This is how we live, Christian Guy

Fear and hope on the margins of British society

Christian Guy

Contents Introduction

A parallel Britain

4

Cathy 8

Streets

Mark, Rob and Matt 16

Addicted

Afua 25

Freedom

Ben 31

Home

Amy 43

Fear

Daniel 49

Battle

Paul and Terry 56

Feared

Mac 65

Territory

Arthur

72 Relationship

Introduction A parallel Britain

If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large William Wilberforce

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We live in a remarkable nation. Our country is one of the most beautiful and prosperous places on earth. It is full of opportunity – nurtured through foundational values such as freedom, fairness, responsibility and the rule of law.

Our language facilitates the world’s conversations. We shaped parliamentary democracy. Our people lead global markets, art, literature, sport, culture and political advancement. Through the centuries the British have led revolutions in industry, technology and human wellbeing. We held back Nazism and with others we destroyed it. A little over two centuries ago men and women used the most prestigious of all Parliaments to abolish slavery. After the Second World War we created a national health service and vital safety nets for our most vulnerable citizens. There are countless reasons to be proud and we must always honour those achievements.

Yet, in many of our towns and cities, I have come face-to-face with serious poverty and deprivation. Countless people live in the depths of despair and are held back by levels of social breakdown which shouldn’t thrive in a nation as prosperous as ours. These are the long-term unemployed, those hit by addiction and teenage street gang members. I have sat with survivors of slavery, lonely older people, children living in care, the homeless and fathers who are suicidal because of mountainous debts. I have been embraced by mothers who have lost their sons to stabbings. They have changed my life and challenged my views.

I wanted to capture some of their stories and to help give prominence to the most disadvantaged people in our communities. I invite readers to consider the accounts and themes contained in these pages. Across only a handful of lives we encounter a complex pattern of disadvantage and poverty on the margins of British society. Those I have interviewed here represent numerous others I have known.

And when we connect these stories to the bigger picture we begin to encounter some entrenched injustice. Family trauma is so often the trigger people refer to when they describe their downward spiral: nationally we know that nearly half of all children will see their parents split by the time they reach their 16th 4

Introduction

Introduction

birthday – higher in our poorest neighbourhoods – and nearly 70,000 live in care in the UK at any one time because their families are unable or unfit to look after 12 them. Related to this, domestic abuse is starkly apparent in the lives of some of those I have met. We know that in 2011/2012, two women a week were killed by their partner or former partner and last year, police reported nearly two million victims of domestic abuse.3 4

Problems at school feature heavily and, as the facts reveal, there is tragic waste in the lower tiers of our education system: on average more than 65,000 children truant each day and more than 48 per cent of our adult prison population has a reading age of 11 or under.5 6 The path from failing at school to crime is welltrodden too. Some I met during these interviews were committing crime long before they sat GCSEs and others started soon after. Many I met had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction at a young age; we know that 380,000 people are addicted to opiates like heroin or crack cocaine and currently 1.6 million people have an alcohol dependency.7 Long-term unemployment also features heavily in the lives of those I have met, and we know through the work of the Centre for Social Justice, that far too many are caught in entrenched worklessness.

1.6 million children currently live in workless households and youth unemployment – though falling promisingly at the time of writing – remains too high.8

A number of people I met also experienced homelessness – for short or extended periods of time – and a striking number, it seemed, had been affected or continued to struggle with unresolved grief. I saw again the importance of grandparents as a stabilising influence on young lives but also as an inspirational spark. A number of people are then inevitably shaken as those relationships come to an end on the passing of those grandparents.

Though rare I also encountered the growing problem of modern slavery.

In recent years several thousand victims of slavery and human trafficking have been found in our neighbourhoods; yet many experts fear we are only just beginning to discover the scale and nature of this, the ultimate form of inhumanity.

I was struck in particular by the stories I heard about people sleeping in graveyards or walking long distances looking for a place to belong. One middleaged man I met on the south coast told me about the time he packed his tent and went walking – searching for anywhere different. For four days he walked – along main roads and over hills. He ate berries and drank water from fields to get by. He covered many miles and ended up, unintentionally, on the road to

Brighton. In sight of the beach, he told me that he was so tired and depressed that he intended to walk in to the sea. “I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to head back to the shore” he told me.

There is raw need out there and I wanted these stories to reveal it.

But, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said: ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’. And, thankfully, thousands of people and charities have followed her call. The telling of these stories was only made possible because somebody somewhere decided to dedicate themselves to those I have written about.

It has been my privilege to visit these life-changing projects and people all over the UK. From Edinburgh to Cardiff, from Sheffield to Sussex, from London to Bristol, I have found organisations and people creating tremendous hope. Just as the man on Brighton beach met another who began talking to him – unknowingly preventing his suicide – countless others have been saved through the grace of those who bother to care.

The many thousands of people who give their time, talents and tireless energy to those left behind should inspire us all. For years I have seen how charities and social enterprises have sparked transformation in people’s lives. Achieving what the state and the private sector cannot, but often enabled by both, there is a group of remarkable people crossing the road to help. Rarely thanked and often unnoticed, they work with those most others write off. They bring restoration to families, opportunities to the unemployed, education to the discarded, recovery for the addict, freedom for the indebted and rehabilitation for the offender. These people, often described as an army of compassion, lift us up.

