[Applause]
people die everyday team C is me and a
14 year old boy said this to me three
years ago and he said it to me three
days after a 17 year old boy was stabbed
and killed in our area and I felt really
alarmed and distressed by this because
it was extreme desensitization to
extreme violence people do die every day
but people aren’t killed every day
people aren’t murdered every day and
today for a whole generation of young
people they can’t even distinguish
between death from natural causes and
murder so how can this be the case well
in the UK we have a serious youth
violence epidemic and all the young
people in this picture have at least two
things in common they’re all under the
age of 19 and they were all killed on
the streets of my city London between
2005 and 2015
185 killings a hundred and eighty five
children stabbed short or beaten and if
I was to tell you about the young people
aged 25 and under that number would
increase if I was to tell you about the
young people killed in Birmingham
Manchester and other cities around the
UK that total would increase and if I
was to think about all the non-fatal
beatings and shootings and stabbings we
might start to get a better picture and
if I told you that that’s only the
official statistics and that sometimes
young people after being violently
attacked don’t even attend the hospital
we might start to get a better idea
because the reality is we really fail to
grasp the true scale of this epidemic
I really don’t like speaking about
statistics because I think they’re so
dehumanizing and every killing is a
tragedy and where does is it leaves a
hole in the lives of that young person’s
community their friends and their family
and unfortunately I’m here today because
I know exactly what that feels like
because six days after my 15th birthday
I can remember vividly waking up
abruptly around 7:00 in the morning to
the sound of my blackberry messenger
pinging and I checked my status updates
before I read my messages and I saw the
night’s events unfold before my eyes
with status is starting from around 1:30
in the morning broken hearts crying
faces and our eye peas and display
pictures had been changed to a familiar
face a cheeky smiled I’d seen so many
times growing up through childhood and a
friend and his name was Marvin and then
I checked my messages and I saw one that
said Marvin’s been shot and I saw
another I said Marvin’s been killed and
I actually laughter that was my first
reaction because I just thought this is
some kind of sick twisted joke and then
I got really really angry because I just
thought why would anyone make something
like this up so in shock and disbelief I
turned on the TV and I saw the headline
17-year old shot and killed in Mill Hill
and then I literally felt my heart break
because I’d been looking at these news
stories since I was 12 years old I
collect newspaper articles about serious
youth violence I was very familiar with
all of them but nothing could have
prepared me for the morning that I woke
up and picked up that paper and my
friend’s face was on the front cover
because the pain and grief that I felt
can’t be translated through the media
because it was wrong
so about a year and a half later I
decided that young people with real
lived experiences of violence should be
the driving force for change and so I
set up the forefront project so you fled
social enterprise and like we said our
vision is a world where communities can
live free from violence and we’re
actually on a mission and our mission is
to empower young people and communities
to understand and respond to serious
violence and the systemic conditions
that caused it and what we do is we
offer violence interventions in the
community and in education settings and
we create this platform that allows
people with who have been involved in or
affected by serious violence to create
change and we create a window for the
wider society to go better understanding
and insight into this issue and we’ve
been doing this for the last five years
so our authentic voices are ultimately
really necessary and they’re necessary
because in our society there’s often
just been calls for increased punitive
ism so in 2015 in the criminal justice
and courts act is a truce a two strike
measure was introduced which means that
there’s mandatory minimum sentencing for
the second time you’re caught possessing
a knife and if you’re 18 that’s going to
be six months in prison and if you’re 16
and 17 it’s gonna be four months in
prison and because it’s a mandatory
minimum sentence it means that even if
it does when it’s a sentence you two
less he can he or she can and so many
people thought that this is a great idea
because what we really need to reduce
violence is harsh deterrence punishment
and the reality is young people don’t
want to go to prison hey most people
don’t want to go to prison but when
they’re weighing up the risk and the
threat of being caught arrested and
sentenced against the fair or being
violently attacked or killed well I know
it’s one I would rather choose
and when we see violence increasing the
police often say we need to increase the
use of this tactic stopping search been
very very controversial and in fact in
2013 our Home Secretary commissioned a
report by the HMI C which revealed that
around 27% of stops and searches that
were carried that were actually unlawful
and young people will always say that it
further erodes the already strenuous
relationship between them and the police
and even though we know that the
majority of stops are carried out for
drugs and not for weapons some people
still just think one less weapon on the
streets we can save a life by it and
