HOWZAT

That doesn’t happen here. There is no room for a table. We all eat dinner off our laps. Families start to not eat together because there is no point. We don’t have any space at any time. That’s why some parents can’t love their children. They are too busy surviving.

If you talk to those families where children are behaving the worst, you find that the kids have no rules and no boundaries. The reason is that the parents have never had any point at which to put them in place.

Many of the young people I deal with have never spent any meaningful time with their mothers or their fathers. Their parents didn’t do anything with them and they have no set of family rules that govern them.

If you are the younger end of an overcrowded family you share a bedroom with your older brother. Maybe there are three of you in one small bedroom. You have no privacy so you come out of your flat for privacy. You stay on the block because you are comfortable there. It becomes your extended bedroom.

As time has gone on, the people who hang around the block have aged from cute little five-year-olds to 15, 16, 17, 18-year-olds. In some cases 21-year-olds are still hanging around.

On one of the estates here there are 1,600 young people and kids under the age of 19. The sight of a big group of young people just terrorises most people. This is where it starts. The kids are perceived as a threat. They are dealt with in that manner. Then they take on the role they were handed. Put that with difficult parenting and you’ve got a problem.

This was an area where poor white people were sent who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. The estates have also become home to London’s largest Moroccan enclave and to Jamaican, Portuguese and Spanish communities. But, although we have been housed in our racial groups, racial tension is not a feature of life here. When they found the alleged July 21 bombers on our estates, no form of war took place.

Instead a child is known by the estate he comes from. Kids will fight with other kids just because they are on their road. You defend your “ends” — your locale — because you don’t want to be seen to come from where the pussies live. You club together loosely to make sure you stand up for each other. It is an easy step from here to the creation of gangs.

Some gangs have names. There is the Cold Hearted Crew, the Heartless Crew. The names are always about being mean and tough: Cutlass, Beg for Mercy. Imagine you are a nine-year-old boy living here. You see these groups of older boys. They seem to be tough. They seem to be having a good time. Nobody interferes with them. You want to be a man and these appear to be men to you.

In some of the gangs, some of the slightly older ones have already been in prison. To the kids on the street, prison has become a badge of honour. It’s almost getting to the point that you have to go to prison.

All their talk is about f****** people up. There is no notion of conflict resolution other than battering people. Violence is deeply ingrained in their culture of “respect”. They have to take people on just because what is said might be disrespectful to them. They have to batter them. They have to be in charge. To be in charge they have to be physically violent.

Not having parental love is one reason the kids argue about respect so much. Their view is you have to be a “bad boy” or people don’t leave you alone. With white boys, it’s about being a nutter. You’ve got to be a nutter. You don’t want anyone f****** with you, you’ve got to f*** them up, you’ve got to show people you’re a nutter. The black boy will say things like “bad boy, gunman, man don’t take no shit”. They talk about blowing people’s heads off and about stabbing people.

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