Hi my name is Nas and I’ve been an avid listener of BBC World Have Your Say for the past 2 years. I believe that my suggested topic of debate on youth violence is an important issue because no matter where you live, whether it is the wealthy and prosperous nations like the UK or the United States or emerging economies like Brazil and South Africa or countries that have recently recovered from civil war like El Salvador youth/gang related violence affects us all.
Personally, this has had a dramatic affect on my life. I have lost a good friend of mine Hussein Hersi, who in July the 7, 2005 was brutally beaten with bats and stabbed to death by a dozen youths as well as another unfortunate family friend who’s only son, Yasin Abdirahman, was set upon by a gang of 20 youths and was stabbed to death for just wearing a red t-shirt!
I would like to invite the World Have Your Say team so that the issue of youth violence which so far killed over 28 youths in the past 11 months in London alone, is tackled and addressed. I would like to understand what is the cause of this global phenomena, can there be opportunities for gang-members to escape the life of violence and who is to blame?
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here in nepal gang voilence is prevelent among drug addicts.these people form gang and robb other people and when they become unsuccessful .then these people don’t hesitate to kill innocent people.beside these there is also increase in fight between different locality to show there supremacy.
Gang violence is all about supremacy. Within the gang and as a means of controlling the streets. And , more than this, it is an example of the failure of the society as a whole to address “their own back yard”. It seems that all of the great and prosperous countries of the world are always talking of the failure of other societies and yet they (the gov’t) never, ever look down into their own streets to see the real terrorism that exists. We need to look at where terrorism actully starts, where terrorists learn to be what they are and, while we’re at it, we might want to count how many people die every week from this form of terrorism.
Having grown up around gangs (never was a member, but they exist in every town everywhere) and having once been beaten by a gang, I can assure you that robbing is only a job to these people. A means to an end. The real objective is power.
Violence roots in the soil of injustice. When some create a privileged community that excludes others, building better housing, running better schools, and providing better health care for “us” — then we cannot simply deplore the violence committed by “them.”
Children, growing up and seeing other children getting all their needs met and many of their superfluous desires catered to, while they live in grim housing, attend overcrowded and poorly staffed schools, and lack good care for their medical needs, feel abandoned and uncared-for by the larger society. The setting breeds a feeling that they must provide for themselves by seeking power as they can get it.
We must look for the ways in which our privilege nourishes the roots of violence, and work for a society in which provision is made impartially for all. In the long run this is the answer to gangs and gang violence.