that might be true but the reality is if
we don’t address why the young people
carrying those weapons in the first
place the police can confiscate as many
knives as they want and Ives are readily
available if young people still feel
unsafe and unprotected they will still
carry them one exercise we like to carry
out with the young people we work with
us to get them to really sit down and
think about all the things that are
stressing them out all the things that
are worrying them and so a few years ago
I was working with a 12 year old boy and
I told him because he was going for a
really really tough time I wanted him to
do this so he went away and about a week
later he came and he gave me this piece
of paper being told to carry something
being forced to do something my brother
getting a long sentence gangs coming in
my house my mum getting her my family
getting her hurting someone bad being
robbed being stabbed another one of my
brother’s friends being killed
and he’s 12 years old and I just form I
thought so many things but one thing
that I made me think is that this young
person has a lack of agency and they
feel really powerless and out of control
now we really have to ask ourselves
again what happens in the first 13 years
of a young person’s life to make them
feel like they have to arm themselves
every day before they leave the house
and the reality is if you feel you’re
gonna be violently attacked or you
actually are attacked the majority of
society you’re going to pull the police
right and for a lot of young people and
a lot of communities they feel like that
formal mechanism that is designed to
deal with conflict is completely
unavailable to them and that’s because
of the lack of relationship between
those young people those communities and
the police force and what that’s done is
created this vigilante culture where
young people feel like they actually
have to protect themselves and so
sometimes even when young people are
violently attacked even though they’ve
experienced things and been through
things that I’ve shipped them to the
core they don’t speak to anyone about
this and a few years ago I was working
with another young man and he was
stabbed nine times and he was in a coma
for a few weeks and I met out with him a
few months later to talk and he was calm
at first and as we the conversation
progressed we started talking about the
court case and he started in irritable
and he made it clear to me that he
wasn’t going to assist this court page
so as he said he’s not going to be a
snitch so I just asked him what outcome
do you want and I watched him processing
this all in his head and he started
getting really angry and he started
shaking uncontrollably and he said to me
he doesn’t want them to be in prison he
wants them on the road he wants to deal
with them himself and as he started
shaking uncontrollably he looked me in
the eye and he just said they tried to
kill me and he made me see that when
young people attacked and violated in
this way it completely eradicate their
sense of safety it completely eradicate
their sense of protection
and this young man had received no
counseling and no support and he was
actually only 16 years old and so this
made me think in society if you really
love labels we love categories it would
be so much simpler if we had our victims
over here and we had our perpetrators
and our offenders over there but the
reality is it’s far more complex than
that
and what we need to do is understand
young people who are violent in light of
their own violent victimization and that
extends far beyond just youth violence
we really need to take account of all
the forms of violence a young person
might have experienced in their life and
for a long time I hadn’t even come to
terms with my own relationship with
violence because I fought it started
when my friend was killed but I did a
bit of soul-searching and I dug a little
deeper and I realized I’ve actually been
surrounded by serious violence my whole
life and first of all poverty is the
greatest form of violence because it
creates that environment where all these
other types of violence can thrive and I
witnessed domestic violence in my house
and in the houses of my friends and I’ll
be honest with you I’m 21 years old now
but some nights I still wake up in the
middle of the night and I can hear
screaming when it’s silent there was not
one young women who I grew up with who
wasn’t a victim of sexual violence
I myself was assaulted so many times as
a teenager but I didn’t even classed it
as a soul because it was so normal to me
I was so desensitized for me and like
many young people who grow up in these
violent environments I had just
completely detached myself from my own
experiences as a coping mechanism so I
came across this study the adverse
childhood experiences study or the ACE
study and it was conducted by the CDC
and what they did is they asked
participants to list the experiences of
abuse and neglect and other adversity
things they’d experienced before the age
of 18 and for each one they’d experience
they would be given a point and those
points were added up and they would be
given a score and what the researchers
did is they correlated
these scores against health outcomes and
these are some of the results really
shocking stuff if you had a score of
four or more you’re around 12 times more
likely to be suicidal four and a half
times more likely to suffer from
depression your risk of heart disease
lung disease and other physical diseases
increased whether there were also
neurological impacts changed the
structure of the brain early childhood
trauma creates the overactivation
of your stress response system your
