Photo: Sai Miller
Organisations refer to them as invisible, the young vulnerable girls who get involved with criminal groups – often through relationships with a criminal individual. Girls are less likely to get arrested, less likely to be picked up by the system, they easily fall off the radar and get drawn into a downwards spiral towards sexual exploitation, violence, drugs, abuse, and a life-long trauma. That is if it continues to go undetected, misunderstood and untreated.
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Janelle was 14 when she first got involved in criminal activity. That was the walk of life that was available to her. Surroundings, familiarity and a sense of fitting in were some of the factors that led her to make early life-altering choices.
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“I can only speak for my generation”, says Janelle, now 30, “but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly appealing for women in certain areas to join criminal groups, but that is our norm, that is just normal life for us. It’s not about wanting to do it, it’s just the standard way of where I grew up”.
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As a young girl born and bred in Brixton, South London, she was surrounded by people that were involved in a lot of criminal activity. Although she did get into abusive relationships, Janelle describes herself and her female peers as very strong characters, far from victims without a voice of their own.
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“Much of the female mentality in my area was, ‘if guys can do it, why can’t we?’ So these strong girls may have been perceived as being aggressive, but when you live in a world where men are of a certain way, for us it was a thing of, ‘well, we can do the same, and if anything we can do it better.’”
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Janelle points out that many women involved in criminality are being victimised and victim-blamed, when in fact they are very strong decision-makers. “You’ll find a lot of the time it’s actually the women making the decisions because their men will turn to them for help,” she says, “so you’ll always find that there are women behind a lot of the things that are going on.”
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She was handling weapons and selling drugs, but she never really felt like she was being true to herself. She wasn’t happy with the inconsistency of her chosen lifestyle. “The women where I grew up always felt the need to have a very hard exterior in order to protect themselves, and I realised that being aggressive and promoting violence actually is not a way for a woman to be.”
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With well-educated and working parents, Janelle grew up in a different household than her female peers whose mums may have been selling drugs themselves. “For me, my lifestyle was out of curiosity, purely because I was the odd one out,” Janelle says, “everyone else came from a certain walk of life, and I wanted that experience.
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For Janelle, it was a conscious decision to get involved in the criminal activity, and it was a conscious decision to get out of it. She saw people before her not getting anywhere, and Janelle wanted to get somewhere. She is a self-sufficient individual, not used to seeking help from anyone. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done it for myself and by myself. Nobody has actually helped me, because there isn’t help out there for a lot of people, so...”
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Yes, so. Janelle is far from the only young person trying to get out of a destructive lifestyle, only to find closed doors. Janelle may be the type of person who kicks in said closed doors, but what do you do if your boots are not strong enough?
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Gifford Sutherland, founder and CEO of organisation Upskill360, is offering vulnerable young people at risk of or wanting to get out of, criminality, help through a mentoring program. He says there has been very little work done around the youngsters, and even less so with young girls.
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“The problem is that the root to any mental health assessment in the current standard system is looking at the young people from an offending point of view, as opposed to a mental health point of view,” Gifford says.
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A young person being in the social care system will have their mental health professionally looked at as a part of the overall assessment. But a young person outside the mainstream education system, in pupil referring units or alternative education, or not in any education system at all, will possibly be assessed without any focus on their mental health. “A young person who has ended up in the criminal justice system will, as a part of that system, be assessed for mental health,” says Gifford. That means that the only way they will be picked up is if they have offences against them. It also means that young people who are still living at home, and thus are not in the care system, will not be picked up either.
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“There’s a whole range of young people who could be active on the streets, or involved in risky lifestyles, who haven’t been arrested ever, so there is no way they can be picked up in any sort of assessment or screening,” says Gifford. “The ways in which a young person’s mental health, as a result of the lifestyle they’re involved in, is being assessed are very limited. There isn’t one young lady that has been through this sort of exploitation that does not need direct help around their mental health. Whether they realise it or not.”
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What if you want to leave the group or the gang? According to Gifford, you can’t. And the risk-related activities are no longer limited to the inner cities, they can be anywhere outside now.
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Photo: Maarten van den Heuvel
A glamorised world
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Gifford is a member of the Mayor of London’s VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls) Committee board, working to get the British authorities to look at young people offending from a mental health perspective. He says the problem is the girls are being perceived as bad and their behaviour offending and challenging when really it is a mental health issue and needs to be treated as such.