I have been struck by several points as I have visited such charities.

First, we should find more effective ways to recognise and honour what they do. At the Centre for Social Justice we host an annual awards ceremony for the best poverty-fighting groups that we find, but we could create other opportunities to celebrate them.

Second, they care about issues, not tribal party politics. Politicians would do well to connect with what this army of compassion fights for, struggles with and achieves day-to-day.

Third, they prove that transformation is possible. Many of the social problems politicians place in the ‘too difficult box’ are being solved successfully somewhere. That message of hope should inspire our political classes to work for meaningful change in people’s lives.

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Introduction

Fourth, they can save taxpayers lots of money. Steer a truanting pupil back on a positive path today and you might prevent a £40,000-a-year prison sentence tomorrow. Move addicts into recovery and the methadone prescription and criminal justice bill will plummet. It costs more than £150,000-a-year to keep a child in a children’s home – supporting families or foster carers and adoptive parents costs much less.9 Keep families together and our housing and benefit costs reduce. There is economic as well as social logic to backing such transformation.

Fifth, we ’re all a bad year away from needing this kind of help. Some of those relying on charities this year would not have expected to be in their position last year. We mustn’t assume those on the margins of society are fundamentally different to us. All were born blank pages, with futures unwritten. Some are taken off course from there but for others it’s a bereavement, a job loss, an illness or a relationship which breaks down that can push them under. We should judge much less and support much more.

In producing this book I am grateful to Rachel Butterfill at the Centre for Social Justice for her co-ordination, editorial input and her superb authorship of Amy’s powerful story. I am also very grateful to Gina Miller and Miller Philanthropy for such generous support of the project.

I have appreciated enormously the charities who have opened their doors and introduced me to those in their care this year. And, of course, my heartfelt thanks go to those who have poured their lives out before me during our conversations. Deeply vulnerable people have taken a risk with me – a stranger – telling often painful stories and sparing no difficult details. I hope they will consider the end product worth it. Their names have been changed but they know who they are.

When I asked my interviewees about the future, two things became apparent. First, they all had hopes and aspirations. They hadn’t been defeated by their disadvantage. Second, they wanted to experience the basics of life which so many of us take for granted: a warm home, a family and a job. Most said they wanted to contribute to society, pay their taxes and have stability.

They have moved me, inspired me, challenged me and changed me.

This short book is theirs. If only one person reading this is motivated a little more to serve the most disadvantaged, it will have been worth it. But I hope it goes further and challenges us all about what more we can each do to make our nation stronger.

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Cathy

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Cathy

Cathy “I have no fear of death, none at all. People dying is normal to me. It’s everywhere I look.” I am visiting the remarkable One25 charity in Bristol, listening to Cathy.

In her mid-40s, she speaks with complete composure.

We sit in a small room in a building adjacent to One25’s women-only drop-in centre. Set amongst taxi firms, rundown houses and executive flats, the old building is an oasis for some of the most broken, vulnerable women in the UK. Providing safety, warmth, food, advice and a doctor’s clinic, One25 is a haven for those desperate enough to work the city’s most dangerous streets at night.

As we begin our conversation Cathy says she’s nothing more than a “drug addicted prostitute.” I quickly discover she is much more than that.

She was born in the Midlands – one of three children under the age of four – and from her opening moments was thrown into the kind of pain most of us can’t begin to imagine.

Her earliest memories are traumatic. A terrifying alcoholic father, the first man she ever knew, tearing into her mother with violence and rage.

She remembers a cloud of permanent fear in her household. Perhaps when children live in the midst of that kind of aggression and noise they recall those first few years more vividly than most of us. Yet, speaking without a shred of bitterness, Cathy tells me that things quickly hit breaking point.

“Our mum finally got out…she had enough…she escaped and suddenly I was on the run at the age of three” she says. With a new born brother and a sister 11 months her senior, she was swept to a council estate in West London. “I was full of fear. Always crying. I didn’t have a dad and I think I must have wanted one.”

This new freedom only went on to trap her further. She tells me about being sexually abused as a young girl in her swimming costume whilst on community trips to the seaside. Emotionless, she describes sordid ‘Miss World’ competitions for her and her friends on the housing estate, which apparently were organised so that local paedophiles – officials and neighbours alike – had an excuse to have the

children dress up.

At home her older sister, who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, would attack her frequently. Cathy tells me she still has pieces of lead in her legs from some of the worst of her sister’s bullying. But again, there’s no bitterness.

“We had hardly anything to live on.” Life for her and for those around her was defined by financial poverty. A constant fight for survival became her norm.

For her friends on the estate though, life at Cathy’s house represented relative safety. “Mum had a cupboard under the stairs where younger children used to stay sometimes, to escape racist hassle and their own families. We would help them out.” Several times social services tried to take Cathy and her siblings into care, but her mother fought hard and somehow did enough to convince the authorities that she could cope.

