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Was Rhys’s murder born of frustrated creativity?
To understand gang violence, we must realise that young people who are unable to channel their innate creativity will be drawn to destruction
When the news came on Thursday that the four gang members who had assisted in the murder of Rhys Jones had been sentenced, here in Peckham a police helicopter was circling overhead.
It's often there clattering noisily at the end of the school day monitoring the activities of the kids as they spill out onto the streets. This is where Damilola Taylor met his death in 2000 and the hovering surveillance is a reminder that life for many youngsters still isn't as it should be in Britain's urban enclaves.
The alarming headlines continue; only a month ago a Metropolitan Police commander warned that gang members are getting younger. They are also killing each other for reasons beyond our adult comprehension. Swaggering, shaven-headed Sean Mercer killed Rhys Jones with one of three gunshots aimed at a rival gang member who had slighted him in some way.
The boys involved in this murder crossed a social boundary in the crime they committed and they devastated a family in the process, but many children share their appetite for violence and this is uncomfortable for what our sense of childhood should be.
Even the round of Christmas pantos recently have had to increase the darker side of their entertainment as young people nowadays are "more drawn to horror", according to David Lan, artistic director at the Young Vic. Parents feel let down by the fact that well before the onset of adolescence children betray a preference for narratives of violence over sentiment.
Ever since the hooligans and rebels of the 1950s we have sought to explain gang culture in terms of deprivation - the loss of hope and prospects and the resulting desperation to assert an identity. These are still compelling explanations, but shouldn't we try and discover more about the seductions of violence and the personal meaning it has for young people in today's culture? Because while we adults find all this killing senseless and depressing, for those who participate it is a world invested with meaning.
The moral and sensual nature of violence is a draw. The player at the games console of Grand Theft Auto is a killer who wins points for destruction. The rush of energy and excitement, the sheer potency of a 'result', is almost expressively creative.
The novelist and critic Anthony Burgess said that "violence among the young is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy". This fitted the life of the young actor Ashley Walters until he gave up his gun and gang life in Peckham to "re-focus my attention on what is possible and positive in life".
Young people who never go near gangs and would fear their malign and dangerous influence nonetheless share a liking for the aesthetic of violence. They see moral emotions of pride and loyalty and expressive ones of heroism and omnipotence; they admire the 'bad guys' and delight in their power and control. But there a line is drawn between fantasy and reality. For real gang members the seduction is complete; they really have, as the movies say, stepped over into the dark side.
Dr Loretta Loach is the author of ‘The Devil’s Children: A History of Childhood and Murder’, to be published on February 12 by Icon Books
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Innate creativity? Words from a luvvy without a shred of experience of life on the streets and in the estates of proletarian Britain. These kids aren't creative, they're chavs; uneducated and no wanting education, emotionally stunted, unloved in many cases, brutalised and cold. They have grown up on a diet of violence fed to them by the middle-class media which lacks any social responsibility, and is only interested in selling sensation and violence to further their own greed. If kids grow up with wall-to-wall violence, they are going to be violent. Duh. These kids know they at the bottom of the heap, they know they have no career prospects or much of a future other than to hang about on their dismal estate. This is no passing phase, it is their life, they know it won't get any better. This is nihilism pure and simple, and there's more and more of them every year. Like rats in a trap, they attack each other as the easist targets for their inchoate anger, frustration and pessimism.
Yes, the children who never go near gangs are have an affinity for the violent aspects of life.
Yet, I disagree with the writer in the this is a passing phase of growth into puberty, we all experience death and its aftermath at an early age and wondering how it would feel is somehow a rite of passage into more mature and adult thinking.
We, adults must somehow get the arts and music and culture back into the curriculum of schools, without adult sensibilities and without the judgement of adult thinking. Our thinking is quite horrified by the thoughts of darkness and blackness that teenagers and especially those creative teenagers have. But we must forgo the drama of charging children with thinking about death and its aftermath, so that they can explore the nether regions of their minds and come out on the other side as fully formed and creative thinking adults.
We place too much stress on the testing that is the regimen nowadays and not enough on the creative side of a child's life.
If we are to regain the ability to train our children to think outside the box and think for themselves, then we must teach creative thinking skills and do this very thing without the judgment of an adults' perspective.