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Gifford believes it is important not to stereotype. There isn’t any specific socio-economic background, Gifford says that’s a myth, they come from all types of cultural backgrounds. Separated or absent parents are also not always the case. Gifford points out that neglect can come from parents working long hours, giving the child a big window, between finishing school and the time the parents are home from work, to get involved with the wrong people. What the youngsters have in common is completely separated from race, colour, creed and nationality. It is the urban youth culture – the latest brands, expensive technology, fashion, social media.
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Years ago gang activities were purely limited to inner cities and deprived areas. However, the new emerging concept of county lines is changing the game. Gang-members, or even individuals, target sleepy, rural areas, very low-key towns, they then take over the existing drug network and replace it with their better-quality drugs, and run a mobile line most often from London to that town. The person being sent there to set up and administering a base is often a young woman. The girl monitors the business, brings the supplies and handles the money. The base is set up at a vulnerable person’s house, for example, someone who has social housing, maybe a young single mother, or a young lady with her own property. She is then manipulated and coerced, oftentimes by fear and relationships, into completely giving up her flat.
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Gifford explains that because of the gentrification in London towns, people in social housing are forced to get housing outside London, sometimes to the same town. So, the social dynamic profile of these towns have dramatically changed, ethnic mixes have changed, the types of people are mixed.
But the policing, security and supervising have not grown at the same rate, so with little policing and security, the towns are very easy markets.
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The base then becomes the centre not only for the drug dealing but also for sexual exploitation, drug use and violence, and it takes its own shape or form, separate to the trade and distributing of the drugs.
No one is going to suspect the young girl operating the base. She is between 11-18 years old, the same age as many young people who are given social housing, she is inconspicuous, and blends in with everything else that goes on around the estate. She is basically invisible. She stays at the base until a certain amount of drug supply is gone, usually three to four weeks.
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“You’ve got to remember, they’re not enslaved,” says Gifford. “They get a lot of material things, they handle large sums of money. It’s exciting for them in the beginning. The gang members are exploiting people who don’t realise they’ve been exploited, who feel as though they are being rewarded. The rewards of going to school and work hard to get a job can’t compete with that instant gratification, they are in a completely different and glamorised world.”
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Photo: Dev Benjamin
Understanding the girls’ needs
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Janelle stopped selling drugs and got herself a job at a hair salon. She had some normality, and then she met a guy. He was well-known on the streets as highly involved in criminal activity. “That brought me right back to square one. I was carrying drugs across town with my child in a sling, I was holding guns. I had come back full circle and worse than it was when it was me by myself.”
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The relationship was very abusive. By the hands of her child’s father, Janelle had fully noted guns shoved down her throat, he stabbed her, kicked her out of cars, punched her down in the street, and kicked her pregnant bellies.
“Everybody has a limit,” she says. “I woke up one day and decided I cannot live like this anymore, or I will end up dead.”
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Janelle phoned Women’s Aid, an organisation providing services for women experiencing domestic abuse. She was forced to call the police, as Women’s Aid required a crime reference number. “I dropped the charges because in the world I grew up in the police are a no-no for us. You’re scorned for calling the police on your own, we feel like we are selling our men to a system that’s unjust towards them. Hence me putting up with extreme violence for so long. I think a lot of young women offending in the urban communities are being subjected to a lot of things purely on that basis alone” Janelle says.
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She was relocated, but her partner found her, attacked her and raped her, twice. The only way for it to stop was to involve the police. She says even though she was raped, it was a very difficult experience to follow through with the charges.
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“I wouldn’t have been offered any support for getting away from the criminal activity I was involved in, because I wasn’t on anybody’s radar. But I have been a survivor of domestic violence, and that’s why I got help,” she says.
Naomi Allen from organisation XLP (The eXeL Project), which offers programs for 11-18-year olds at risk of or involved in criminality, agrees with Janelle. “There isn’t much support or understanding of these women choosing to get involved with criminal groups,” Naomi says.