At primary school Cathy’s teachers couldn’t work out what to do with her or how to engage her. She couldn’t read or write so, according to Cathy, was subject to endless tests and experiments. In the end little helped and nothing improved. She grew more distant from the education system and when it came to thinking about secondary school, at the age of ten, she dropped out altogether.

Why? “I couldn’t read or write and I didn’t want the shame of that to get out” she confesses. In the mornings she would sometimes pretend to go to school, but returned to the house when her mum had left for work.

Leaving school was a trigger for much of what followed. She discovered alcohol in a major way at 11 and, quite quickly, it was drink and drugs instead of English and maths. Cathy tells me it wasn’t long until every day became a cocktail of cider, wine, cannabis, glue, aerosols and cigarettes with other children who were not in school. By any means necessary she would manage to earn the money to feed the growing habits. And her mum, who worked, studied and eventually purchased her council house, had bigger things to worry about. With her eldest daughter in deep psychological trouble and her son in and out of police stations, Cathy was the easy one.

In reality she was heading for disaster. Her addiction developed fiercely and relations with her family spiralled out of control. “My mum kicked me out of home at 14 years old, so I made my way to a charity in London. I went into my first detox unit at 15.”

By day she would roam the streets, by night she found refuge in the

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Streets Bristol

Cathy

Cathy

project’s shelter. Cathy would smuggle a vodka bottle in her socks to get her through the night. She still has scars from various suicide attempts there – she would slit her wrists to try to take the pain away.

“I was a 15-year-old girl but the doctors said I had the body of a 50-yearold man. The cuts on my arm became badly infected so they took me to hospital…

I was kept in isolation because I was such a mess.” What followed – her detox – didn’t work, and she was back to the chaos of addiction and abuse on the streets shortly after.

It’s hard to know how to react when a stranger is being so open about deeply personal issues. The discomfort one feels as detail after detail, trauma after trauma emerges is difficult to describe.

I manage to break her flow to ask if she ’s sure she ’s willing to tell her story, conscious that opening up before me are some of the most intimate details imaginable. I am a man she met only a few minutes earlier; a man she met through a women-only centre. I’m honoured that she agreed to give me a chance. But before I’ve even finished my sentence she’s speaking again, as if pleased that her story might help others if it’s retold.

Soon after the failed detox she met a man and began a relationship.

Maybe deep down she knew he was bad news from the beginning, but one senses, despite all the pain and abuse she had known, her hope for something more innocent hadn’t completely faded. He turned out to be awful. “A violent bully.” Feeling unable to belong but unwilling to leave “…we had two kids and I suffered a miscarriage with another…I don’t think my body could cope with it all at that stage.” And as if sensing my next question (or the question I had thought of but felt uneasy asking) she explained why she had the kids despite knowing what he was like. “I just wanted to love something and I wanted something to love me.” She was 19.

Whilst Cathy was living in the hell of that relationship, her older sister threw herself off a 15 floor tower block. “After that my mum took custody of my sister’s kid.” She speaks warmly about her mother during our conversation.

“My role model” she says. Her mother loved her children and worked hard but, inevitably, she was overwhelmed by everything.

Quickly, she then moves the conversation back to her boyfriend of the time. “One day he tried to burn the house down with me and the kids inside.

I got a knife, ran out the front door and stabbed him.”

When police officers arrived she said she hoped he would die. “Not what you should say in that situation” she tells me with a regretful smile. “The judge later said it was the most appalling opening line he had heard from a defendant.”

Following the stabbing they planned to charge her with attempted murder, but she claims she managed to get it downgraded after agreeing to sleep with someone important.

After the trial, Cathy went into treatment instead of prison. Her kids were put into temporary care. For years she cycled through detox and rehabs, many times, on a journey which took her all over the country. She would relapse and return to crime – “more knife charges, more dodgy men, more drugs. I actually had plenty of opportunities but my life was chaos.”

Then, after years of failure, somehow something worked. She went clean and stayed clean for three years. Life was looking up, but she and a man she had met in treatment started a relationship. She was in recovery but he was still using when they moved in together. “A really bad idea to get with someone else in treatment” Cathy says. He abused her, “he stole my daughter and took my money.” To cope she returned to the drugs. I didn’t have time to ask about if or when her daughter had been returned to her.

After crashing again she lost her children to the care system and went to live in a linen storage room, in the basement of a London hotel which could be accessed from the road. For six lonely months she slept there, or in nearby doorways. Just about surviving, she decided to earn money through sex work to pay for her drugs. She tells me about “cooking up hits in McDonald’s toilets.”

“I didn’t care whether the needles I was using were dirty or where the drugs had come from. Or the spoons. I was at rock bottom – desperate.”

“I would be on the beat at any opportunity. Every day: earn money to pay for drugs. Earn money to pay for drugs. Earn money to pay for drugs. It was just about getting by.”

As I listen to Cathy I am struck by the desperation of the men who take to the streets to pay for this. Often, known to the police, night buses and watching minders they ‘hire’ very vulnerable women. One25 says that of those on the streets they are in touch with: 62 per cent were abused as a child; 38 per cent grew up in care; 80 per cent are homeless; 92 per cent are malnourished and 99 per cent are addicted to drugs and alcohol – with the average age of first use being 13.

