Gang policy on a wing and a prayer

We pray for better days." That is the bleak and rather sensational way in which the under-cover journalist calling himself 'John Heale' introduces One Blood, his book on Britain's street gangs.

It is true that street gangs cause terrible fear and suffering, to themselves as well as to others, and it seems to be true that there is something new about the way they are growing and drawing ever younger children into their own fearful and blighted existences. At any rate, the country is in the grip of an uncritical hysteria about feral youth and knife and gun crime.

However, as Heale himself says, it is extremely difficult to know with any precision what the facts really are. For one thing, the official figures are unsatisfactory: for instance, the annual British Crime Survey does not interview children under 16, only adults, and it is increasingly children who

are affected by gang violence.

Heale claims to have done many months of research among gang members in England's major cities. He is convinced that the gang problem is getting worse, but he doesn't really demonstrate it. The Prince's Trust, for example, has just published a report on youth culture which finds that only 9 per cent of young people aged 16-25 have spent time in a gang, only 2 per cent carry knives and only 3 per cent regularly use drugs.

None of this means, however, that there isn't a very alarming problem. Nobody doubts that there is in this rich country a poverty-stricken underclass of angry, alienated, unemployable and disturbed young people who feel they have been failed by everyone and everything, except each other - and they will fail each other too. The question is what, if anything, can be done.

A 'multi-agency solution' is the dreadful phrase regularly used in answer, by Heale among others, because the causes of the problems are so complex and interconnected. But all such agencies are already in place, most of them for decades - urban renewal,