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The XLP report in 2014 looked at girls in gangs when it was almost completely unspoken of that girls would be a part of the criminality. “There was this real misconception that all girls affiliated with criminal groups or gangs were forced into it,” says Naomi, “but when we were talking to some of the girls we found that, yes for some girls that is the case, but some girls get involved willingly because they see the power they can achieve. That they can belong to something, it gives them status and identity.” The gangs are often places of real influence in their area, they can have a voice, earn respect and be influential – regardless of their economic backgrounds.
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However, what starts off as a choice can very quickly turn into extreme isolation, being completely controlled by the guys in the group regarding who they talk to and where they go, the guys demand sexual acts not just with them but with multiple people in the gang. The rights and the voice they felt empowered them now totally disappears.
Jessica Southgate, Policy Manager for Agenda, the alliance for women and girls at risk, has written about the lack of understanding for the girls’ needs in her report Seeing Differently: Working with girls affected by gangs, in 2011. She says it is equally important to remember that the young people who join criminal activity are limited to incredibly constrained choices, even if they may feel fairly autonomous and like they have been able to make decisions.
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Jessica also highlights the need to listen to girls as they are often disbelieved, which leads to a further lack of trust in the system. More attention needs to be paid to the girls’ and women’s needs. Jessica believes their voices, stories and experiences must be at the heart of the work towards bettering their conditions.
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“Of course the girls need investment,” Jessica says. “They need community support in the places where they are.”
Another thing XLP found was that the girls were often invisible. The police told them, “we’re never going to find them unless they commit a crime,” the health services told them, “we’re never going to see them unless they get hurt,” the schools told them, “we’re never going to see them unless they turn up.” Also, a girl who is getting sexually exploited is not likely to tell her parents because of the shame she feels, explains Naomi.
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Gifford Sutherland explains that since the interventions around trauma and mental health tend to be related to an offending referral, these tend to focus predominantly on men since offending is mostly done by males. “Very rarely are there any interventions that work with girls,” says Gifford. Research shows that girls have different needs than boys when it comes to rehabilitation and intervention coming out of criminal activity, and yet there are almost no gender-focused programs.
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Also, the mental health sessions that are available usually lasts for 12 weeks, before that service stops. “But working with a young person around their trauma may take 12 weeks before they even open up. By the time they begin to feel they can trust you, the provision has ended,” says Gifford. When Upskill360 started running their 12-month female-focused program for healthy relationships, HEART, they found that it was not until the second half of the year that they began making a real breakthrough.
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“The underlying issues affecting these young women were sometimes not even in relation to the perpetrators, but about things that were missing in their own life prior to joining a gang, which made them vulnerable,” Gifford explains. “But it could take that long before we could even begin the initial work with the girls.”
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The lack of understanding and support means that the girls go all the way into adulthood without anyone addressing the impact of their trauma. They end up carrying that trauma over the years, and it resurfaces in relationships when they become adults.
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“Most young people with mental health assessments will be referred to the NHS mental health service CAMHS. The problem with that is there is a stigma around CAMHS and the young person becomes very defensive, they feel labelled and that there’s something wrong with them,” says Gifford. He believes something needs to be done around what the young girls and boys identify with counselling services, alternative ways for mental health assessments through provisions are very much needed.
What Gifford suggests as “one of the real solutions”, and what Upskill360 is already doing, is to train people and specialise them in working with trauma. “To have community workers, mentors, key workers, support staff – everyday people from the community,” says Gifford. “That wouldn’t carry the stigma that an official counselling assessor has for these young people. That’s what we’re working for, there’s nothing like that out there at the moment.”
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Naomi Allen also says unless the young person is at high-risk level of self-harming or suicidal CAMHS are unlikely to take them on, or they will be put on a very long waiting list, as the service is very overwhelmed with referrals.
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Naomi says any sort of mental health work should be gender separate, as the girls often have traumatic experiences being involved with guys. They have completely different needs, which often relates to working on forming healthy relationships. But even within the girls’ gender group the needs differ.
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“There are some girls who are used particularly to fight other girls, so their trauma is related to being coerced into inflicting or receiving injuries from other females,” says Naomi. “We need to as much as possible think of the specific needs of the group we currently work with. Some young people can be incredibly resilient and have a very matter-of-fact mind-set. For other young people, their experiences can tear them apart and completely break who they are.”