fight-or-flight mode I mean this happens
later on in life it can result in people
who live in almost a constant state or
fight-or-flight and so this made me have
a new perspective because I fought so
many young people that I’ve worked with
and people in our society have really
really high ace scores and they’ve
experienced things that you can’t even
imagine
and I also questioned why when a young
woman or young girl cuts herself will
say that self-harm but when the young
men that I work with punched the wall we
don’t think that self-harm and I started
to just think about they’re a lot more
deeply and one thing that really really
saddens me is the fatalism that this
culture has produced people die every
day T it really breaks my heart that so
many of the young people I’ve worked
with honestly expect to die and a few
weeks ago my team were working in a
college and one of the exercises that we
were carrying out was we wanted these
young people to make some life plans
where do you see yourself in six months
a year three years ten years and it was
going great and so a 17 year old young
man said there’s no point and we had to
say what do you mean he said no there’s
no point of me making this this plan I
said he might not even be around anyway
so a colleague of mine had to sit him
down and just say there’s no harm and
just writing it down just write the plan
make some provision for the future and
so he did in the end make that plan and
I started thinking about post-traumatic
stress disorder and I started thinking
about the experiences young people have
had and how traumatizing they are and
how as I said they very often don’t
access any formal support for their
mental health services and I know that
in communities like mine everybody knows
at least one person who’s been killed as
a result of a knife or gang crime and at
least one other person who’s in prison
for the same thing and I know that we
really associate PTSD with veterans
coming back from the war but I’m telling
you today that the war on the streets of
my cities and other cities is raging
right now can it really be said that
we’re living post trauma I think that we
live in a state of perpetual community
for mice never-ending we don’t have the
time to breathe let alone heal before
the next incident we have a collective
community memory and it arose a young
person’s sense of safety every time
another young person is killed and every
time we turn on the TV or read the paper
and we see another young person has been
killed it just realises us and this made
me think about agency
feeling out of control feeling powerless
feeling helpless we don’t ever ask what
is being communicated through violence
what are young people trying to tell us
when they are violent and in light of
these early traumatic experiences
sometimes I just feel that young people
have been rendered so helpless and out
of control throughout their lives that
in that moment some of them seek to
exert power and get some kind of control
back in that moment through the use of
violence so how can we make young people
feel more in control of their lives and
I honestly believe that if we’re able to
talk to young people and communities
about the impact of trauma about the
impact of violence then ultimately we’ll
be able to help them regain some control
maybe understand their own behavior and
all better and maybe even we can help
them come to terms with the things that
have happened in their past and we can
give them a tool and help them build
resilience to deal with the pain of the
present and the pain of the future and
in America there are some really great
initiatives that are coming out of
cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh these
initiatives seek to design therapeutic
interventions not for individuals but
for the entire community
collective trauma interventions and I’m
going to America this year to see some
of these because I think this is what
urgently required in the UK so what if
what if we’re able to design long term
holistic interventions that work with
young people to rebuild their sense of
security or protection to increase their
trust and what if we can work together a
therapist psychologist trauma specialist
community members frontline workers and
practitioners to POE develop
interventions but I’m not just going to
work with individuals but I’m gonna work
with entire communities to help them
come to terms with the things that
they’ve experienced because
I really want to live in a world where
young people like my friend not only
live beyond their 18th birthday but live
happy meaningful fool lives that are not
characterized by a lack of hope justice
and opportunity but that are actually
characterized by a sense of purpose and
fulfillment and I actually want to live
in a society where we’re not comfortable
with children killing children and where
our governments take action to design
the mechanisms that are required to deal
with the trauma whole communities have
had to bear and I really want to live in
a world where our policy reflects this
and I come actually here today to share
this message of hope with you because if
I’m really honest it’s only hope does
allowed me to do this for the last five
years was I think we gained it’s so
wrong I think we can do it so much
better I think that we could actually
address this issue of serious violence
as a public health issue as opposed to a
criminal enforcement issue and I think
that if all of us can dedicate our time
or resources or effort and our energy
into doing this then this vision that me
and my team have of a community living
free from violence I honestly think that
we can actually make that a reality
thank you
you
people die everyday team C is me and a
