Poverty, desperation, social exclusion, this is the soil in which gangs grow / A.J. Hendry

Gang’s grow because there are whānau in our country who have been pushed so far to the margins, that they can no longer see a place for themselves among us...

This is a piece I wrote back in 2021, originally featured on STUFF. Besides for a tiny edit (I removed a reference to a couple of politicians who are no longer engaged in the debate currently), it remains exactly the same. The conversation hasn’t really changed. But, it needs to.

Over the last week National has been attempting to drive a conversation around gangs.

Their narrative: gangs are growing exponentially under Labour, and the Police have grown soft.

Their solution: Get tough on crime, hit the gangs hard, and invest, invest, invest in disrupting, deterring, and punishing gangs and those connected with them.

The problem with the conversation that National is trying to drive is that they’re misses the point. Getting tough, investing more time, energy and police resource into punishing and disrupting gang activity, is not going to deter people from joining gangs.

They fail at providing a solution because they demonstrate that they fail to understand the problem.

Gangs do not exist in a void, people are not waking up one day and thinking ‘my life’s great, society’s great, I really love this country, I’m going to join a gang’. No, gang’s grow because there are whānau in our country who have been pushed so far to the margins, that they can no longer see a place for themselves among us.

I work for a service that supports rangatahi who have experienced homelessness. And though not all the young people we serve are full-on members of a gang, many are, or are in some way connected.

These are young people that our society has failed, rangatahi who have heard the message loud and clear, that we, society at large, don’t care about you, you’re not welcome, you’re not wanted. Young people who have been abandoned by the state, rejected by our communities, literally left to sleep on our streets because our society has not cared enough to care for them.

Recently, I spoke to a young man who was getting into some trouble for wearing his colours in the wrong spaces. We had a frank kōrero, and at one point I told him plainly ‘bro, you can’t be wearing those colours around here, you’re just attracting trouble’.

I will never forget how he looked at me, the sincerity, the honest and pained desperation that was in his voice and face. He knew something needed to change, but ‘they’re my family,’ he pleaded.

The words stuck with me.

Because they were true.

You see, when you see gang in a headline, most of the time you see an image of some huge, scary, biker who you imagine is going to punch your face in. But, for many of our whānau, especially those we’ve forced to the margins of our society, that’s not the way it is for them. When you speak of their ‘gang’, their ‘colours’, they ain’t thinking criminal, they’re thinking whānau. They’re thinking the boys who showed up for me when no-one else did. They’re thinking the people that will show up when the rest of our society and communities abandon them, the crew that’ll be there for them when they’re starving and are denied a food grant at Work and Income, the brothers that will take them in when they’re on the streets in winter and they’re refused emergency housing.

It’s easy to rail against gangs, as if they are inhumane organisms that just need to be amputated from within our communities. It is easy to say that anyone who would associate with a gang, or think of joining one is a criminal, and should be punished severely. But, when these rangatahi are in trouble, hungry, homeless, are you going to take them in? Will you make space in your world for them? Heck, will you even vote for a world where their humanity can be recognised, where they can have enough food to survive, where their kids don’t have to grow up in cold and damp houses, where they don’t live under the threat of violence, or every day have to deal with the fear of not knowing where they’ll sleep tonight?

So yeah, I struggle to tell my young people that they shouldn’t be involved with gangs.

Because, the reality is society has dropped them, and this group of people we’ve dehumanised, forced to the margins of our society, and branded criminal, thug, gang member, are really just a whānau who turn up for one another.

This isn’t to say that there is not harm that comes with gangs and gang culture, nor is it to attempt to paint an idealised picture of what gangs are. But, it is to acknowledge that when you abandon a group of people, when you leave them in poverty, and send the message that they are not welcome in society, that we should not be surprised to find them organise themselves into what we call gangs.

Poverty, desperation, social exclusion, this is the soil in which gangs grow. So, if we want to deal with the problem, we need to address the cause.

In this time of uncertainty it is vital that we have a strong Opposition, one that will stand up to our Government, and keep them to account when they fail to live up to their promises to our people.

National can be that, if they choose to fight the battles that matter.

National are right on one thing, the presence and visibility of gangs seem to be growing. But, so is inequality, and the feeling of desperation within our communities.

So, if the National Party wants to make gangs a focal point of their Opposition, then by all means. But, how about calling on the Government to urgently provide the solutions. Not more policing, and more tough-on-crime rhetoric. We should all know by now that that doesn’t work. In fact, the environment it creates actually makes things worse, by intensifying the stigma, and pushing our whānau further and further towards the margins. No, let’s hear the Opposition intensify their call for urgent action on housing, let’s see them join the chorus of NGOs demanding urgent action on child poverty and for the Government to raise baseline benefit levels. Let’s hear them calling out the Government’s slow movement on justice reform and let’s see them critique the Government’s failure to respond adequately to what are very obvious human rights violations occurring in our prisons.

National’s rhetoric on gangs is cheap. It is good for a headline, and even better for a tweet, but it has little impact or use in the real world.

If you want to prevent the growth of gangs, then you need to create a society where all our whānau are included, welcomed, and cared for. You need to get serious about eradicating poverty, ensure the right to housing is granted to all our people, provide whānau with the basics they need to thrive, address the systemic racism and bias that is ostracising a large portion of our whānau, end homelessness, and just care about the human beings that exist beneath the patch.

If you want to address gang numbers, you deal with the problem.

If you want a headline and a soundbite, you criticise the police and name the Government ‘soft on crime’.

It’s a long road to the next election, and the National Party still has plenty of time to decide what sort of opposition they want to be.

One that creates solutions, or one that creates headlines.

A.J. Hendry is a Laidlaw College graduate, and a Youth Development Worker and rangatahi advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads a service supporting rangatahi experiencing homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.