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Photo: Sydney Sims
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Anything is possible
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Janelle was relocated a second time, to get away from her abusive partner. “When you’re at rock bottom, the only way is up,” she says. She did a lot of self-help to move on to a normal life. “It takes a lot of courage to be involved in a criminal lifestyle, and if you have that ability and mental strength you can transfer that to lead a healthier life. I thought, ‘well, how far can I go if I slipped my mentality into something positive?’”
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Today she studies criminology and psychology at university. She also trains police officers in domestic violence. Furthermore, she works in youth prisons where she speaks to girls to prevent them from following the same path she chose.
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In the prisons, she tries to raise awareness that “the Bonnie and Clyde-idea doesn’t exist”, and to shift the stigma of not involving the police. She says there isn’t much mental health support in place, and something “that frustrates” her “dearly” is the lack of psychologists in prisons. Having one psychologist for the whole prison where she works, spending two hours with 70 odd inmates, is more common than not according to Janelle.
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“A child under 17 years of age being sent to prison should set off alarm bells for anyone,” Janelle says. “The blame and the emphasis should not be put on the child.” What environment have they come from to end up in prison at such a young age, she asks.
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Jessica Southgate has also seen victim-blaming, especially when it comes to child sexual exploitation and girls at risk of joining criminal groups. “Girls who are at risk of abuse or involvement in crime, are seen by the public services and wider society as part of the problem,” she says. “They are seen as the risk to be managed, and there’s a lot of public interest put onto them. That hasn’t changed since I wrote my report.”
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The way girls are presented and spoken about is another thing that has remained since Jessica’s report. She says the image is over-simplified and distorted. There is often one very high profile case that people are interested in, but they’re not picking underneath the surface to look at what might have caused her to affiliate with crime and criminal men. “The heightened risk for girls of exposure to sexual abuse and harassment also still remains the case,” Jessica says. She firmly believes society must become more alert to the impact of trauma. “We still have a long way to go, we are far from understanding how trauma impacts girls’ lives,” Jessica emphasises.
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Janelle agrees with Gifford Sutherland, unresolved trauma will resurface in adulthood. “Prison isn’t rehabilitating them, because when they come out they’re faced with the same situation and they may get into it again because they haven’t mentally been through what’s happened. The whole assessment structure needs to change” says Janelle. She feels the work she does with the girls in prison is a last resort, the girls have already reached the farthest end of the scale, when these interventions should be a first point of call.
“We have to remember that they’re still children regardless of the crimes they’ve committed.” Janelle thinks a lot of adults with mental health issues have contributing factors that stem from their teenage years of unresolved trauma. “One of the girls I know committed a crime at the age of 12, she’s now been in prison for four years. How is she not going to enter adult life without any mental health issues for the violence she has committed? Where’s the mental support available for these people in prison?”
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She thinks it’s too easy for young people to become invisible. “No child should be dropping out of school and completely falling off the radar, it shouldn’t be as easy as it is today,” Janelle says. She points out that many young girls grow up before their time, and they don’t see why they should be in school, “and that’s another whole big issue for the government to fizzle out”.
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Janelle talks about a big grey area of missing young people. “You see missing-people posts on Facebook, and a lot of the time the child isn’t missing, they’re sitting down with a man that’s too old for them, thinking they’re bigger than they are, and end up subjecting themselves to things that they shouldn’t be involved in,” she says.
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“Things have changed drastically, it’s a different ball game now,” Janelle says. “The girls are a lot more sexually active, and with social media there are a lot more avenues for them to be vulnerable at.”
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Janelle keeps coming back to self-empowerment and the strength that the young girls carry. “The girls are actually quite strong, powerful individuals, but they don’t actually see it. They have the confidence to use it in a street lifestyle, but they lack the confidence to live a normal lifestyle,” she says. “Many of them resort back to criminal activity or to dating guys that are involved in that because it is intimidating to date a normal guy who’s not involved. It is a shame that they don’t realise how powerful they could be if they took their principles and applied them to normal life. But that’s where we as mentors come in. To encourage them.”
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Janelle believes the adapting to a normal life is one of the biggest challenges the young offenders face. She knows they can do it, and she tries to show them what she sees in them. “I am a big believer in turning negativity into positivity. Anything is possible, just look at me. Anything is possible.”
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