14 year old boy said this to me three
years ago and he said it to me three
days after a 17 year old boy was stabbed
and killed in our area and I felt really
alarmed and distressed by this because
it was extreme desensitization to
extreme violence people do die every day
but people aren’t killed every day
people aren’t murdered every day and
today for a whole generation of young
people they can’t even distinguish
between death from natural causes and
murder so how can this be the case well
in the UK we have a serious youth
violence epidemic and all the young
people in this picture have at least two
things in common they’re all under the
age of 19 and they were all killed on
the streets of my city London between
2005 and 2015
185 killings a hundred and eighty five
children stabbed short or beaten and if
I was to tell you about the young people
aged 25 and under that number would
increase if I was to tell you about the
young people killed in Birmingham
Manchester and other cities around the
UK that total would increase and if I
was to think about all the non-fatal
beatings and shootings and stabbings we
might start to get a better picture and
if I told you that that’s only the
official statistics and that sometimes
young people after being violently
attacked don’t even attend the hospital
we might start to get a better idea
because the reality is we really fail to
grasp the true scale of this epidemic
I really don’t like speaking about
statistics because I think they’re so
dehumanizing and every killing is a
tragedy and where does is it leaves a
hole in the lives of that young person’s
community their friends and their family
and unfortunately I’m here today because
I know exactly what that feels like
because six days after my 15th birthday
I can remember vividly waking up
abruptly around 7:00 in the morning to
the sound of my blackberry messenger
pinging and I checked my status updates
before I read my messages and I saw the
night’s events unfold before my eyes
with status is starting from around 1:30
in the morning broken hearts crying
faces and our eye peas and display
pictures had been changed to a familiar
face a cheeky smiled I’d seen so many
times growing up through childhood and a
friend and his name was Marvin and then
I checked my messages and I saw one that
said Marvin’s been shot and I saw
another I said Marvin’s been killed and
I actually laughter that was my first
reaction because I just thought this is
some kind of sick twisted joke and then
I got really really angry because I just
thought why would anyone make something
like this up so in shock and disbelief I
turned on the TV and I saw the headline
17-year old shot and killed in Mill Hill
and then I literally felt my heart break
because I’d been looking at these news
stories since I was 12 years old I
collect newspaper articles about serious
youth violence I was very familiar with
all of them but nothing could have
prepared me for the morning that I woke
up and picked up that paper and my
friend’s face was on the front cover
because the pain and grief that I felt
can’t be translated through the media
because it was wrong
so about a year and a half later I
decided that young people with real
lived experiences of violence should be
the driving force for change and so I
set up the forefront project so you fled
social enterprise and like we said our
vision is a world where communities can
live free from violence and we’re
actually on a mission and our mission is
to empower young people and communities
to understand and respond to serious
violence and the systemic conditions
that caused it and what we do is we
offer violence interventions in the
community and in education settings and
we create this platform that allows
people with who have been involved in or
affected by serious violence to create
change and we create a window for the
wider society to go better understanding
and insight into this issue and we’ve
been doing this for the last five years
so our authentic voices are ultimately
really necessary and they’re necessary
because in our society there’s often
just been calls for increased punitive
ism so in 2015 in the criminal justice
and courts act is a truce a two strike
measure was introduced which means that
there’s mandatory minimum sentencing for
the second time you’re caught possessing
a knife and if you’re 18 that’s going to
be six months in prison and if you’re 16
and 17 it’s gonna be four months in
prison and because it’s a mandatory
minimum sentence it means that even if
it does when it’s a sentence you two
less he can he or she can and so many
people thought that this is a great idea
because what we really need to reduce
violence is harsh deterrence punishment
and the reality is young people don’t
want to go to prison hey most people
don’t want to go to prison but when
they’re weighing up the risk and the
threat of being caught arrested and
sentenced against the fair or being
violently attacked or killed well I know
it’s one I would rather choose
and when we see violence increasing the
police often say we need to increase the
use of this tactic stopping search been
very very controversial and in fact in
2013 our Home Secretary commissioned a
report by the HMI C which revealed that
around 27% of stops and searches that
were carried that were actually unlawful
and young people will always say that it
further erodes the already strenuous
relationship between them and the police
and even though we know that the
majority of stops are carried out for
drugs and not for weapons some people
still just think one less weapon on the
streets we can save a life by it and
that might be true but the reality is if
