At 12, I was in a street gang and carrying a knife
I REMEMBER the first time I walked into the street with a knife in my pocket. I felt like a character in a gangster movie. I was 12 years old and living on the streets after running away from a children’s home. I found solace in a gang — the older boys took good care of me and made me feel wanted. Dad died when I was 11 and Mum, who had her own problems, had moved on pretty quickly. With the gang, I felt I was free to live my life — it was adventurous and exciting. I also felt safe for the first time since Dad died. One day I had a fight with an older boy from another gang. I was being beaten up badly, so ran away because I knew if I didn’t I would end up in hospital. I tripped over in front of a woman with a child and my knife fell to the ground. I remember the horrified look on her face — she must have feared I was about to attack her. I picked up the knife and ran off as fast as I could before she could call the police. When I told my gang what had happened, I thought they would go looking for the boy who had beaten me up, but to my surprise they turned on me. They told me I should have stabbed the other boy to put the fear of death into him and his mates. The thought of sticking a knife into another person scared me more than being stabbed myself. I managed to escape that time of my life unharmed, but today I face it again with a new generation of youngsters. I manage two care homes in London for teenage boys aged 16 to 18 and every day I see how they are tempted to follow a life of crime. Everyone’s an expert when a young person ends up dead, but the reality is simple: unless you’ve been there and seen it, you’ll never truly understand it. I wrote the book Damaged about being brought up in the care system surrounded by danger. Now I live by one rule: the pen is mightier than the sword, but it’s going to take a lot of resilience to bring it to life.
CHRIS WILD, Enfield, North London. THE grooming of girls and the recruitment of boys into county lines drug running have a common factor — care homes. These vulnerable young people are supposedly being kept safe from danger. When are we going to have a proper investigation into the running of care homes and make them the secure environment they are supposed to be? This might involve overcoming the political correctness that hampers all such efforts, which means these children can’t be supervised effectively.