are illuminated, strengthening the case to adopt Contextual Safeguarding models.

An important element of the research into youth violence and its underlying causes is the focus on mental health, and yet research examining the mental health and emotions of gang members is currently in its infancy. Sarah Osman and Jane Wood present empirical insights into the way in which gang members and non-gang youth differ on anxiety, depression, psychological distress and self-conscious emotions, such as guilt and shame. Their study of young people aged 13–19 years recruited from secondary institutions in London shows that gang members experience higher levels of psychological distress, rumination and lower levels of emotional well-being. Osman and Wood describe gang members as vulnerable offenders and call for gang intervention programmes focused more on the mental and emotional needs of youth.

Finally, co-editor Ross Deuchar’s paper picks up on the theme of mental wellness to explore the vital role of religion and spirituality in gang disengagement and violence desistance (see Deuchar, 2019). Deuchar shifts the focus from the United Kingdom to the Scandinavian context, presenting insights from life history interviews he conducted with a small sample of male reforming gang members in Denmark who had become immersed in a holistic spiritual intervention programme that foregrounded meditation, yoga and dynamic breathing techniques. He illustrates the way in which engagement with the programme enabled the men to begin to perform broader versions of masculinity, experience improved mental health and wellbeing and develop a greater commitment to criminal desistance. Links with religious and spiritual engagement are discussed, and importantly, the paper includes important implications for gang violence reduction in the UK context.

Concluding Remarks

In his call for a more ‘public criminology’, Matthews (2016: 2) admonishes criminologists who turn out policy irrelevant work and ‘so what’ criminology, noting ‘a great deal of criminological investigation is poorly conceived and researched . . . theoretically weak, methodologically inadequate and has little or no policy relevance’. As practitioners and policymakers continue to search for evidence-based solutions to the ever-escalating issue of violence within the United Kingdom, as Editors we hope that no reader comes away from this special collection saying, ‘so what’. Instead, we anticipate this edition will serve as a critical appraisal of the field and benchmark for future research and practice.