we don’t address why the young people
carrying those weapons in the first
place the police can confiscate as many
knives as they want and Ives are readily
available if young people still feel
unsafe and unprotected they will still
carry them one exercise we like to carry
out with the young people we work with
us to get them to really sit down and
think about all the things that are
stressing them out all the things that
are worrying them and so a few years ago
I was working with a 12 year old boy and
I told him because he was going for a
really really tough time I wanted him to
do this so he went away and about a week
later he came and he gave me this piece
of paper being told to carry something
being forced to do something my brother
getting a long sentence gangs coming in
my house my mum getting her my family
getting her hurting someone bad being
robbed being stabbed another one of my
brother’s friends being killed
and he’s 12 years old and I just form I
thought so many things but one thing
that I made me think is that this young
person has a lack of agency and they
feel really powerless and out of control
now we really have to ask ourselves
again what happens in the first 13 years
of a young person’s life to make them
feel like they have to arm themselves
every day before they leave the house
and the reality is if you feel you’re
gonna be violently attacked or you
actually are attacked the majority of
society you’re going to pull the police
right and for a lot of young people and
a lot of communities they feel like that
formal mechanism that is designed to
deal with conflict is completely
unavailable to them and that’s because
of the lack of relationship between
those young people those communities and
the police force and what that’s done is
created this vigilante culture where
young people feel like they actually
have to protect themselves and so
sometimes even when young people are
violently attacked even though they’ve
experienced things and been through
things that I’ve shipped them to the
core they don’t speak to anyone about
this and a few years ago I was working
with another young man and he was
stabbed nine times and he was in a coma
for a few weeks and I met out with him a
few months later to talk and he was calm
at first and as we the conversation
progressed we started talking about the
court case and he started in irritable
and he made it clear to me that he
wasn’t going to assist this court page
so as he said he’s not going to be a
snitch so I just asked him what outcome
do you want and I watched him processing
this all in his head and he started
getting really angry and he started
shaking uncontrollably and he said to me
he doesn’t want them to be in prison he
wants them on the road he wants to deal
with them himself and as he started
shaking uncontrollably he looked me in
the eye and he just said they tried to
kill me and he made me see that when
young people attacked and violated in
this way it completely eradicate their
sense of safety it completely eradicate
their sense of protection
and this young man had received no
counseling and no support and he was
actually only 16 years old and so this
made me think in society if you really
love labels we love categories it would
be so much simpler if we had our victims
over here and we had our perpetrators
and our offenders over there but the
reality is it’s far more complex than
that
and what we need to do is understand
young people who are violent in light of
their own violent victimization and that
extends far beyond just youth violence
we really need to take account of all
the forms of violence a young person
might have experienced in their life and
for a long time I hadn’t even come to
terms with my own relationship with
violence because I fought it started
when my friend was killed but I did a
bit of soul-searching and I dug a little
deeper and I realized I’ve actually been
surrounded by serious violence my whole
life and first of all poverty is the
greatest form of violence because it
creates that environment where all these
other types of violence can thrive and I
witnessed domestic violence in my house
and in the houses of my friends and I’ll
be honest with you I’m 21 years old now
but some nights I still wake up in the
middle of the night and I can hear
screaming when it’s silent there was not
one young women who I grew up with who
wasn’t a victim of sexual violence
I myself was assaulted so many times as
a teenager but I didn’t even classed it
as a soul because it was so normal to me
I was so desensitized for me and like
many young people who grow up in these
violent environments I had just
completely detached myself from my own
experiences as a coping mechanism so I
came across this study the adverse
childhood experiences study or the ACE
study and it was conducted by the CDC
and what they did is they asked
participants to list the experiences of
abuse and neglect and other adversity
things they’d experienced before the age
of 18 and for each one they’d experience
they would be given a point and those
points were added up and they would be
given a score and what the researchers
did is they correlated
these scores against health outcomes and
these are some of the results really
shocking stuff if you had a score of
four or more you’re around 12 times more
likely to be suicidal four and a half
times more likely to suffer from
depression your risk of heart disease
lung disease and other physical diseases
increased whether there were also
neurological impacts changed the
structure of the brain early childhood
trauma creates the overactivation
of your stress response system your
fight-or-flight mode I mean this happens