Earlier during a meeting with One25 staff I had asked how they protect

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Cathy

Cathy

against an ‘anti-men’ atmosphere defining all they do, and how these women can ever hope to know an equal, loving relationship in the future. “It’s very difficult” says Gill Nowland, One25’s Chief Executive, but because most of the women have never known a good father it goes even deeper still. The helpers here do what they can to show them decent men – the chef who helps to teach cooking in the centre for example – but there’s a limit to what they can do given how vulnerable they are. I realise that someone like Cathy has never really known a good man. She has probably never experienced a relationship with a man which wasn’t built on abuse, control or transaction.

I ask Cathy what it’s like to work the streets selling sex at 2am. “Oh it’s terrifying…freezing cold, lonely. You suffer mentally then you suffer physically.

Here in Bristol it seems you’re attacked by almost every other man. I stopped wearing skirts and boots because I always had to fight. I ended up in jeans and trainers to help me deal with them when they became violent. I was stick thin.

The aggressive men are known as ‘ugly mugs’. They’re the nasty ones and we report them when we ’re attacked. You have to be desperate to do this. It is soul destroying.”

I also hear about the living conditions of some of the women in touch with the project. Some live in squalor. Sofa surfing is common. Sometimes they’ll go back to a punter’s house and stay the night. It’s chaotic and dangerous. It strikes me that sleep deprivation must be a way of life. And the mundane things in life don’t go away. Washing. Cooking. Bills. Food. Mostly dealt with alone, if at all.

Cathy came into contact with One25 when the charity’s outreach van helped her one night. The van takes to the streets five nights a week stocked with leaflets, food, contraception, advice and the latest ‘ugly mug’ reports.

On two benches “very intimate conversations take place” a staff member tells me. “We meet people at their lowest point. Scared, cold, hungry and crying.

When we stop the van, the driver is constantly scanning our location for threats or anything we need to be aware of. The police also keep away when we ask them to, so that we can have the space to work with the women here. Sometimes, after being in the van, we watch the girls get out and walk back to their minder’s car. They hand over the bag of food we ’ve given them and the guy starts eating it.”

One25’s van and their selfless volunteers saved Cathy’s life. She weighed a little under seven and a half stone when they found her and relied on a nebuliser

every day. By then the father of her children was dead – a brain haemorrhage on a London bus she says in passing – and her children were unemployed and addicted to drugs. She has been rescued.

We talk about the future and what she wants. “To help people and to earn my way properly, on my own.” I ask whether she has any advice for politicians and she presses the importance of effective sex and drugs education in schools. Perhaps surprisingly she also says MPs shouldn’t legalise prostitution.

She worries about the impact on the girls if earnings are taxed. At best punters will pay the same rates, perhaps less in a higher risk climate, so the girls will have to work even harder and take new risks to maintain current earnings.

Unintentionally we finish by talking about dying again. She has referred to death a lot during our time together. “It’s something I’ve lived with every day. In my world you lose people all the time. Girls I worked with one day were gone the next. We put their pictures up and lit candles for them.” Women like Cathy exist in a world of drink, drugs, awful health, mental torment and violence.

It’s no surprise many of them die young.

“And I’m not afraid of death. Even now, if there was a needle on this table with a £100 heroin hit in it, I’d inject in an instant, knowing full well it could kill me. That’s addiction. I don’t have any visible veins now but if I did I wouldn’t worry about it. No fear of going over. That’s what it’s all about – the escape. I’ve lived with it all of my life. It’s the drugs and the feeling they give me that makes things normal.” Even now, after all the support and love she has encountered at One25, she would still inject.

When our interview ends I thank her and she leaves without looking back.

“Nice to meet you. If you need more information I can give Gill my number” she says, walking down the stairs.

An hour ago I didn’t know Cathy and now, after just one conversation, I feel I could tell you more about her than I could about my closest friends. I sit back and think of my wife and children. I feel guilty for thanking God it wasn’t them. But it could have been. It might still be. And that, I suppose, is the point.

On day one Cathy was no different to anyone else. Her future was unwritten but her life simply came to reflect the chaos she knew. The truth is that back then, as a baby, she had little chance and no choice. By the time she had control it was nearly too late. Today, frankly, it is a miracle she lives at all.

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Cathy

One25 www.one25.org.uk One25 reaches out to women trapped in, or vulnerable to, street sex work, supporting them to break free and build new lives away from violence, poverty and addiction. Their van outreach service operates five nights a week providing nutritious food, first aid, warm clothing and emotional support to the women they encounter. Their women-only drop-in centre is a refuge in which staff can help these women take their first steps away from the street.

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Mark, Rob and Matt

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Mark, Rob and Matt

Mark, Rob and Matt “I was ten when mum died. Our family broke up after that – none of us knew how to cope” Mark tells me.

He is describing the moment that his childhood collapsed. Until cancer tore in things had been uneventful; his family secure. He grew up on a large social housing estate in Manchester, as one of four children with two loving parents.

