After the riots: the Hackney worker teaching young men to be ambitious
Hackney youth worker Emeka Egbuonu wants to encourage ambition and self-belief
A short walk through Hackney, in east London, reveals a lot about what drives gang intervention worker Emeka Egbuonu. Where the road humpbacks over Regent’s canal is the wall he and his friends were pushed against on one of the many times they were stopped by the police in their teens. Egbuonu was still in his uniform from his Saturday job at a DIY shop, but they were nonetheless told they fitted the description of a group who had just carried out an armed robbery. That day, they spent 10 hours in police cells before being released uncharged.
On Hoxton Street, Egbuonu points out the takeaway, where his friend Agnes Sina-Inakoju was shot last year by a gang member looking for rivals. Aged 16, with no involvement with gangs and with dreams of studying at Oxford, she died 36 hours later.
Further down, are the redbrick blocks of the Arden Estate, where Egbuonu grew up, and the sunken concrete football pitch where he practised relentlessly before realising he needed other ambitions in case he did not make it as a professional sportsman. Round the corner he points to where the Crib youth project used to stand, which he credits with fuelling his desire to succeed in life.
For the last three years Egbuonu, now 25, has been back at the relocated Crib, this time as youth worker. In 2009, he devised Consequences, a programme of one- or two-day workshops aimed at giving 13- to 19-year-olds the confidence and skills to avoid getting involved with gangs – or to get out of them. The importance of ambition is drilled into participants, along with practical help on setting and meeting realistic goals. An exploration of the barriers they may face follows, from peer pressure to stereotyping and inequality, but the focus is on overcoming those hurdles rather than using them as excuses. Egbuonu offers mentoring to anyone who wants more help.
He has written a book about his work, which is self-published on Friday. As commentators and politicians search for answers in the wake of August’s riots in England, its raw insights have won it some high-profile admirers. Professor David Wilson, director of Birmingham City university’s centre for applied criminology, thinks it should be on reading lists at the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, saying it “fills a criminological gap”. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “Communities need people like Emeka.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, north London, calls the book’s analysis “crucial”.
On the day the riots reached Hackney, Egbuonu went out on the streets to make sure none of the young people who go to the Crib were getting involved. Many were getting the BlackBerry messages encouraging rioting, and he knew one – who hasn’t attend his sessions – that did take part, but most, he says, needed little persuasion to steer clear.
“One of the young men I’d been working with for some time said he didn’t want to get involved because he’d come too far,” he says. “He said if he worked hard enough he might be able to afford the things it might look attractive to go and loot.”
It is the perfect endorsement of his work, but the Crib has lost 75% of its funding from Hackney council in the past year, and Egbuonu’s own hours have been cut from 16 to eight a week. Still, staff at the centre hope that local authorities across London will be keen to commission the workshops, post-riots. Neighbouring Islington council has already shown an interest.
Egbuonu estimates he has worked with around 300 young people in Hackney, mainly in groups of between 10 and 15. It is hard to measure success scientifically, but he reckons around eight from each group approach him afterwards wanting more, and says almost all of those he has worked with constantly are now in college.
He identifies a range of factors in the underachievement of young black men, many of them familiar. There is a slavish devotion to musicians or sports stars as role models, set against a lack of ambition in more achievable arenas. There is a risk too of being groomed for gangs at an age when everyone wants instant financial gratification and selling drugs is a way to get it.
Teachers come in for a particularly rough ride, with claims that too many lack belief in their students and imbue them with a lack of self-belief.
Egbuonu deals too with the absence of male role models in families. In one chilling passage in the book he recounts being told by a teenage boy that he planned to “breed” his attractive girlfriend to secure his place with her. Another said it would “mark his territory”.
Girls too, he says, talk of wanting to have a baby to connect them to a boyfriend for ever.
Tougher sentences will not help, he says, because people will still take the risk of getting caught and prison will not address the root causes of the problem. Suppression of gangs is no more than a “Band Aid on a bloody wound”.
“It is not a fix,” he writes. “It is the police using deterrents as a fix, all it does is perpetuate stereotypes and fill prison cells.
“We must work with police, yes, but we need to do it on our terms, with change from within our community.”
That means battling to overcome stereotypes that are accepted even within young people’s worlds, constantly encouraging ambition and teaching black history to avoid older gang members becoming role models. Where he is faced with the influence of peer pressure in his sessions, seeing young people nervous about speaking out, he coaxes the one he identifies as the “leader” to get involved first.
His beliefs will not be comfortable reading for everyone: he also believes parents should feel freer to discipline their children physically.
Throughout the book, there is a message that government cannot be relied upon. Isn’t that letting politicians off the hook?
Do something
Egbuonu is fond of quoting a saying his Nigerian grandmother taught him: “No one person can do everything but everyone can do something.”
So while there are parts of his vision that require input from the top – job creation, for example – he will happily focus on other areas.
“Let’s concentrate on what’s in our control. Jobs are out of my control.”
He was moved to write the book after a friend, hearing him speak about Sina-Inakoju’s death, suggested he put his experiences on paper. The product is for everyone, he says: teachers, police, youth workers, parents, but most of all for young people themselves.
“I’m getting a lot of feedback from young people who haven’t read a book optionally since they left school,” he adds.
Next month, he will talk in Birmingham at a conference on understanding the riots, at the invitation of Wilson. You feel more such offers may be forthcoming. But he has not been asked to give evidence to the government’s communities and victims panel on the riots, and in fact it turns out he knows nothing about it – despite being exactly the kind of person you would expect the government to be trying to engage.
Egbuonu has no desire to get into politics. “There’s always too much talking and quick reaction when things happen and then there’s not much follow-up,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t like going to too many meetings, because I feel people are more worried about the minutes than the actions.”
What if more meetings beckon from now on? “Well, hopefully, then I can get them to take the action,” he replies.
• Consequences – Breaking the Negative Cycle is published on Friday. ISBN 9780956981004
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