Girls face brutality and exploitation in gang underworld

Thousands of British girls and young women are entangled in a brutal gang culture where sexual exploitation, guns and drug-running are a daily reality, a new report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) reveals.

The Girls and Gangs report, published on March 24, looks at how gang life can impact girls and young women and calls on the Government to act urgently to map the problem of girls and young women associated with gangs so opportunities to intervene are easier to identify.

The report was published just two days after 15-year-old Shereka Marsh was shot in the neck at a house Hackney, London, on March 23. A 15-year-old boy has been charged with her murder.

The CSJ found that despite a Home Office-led strategy against gang culture being launched in 2011, too little has changed.

The report found girls and young women are also frequently used to stash weapons and as drug mules because they are less likely to be stopped and searched by police. In London last year only six per cent of stop-and-searches were conducted on females.

It also calls for youth workers to be embedded in major trauma units in gang-affected areas, pointing to the success of King’s College Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital which have been running similar schemes.

The report also calls for the police to team-up with voluntary organisations to ensure that when male gang members are arrested and imprisoned their girlfriends receive support to exit gang life.

CSJ Deputy Policy Director Edward Boyd said the media regularly shines a spotlight on the criminality of male members, but the daily suffering of girls goes largely unnoticed.

“We are often unsighted about the desperate lives of girls embroiled in gangs. They live in a parallel world where rape is used as a weapon and carrying drugs and guns is seen as normal.”

Patrick Regan, the chief executive officer of urban youth charity XLP who helped carry out the research, said: “The biggest issue with girls in gangs is that we simply don’t know the full extent of the problem. The data we have is merely the tip of the iceberg and at XLP there is no doubt that we see increasing numbers of girls dragged into this appalling world of exploitation, criminality and hopelessness.”