His dad, a roofer, worked hard to make a success of the family business his grandfather had built. “A typical working class upbringing” in his view.

“Things were quite good really, but then all of a sudden mum was diagnosed with cancer. Four months later she died. She was only 37.” He still seems besieged by the shock of it all. A young family was decimated. “Dad didn’t know what to do or how to react. He wasn’t that affectionate. It had a massive bearing and broke us all up in the end.”

Mark is now in his late 30s but unsurprisingly, looks much older than that.

We meet at one of Sheffield’s brilliant addiction recovery charities, which runs a town house turned drop-in centre. In the small first floor office of Josie Soutar, Chief Executive of Sheffield Alcohol Support Service, Mark and I perch face-toface on swivel chairs overlooking the drop-in centre’s busy back garden.

Earlier Josie had told people at the centre that I was due to visit – seeking to hear untold life stories. He seems eager to share his and is first up the stairs.

In our quiet room he speaks calmly and elegantly about those days which took his mother. For a few moments he pauses to look out the window, then tells me how things disintegrated quickly from there.

His brothers found themselves in regular trouble – in and out of crime as young offenders – and he went to live with his gran. “We lost touch with dad really – we saw him a bit but he just couldn’t cope.” His grandmother provided an instant sense of love and care, the comforting kind which so many older people offer effortlessly in times of crisis, but on reflection he says she probably also gave him a bit too much freedom. “Perhaps I needed a little tighter rein” Mark confesses, as he admits sliding into casual cannabis use and petty crime.

He doesn’t mention his father again during our conversation.

For a few years low level trouble was the pattern – living with his grandmother and messing about. But he finished school and left with four O-levels. “I loved it, especially English. I was one of the lads but I did quite well.”

After studying he took a decent job as a programmer at a major mobile phone company. Things began to look up. “It was around the time mobiles came onto the market” he recalls “and the rave scene was taking off big in Manchester.”

With a steady job during the week and parties at the weekends, life was great.

He would go to raves with colleagues, encouraged by his boss. “He was into ecstasy and cocaine” Mark recalls. “After a while I started trying some with him and it went from there.” A habit became entrenched and it wasn’t long before he was selling pills, as well as taking them, during weekends.

“Me and the boss were arrested” he says, surprised to this day that he got caught. “He was sent down, but I only expected a slap on the wrist. The team who drew up my pre-sentence report recommended something in the community, but the judge said he wanted to make an example of me so I got two years inside.

It was a massive shock.”

“In prison I ended up sharing a cell with a heroin addict and dealer” Mark tells me. “I hadn’t touched the stuff until then – I knew what it did to people.”

But in that cell, under pressure, he submitted. Like many other former prisoners I’ve met he tells me that it was his time inside which sucked him into hard drug use. Far too many enter prison with a casual drug habit and leave a few months later fully addicted.

“I remember the moment I first tried heroin very clearly. It was Boxing Day. He kept pushing me and pushing me so I gave in. It was a massive euphoria – you’re elated – it gave me an amazing feeling, an escape, it rushed to my head.

It felt like I wasn’t in that cell anymore. I was floating somewhere else and it felt great.” He vomited badly after that first use.

Briefly I think about the millions of families around the country who were together on that Boxing Day. I wonder which Christmas it was that Mark was taking heroin in a small cell – nobody noticing. I wonder what I was doing that day.

When I ask how the heroin had been smuggled into prison he tells me it was mainly via his cell mate’s visiting girlfriend. “She would put it in a small

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Addicted Sheffield

Mark, Rob and Matt

Mark, Rob and Matt

balloon and keep it in her mouth. If searched she would swallow it and bring it back up again later.” Of all the methods I hear about as I meet people who use drugs in jail, which range from the simple to the mind-boggling, that’s pretty common.

Mark survived prison and remarkably, on release from jail, managed to secure a return to his job with the mobile phone company. (Remarkable because a criminal record can be an insurmountable barrier for former prisoners wanting a second chance). He began renting a flat with two other people.

“After a while I met an old mate in a pub one Friday night. He was in a bad way and had issues. We got talking and I thought I’d help him out with a place to stay for the weekend. He was short of cash so I gave him £20 to sort himself out.” After the weekend, as he left for work, Mark entered the spare room to tell his friend it was time to get on. He found him in a dreadful state – on a heroin fix and unable to get up.

Seven weeks later he was still there. His heroin use was constant and Mark’s housemates became angry about this dysfunctional stranger. “Things got a lot worse” he tells me. “Jewellery and other stuff would go missing from the girls’ bedrooms and it wasn’t safe for them.” Mark tried to cover for him and couldn’t quite find a way to kick him out. Manipulated and desperate, he instead resorted to helping his friend use heroin as safely as possible. He tried to bring control but ended up sucked in. “I would drive him to the dealer at night so he could pick it up, and then I would drive him home. I wanted to make sure he didn’t get pulled into even more trouble.”

His friend kept pushing Mark to use with him and one night the words “just try it” worked. “It was a trigger. I went on a two-week binge with him.

It was heroin every day…I would buy it and we would take it.”

During that binge his friend crossed a final line. “He had to go – he staged a break in at the house and lots went missing.”