later on in life it can result in people
who live in almost a constant state or
fight-or-flight and so this made me have
a new perspective because I fought so
many young people that I’ve worked with
and people in our society have really
really high ace scores and they’ve
experienced things that you can’t even
imagine
and I also questioned why when a young
woman or young girl cuts herself will
say that self-harm but when the young
men that I work with punched the wall we
don’t think that self-harm and I started
to just think about they’re a lot more
deeply and one thing that really really
saddens me is the fatalism that this
culture has produced people die every
day T it really breaks my heart that so
many of the young people I’ve worked
with honestly expect to die and a few
weeks ago my team were working in a
college and one of the exercises that we
were carrying out was we wanted these
young people to make some life plans
where do you see yourself in six months
a year three years ten years and it was
going great and so a 17 year old young
man said there’s no point and we had to
say what do you mean he said no there’s
no point of me making this this plan I
said he might not even be around anyway
so a colleague of mine had to sit him
down and just say there’s no harm and
just writing it down just write the plan
make some provision for the future and
so he did in the end make that plan and
I started thinking about post-traumatic
stress disorder and I started thinking
about the experiences young people have
had and how traumatizing they are and
how as I said they very often don’t
access any formal support for their
mental health services and I know that
in communities like mine everybody knows
at least one person who’s been killed as
a result of a knife or gang crime and at
least one other person who’s in prison
for the same thing and I know that we
really associate PTSD with veterans
coming back from the war but I’m telling
you today that the war on the streets of
my cities and other cities is raging
right now can it really be said that
we’re living post trauma I think that we
live in a state of perpetual community
for mice never-ending we don’t have the
time to breathe let alone heal before
the next incident we have a collective
community memory and it arose a young
person’s sense of safety every time
another young person is killed and every
time we turn on the TV or read the paper
and we see another young person has been
killed it just realises us and this made
me think about agency
feeling out of control feeling powerless
feeling helpless we don’t ever ask what
is being communicated through violence
what are young people trying to tell us
when they are violent and in light of
these early traumatic experiences
sometimes I just feel that young people
have been rendered so helpless and out
of control throughout their lives that
in that moment some of them seek to
exert power and get some kind of control
back in that moment through the use of
violence so how can we make young people
feel more in control of their lives and
I honestly believe that if we’re able to
talk to young people and communities
about the impact of trauma about the
impact of violence then ultimately we’ll
be able to help them regain some control
maybe understand their own behavior and
all better and maybe even we can help
them come to terms with the things that
have happened in their past and we can
give them a tool and help them build
resilience to deal with the pain of the
present and the pain of the future and
in America there are some really great
initiatives that are coming out of
cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh these
initiatives seek to design therapeutic
interventions not for individuals but
for the entire community
collective trauma interventions and I’m
going to America this year to see some
of these because I think this is what
urgently required in the UK so what if
what if we’re able to design long term
holistic interventions that work with
young people to rebuild their sense of
security or protection to increase their
trust and what if we can work together a
therapist psychologist trauma specialist
community members frontline workers and
practitioners to POE develop
interventions but I’m not just going to
work with individuals but I’m gonna work
with entire communities to help them
come to terms with the things that
they’ve experienced because
I really want to live in a world where
young people like my friend not only
live beyond their 18th birthday but live
happy meaningful fool lives that are not
characterized by a lack of hope justice
and opportunity but that are actually
characterized by a sense of purpose and
fulfillment and I actually want to live
in a society where we’re not comfortable
with children killing children and where
our governments take action to design
the mechanisms that are required to deal
with the trauma whole communities have
had to bear and I really want to live in
a world where our policy reflects this
and I come actually here today to share
this message of hope with you because if
I’m really honest it’s only hope does
allowed me to do this for the last five
years was I think we gained it’s so
wrong I think we can do it so much
better I think that we could actually
address this issue of serious violence
as a public health issue as opposed to a
criminal enforcement issue and I think
that if all of us can dedicate our time
or resources or effort and our energy
into doing this then this vision that me
and my team have of a community living
free from violence I honestly think that
we can actually make that a reality
thank you
you
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