Photo by David Woo, used under Creative Commons licence.

Who is your friend?

It’s a question I’ve sometimes had to ask young people as they develop their own independent judgement.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen youngsters become involved in gang culture. Keeping them away from this is something I feel strongly about, but criticising and being negative isn’t the way

If you can see that someone is going down a wrong path, the first thing to do is to understand why.  

Gang culture is surrogate family

People join a street crowd because they haven’t got a gang already.  Gang culture is surrogate family. This can be hard for people on the outside to understand.

But for too many kids, this is something that’s missing: a secure base, a sense of structure, people you belong with who’ll always be there for you. Understand that sense of lack they feel, that emptiness, and now you can start to understand how much they want to do something to fill it, and why they join gangs and follow along with what other gang members do.

But people who lead you in ways that are harmful to you – perhaps even into ways which are violent and criminal and which could endanger your life – are not your friends. They do not have your best interests at heart, but theirs.

With strong self-worth, the need to get involved in gang culture diminishes. That’s what we work to achieve with our young people at Panther Taekwondo Black Belt Academy. I’ll be looking more carefully at this in the coming days on my blog.