A few days after his friend had been kicked out, Mark woke up for work feeling very ill. “I was withdrawing but I didn’t know it at the time.” To alleviate the symptoms he found himself back at the dealer’s flat one night. He needed another fix, with or without his friend. “It was calling me…I was sweating…my appetite had gone. I knocked on this guy’s door and to his credit he refused to sell, initially. He saw I was on my own and said he thought it wasn’t the kind of thing for me. But I got my way in the end and he sold. Regularly.”

I ask Mark how much he would spend each day. “£20. That was enough for me. Some of my mates spent £100 and wanted to go right to the edge. They’d be unconscious. I never did any of that. All I wanted was just enough. I suppose I was a reluctant user.” Clearly most people spending £100 a day on heroin fund it through crime. And they don’t tend to live very long.

But the drugs took their inevitable toll. “Work caught wind of it. I was losing weight, losing interest…I would come in late, take sickies, refuse overtime.

After about six months my manager called me in and said they knew what was going on and they wanted me to leave.”

“Within days I’d lost it all – my job, my home, the lot.”

“I began leading a life of crime. I was living in bedsits, on sofas…it was shoplifting and fraud…anything I could do just to fund the drugs. The dealers kept selling to me…and I then found myself back on my childhood estate.”

The police knew Mark and searched him often. Then he started dealing.

“I started working for the local guy. He gave me 20 bags of heroin to sell for £10 each. I’d be given four for myself as a salary. On a good day I’d go back to him three times and clear about £600. But it was horrible. Horrible existence; horrible people. Every day was groundhog day.”

Selling heroin in the shadows was treacherous. He was attacked viciously.

Sometimes he was lucky to survive. “During one deal I was stabbed by a 15-yearold girl who wanted to take the drugs from me without paying. That was five days in hospital. The knife went two and a half inches into my chest.”

“Then there was the gang of lads in a hire car. I haven’t told many people about this actually. I was sent to meet them by the main dealer. Stupidly I got in their car. Before I knew it they had chicken wire around my neck and took me back to a flat. I was battered up and down with a metal baseball bat” he says, acting out the assault as he describes it. “It was relentless. They made me put my hands out on the floor and smashed them hard. They broke all of my fingers.”

Casually he says “one of them was an old school mate I’d grown up with on the estate. He’s dead now – hanged himself.”

“Somehow I got to A&E – I could just about crawl – and I told them I’d fallen off my motorbike. Believing none of it they sat me down with police officers. Obviously I told them nothing.”

Another spell in prison followed shortly after having been caught with enough drugs to implicate him as a dealer. Two and a half years and a lot of

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Mark, Rob and Matt

Mark, Rob and Matt

heroin later he came out and knew he needed some help. He moved back in with his grandmother who tried to get him to church. He then tried a Christian rehabilitation centre at her request but lasted only three days – “it was a cold turkey place and I got really ill. She thought I needed prayer but I knew I needed more than that.” She passed away soon after, which hit him hard. In her honour he tried another rehab and, after a successful detox, he spent a year in a sevenbed unit in Wales. This was followed by 12 months supported living in the local community. It went well and he got clean. He started training and volunteering through a local criminal justice project, which soon became permanent when they employed him to manage a night shelter in North Wales. With his recovery in better shape, he became a mentor for young people working with a local housing association and charity network. Life began to find new balance: a job, a flat, a car.

“But I was missing something” Mark says. He begins speaking about family and how much he longed for one. That year he spent Christmas with his sister’s family, back in his former neighbourhood. She was extremely low with relationship problems, he recalls, and as he drove back home before New Year’s Eve he wondered what he could do to help her. “I called and suggested I could move in if she wanted me to. She said she hadn’t wanted to ask but that she ’d like to have me around.”

“I lasted about a month. I was driving to North Wales, working in the community there, then back late at night. My sister was worried about me slipping into my old ways so she kept a close eye on me. I didn’t really leave the house unless for work. She ’d keep ringing me. It got a bit much.”

In what is rapidly becoming a theme of Mark’s story, someone dragged him astray again. He reconnected with a childhood friend from the estate – “He was a guy I used to do drugs with. He got in touch having seen me drive by.” After batting away several requests to join a few of his old mates at their house – knowing what they were doing – he turned up at the front door one night.

“When he answered the door I saw them all in there, using drugs, in a state. I was torn…but eventually walked through the door and that was my downfall. After a long time clean I relapsed there and then.”

The next morning he told himself it was just a one-off, but a month later they got to him again. It soon became a weekend routine. They used him for money – he’d pay for their drugs. “They were all on benefits and in the ten years

since I’d seen them they hadn’t changed a bit.” He describes how heroin began to creep into his working week. Then it took over his evenings. “I knew everything I had worked for was under threat. And it was all I had.”

At that point he attempted one final stand. Pleading with his doctor for some time off work, “to get his head straight” he was given one month. His GP agreed to sign him off for ‘stress-related reasons’ and gave him a prescription for some heavy duty sleeping pills. At the same time, because it was a drugs case, he says he was automatically referred to a charity for help. He went to see one of their case workers and assured her that he was OK, that he just needed time to get steady. But unbeknown to him he says his case worker – forced by duty of care requirements in place for clients working with vulnerable young people – notified his employer in North Wales without seeking his consent. “Straight away I got a call from my manager. The team was shocked. She cried as she told me I was suspended. My world came crashing down and then I lost control.”

“I was at rock bottom. Within weeks I’d spent my life savings on drugs just to get by. My sister was heartbroken – her fears had come true. I moved out and ended up in a hostel. Then I went back to rehab.”

Drifting, he came to Sheffield in the spring of 2012. He spent a year in residential rehab and then connected with the charity I’m visiting today. “It’s tough but I’m slowly trying to rebuild” he says. “The welcome you get here is amazing.”

Knowing how many people struggle with both drugs and alcohol, I ask whether he’s been dependent in the same way with drink. “Never had a problem with it” he says, “but I’ve seen how much more harm it can cause than heroin.”

He mentions three people he went through rehab with recently in Sheffield who have since died.

Others I meet at the drop-in centre that day mention different triggers, and various types of addiction. One guy called Rob was excluded from his private school scholarship and found trouble in a failing comprehensive. He grew up poor but was bright, and when he buckled under the pressure of not being able to afford the clothes and trips the other boys could, he ditched education and used his brain to develop a criminal network. He became a drug user. He was in and out of young offender institutions and prison from 17 years old.

“It was brutal in prison” Rob tells me. “You were as likely to get a punch in the face from the staff as a smile. One day we were playing murder ball in

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Mark, Rob and Matt

Mark, Rob and Matt

the gym with a guard overseeing, but there were no rules. It was very violent.

All of a sudden another officer walked in, looked over to me and shouted ‘your granddad’s dead.’ I was 17, a kid, and that’s how they told me.”

“I lost it. During the game I went in hard, kicking and punching the guy I was playing against. Eventually they pulled me off him and I was bundled out.”

He describes the lucrative scams he created later on the outside, ranging from fake passports and forged traveller’s cheques to stealing from jewellery shops during European football away fixtures. All to fund his addiction.

Another young guy I meet for a chat in Josie’s office, called Matt, says he never knew his dad and left home because he didn’t get on with his mum’s boyfriend.

He moved in with his nan but she died when he was 19. He turned to drink, beginning at parties and moving to everyday dependency. “I got through three litres of vodka a day. I was drinking to take stuff away…to pass out. At 24 years old I lost the use of my legs and had to use a walking frame.”

After continuing like this he tells me he spent on average six months in every 12 in hospital, for several years running, in his late 20s. Then, with sadness and a much quieter voice, Matt goes on to describe how his best friend – another addict much older than him – had died just days after they had both been warned they had only months to live if they persisted with their drinking.

“It was a big moment for me. Doctors had been saying that kind of thing for a while but we both assumed they weren’t really serious. Then he died…and I realised we’d been told the same thing. I left hospital a few days before he passed away. I gave him a cuddle and said it would be OK. But it wasn’t. And that was a wake-up call.”

I finish my time with each of them by asking about the future. “What do you hope for?” Mark typifies the response. “I want to be a productive member of society. To pay my taxes. I suppose I want to be settled in some kind of family environment – but it can’t be with my twin brother now because he just died of cancer. Hopefully a decent job and feeling good about life.”

For Mark, Rob, Matt and hundreds of thousands of people in recovery like them, every day is a battle to stay clean. Many of us struggle to live in the here and now but they have little choice. We often wish our time away, live for Friday nights, long for the winter months to pass so we can have a summer holiday.

But for those in recovery it’s often just about getting from morning to night.

Then through the night to the morning. When you’re in the grip of addiction or

trying to avoid it, days and dates have no distinction – be it Monday afternoon or Christmas morning.

Those I met in Sheffield know they’re making progress, but they’re also aware that they’ve done so before. For several years at a time some have known recovery, before crashing again. It is as unpredictable as it is tragic. But that is the nature of addiction. Recovery is a daily battle of choices to be won. It can involve many false starts. My time here reminds me that those who manage to overcome it, and those who help them, are some of the most courageous people you could meet.

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Sheffield Alcohol Support Service (SASS) www.sheffieldalcoholsupportservice.org.uk SASS helps people to tackle addiction and change their lives through a range of specialist alcohol, drug and family services. SASS offers peer-led addiction recovery groups which helps nurture a strong community. It also supports families whose children are at risk of being taken into care, helping them to make the vital changes needed to stay together.

Afua

Freedom Cardiff

Afua

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“One wanted to kill me, the other said they should leave me to die. They left me and somehow I managed to make my way to the woods and hide.”

Today I’m with Welsh charity BAWSO, a short walk from Cardiff ’s Millennium Stadium, to meet Afua. Just over a decade ago Afua was trafficked to the UK from a Central African warzone. She talks to me, at times tearfully, holding her 18-month-old boy tightly.

BAWSO was established to provide specialist services to people from Black and Ethnic Minority backgrounds who are affected by domestic abuse and other forms of abuse, including female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage, slavery and prostitution. This house-turned-rescue centre, and BAWSO’s network of secret safe houses, serve some of the most abused people within UK borders.

I sense immediately the care with which staff members must operate every moment of their day here. Many of the women and children using this sanctuary have been broken by the worst forms of behaviour known to humankind. Physical, emotional, psychological torture – often all at once.

Here in Cardiff, BAWSO restores the lives of women beaten and bullied beyond recognition, those who have been stripped of all personal freedom, young girls and boys who have cowered in terror as their father unleashes another round of hell in their home. There is a pure but careful atmosphere in places like this.

It is always a tremendous honour to be hosted and trusted to enter their refuges – this is as vulnerable as people can get. Within these walls, lives are pieced back together moment by moment, day by day, month by month. You either enter such places with humility and care or you shouldn’t enter at all.

When I arrive I’m told there is no certainty I can interview Afua. She is taking a college course and her lectures may mean she is unable to make it to see me before it is time for me to leave. As we wait I ask one of the charity’s inspiring caseworkers, Imogen, about the work she does.

“I began helping here through what we call ‘floating support’. We seek 26

Afua

Afua

to prevent homelessness by getting people into mental health care, supporting them to deal with bills and issues within the wider family. Our people often live in overcrowded ‘slum housing’ - perhaps a family of five living in a one-bedroom flat for instance. The conditions are awful but these are houses on streets you might drive down every day. The landlords want their rent on time and make minimum repairs.”

“Then I went to work in our Domestic Violence refuge.” Beyond providing a safe place to stay for those who have escaped abuse at home, I ask Imogen what it’s like in a refuge and about the kinds of ways people are supported. “It’s a busy place. They are shared houses with family rooms and some self-contained flats. Most women are there because their husbands have been abusing them physically, mentally or financially. Some women do want to return to give family life another shot.” Imogen is understandably sceptical that these men can change.

“We have new-born babies, 14-year-old teenagers and all ages in between. Some have behavioural problems as you might expect. Some make it fun to be in there though. But often they have to change schools. We’re giving them constant support with bank accounts, benefits, GP appointments and general counselling.”

Some but not all have been victims of trafficking. “12 women, some with children, have been trafficked. They stay with us for between six weeks and a year but the average is four to five months. Some women had children before they were trafficked and see their children abused during the trafficking process as well – one had a four-year-old child who was forced to smoke cannabis for example. ”

“Others have children as a result of being raped by their traffickers and sometimes women choose to enter relationships with clients in brothels.

One I know has had two kids with a man who visited her.”

For trafficking victims who manage to get free, the first few days are a blur. “They are quite disorientated, confused, erratic and emotional” Imogen tells me. “One lady was helped to escape by a client of hers in a brothel but in the car on the way to our refuge she threw herself out, breaking several bones.

On day one we find them essential supplies like food and clothing. Many have health issues which require urgent attention. Then we move into a process to slowly help them become independent.”

As we wait we talk some more but the clock is winning. I prepare to leave Cardiff without an interview but then, pushing a buggy and balancing its paraphernalia, Afua walks past the window and into the centre.

We are introduced and immediately the connection between Afua and Imogen shines through. Her son is a beautiful little boy and understandably shy.

I thank her for being willing to meet with me and tell her story. She nods and says OK. I check with Imogen that she is sure Afua is happy to talk and we begin. Her English was impressive but broken. I hope to do her justice.

She grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her family kept cattle but then war broke out. It was the Second Congo War or, as it is also known, the Great War of Africa. It was the deadliest war in African history, killing more than five million people.

“The war started. I remember some men coming into our house.

They killed my father in front of me. Then my brother was killed. I don’t know what happened to my mother. Others ran and I became separated from my son and I still don’t know where he is. He would be 14 today.”

She is speaking very quietly. Her little boy is cuddling her closely and playing with a toy. It is clearly hard for her but she wants her story to help others.

“The soldiers caught me and raped me. I was burned. They made scars.

They took me and I expected to be dead.” Afua then describes the conversation she heard between two soldiers. They debated whether to kill her or leave her for dead. They chose the second option saying she’d be dead soon anyway.

Somehow she made it to nearby woods to hide.

“I don’t know how long I was there for. Eventually people found me and I assumed they had come to kill me.” Instead they took her to a refugee camp – she doesn’t know whether she crossed borders or remained in the Congo. Afua tells me the camp was so crowded and the tents didn’t have enough room for all the people. But she was given food and clothes. “I was crying for my family all the time because I didn’t know where they were.”

She then speaks about a man who came into the camp to try to help.

“He told me his name was James. After a while he told me that he could take me to his country to escape to have a better life. ‘Go with this man’, other people said. I was desperate enough to say yes.”

She had no idea where she would be going or what lay ahead of her.

“He told me I would be OK. It was so bad in the camp I had no option. He told me he would find my son and bring him to me in the new country. We got on a plane and arrived in darkness. We came at night to a house.”

She had arrived in Birmingham, England. She was to spend five years

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Afua

Afua

kept in a basement, forced to work and held against her will. She was then moved to another house by traffickers, this time in Manchester.

“A man owned that house” she says. “He kept me there. He raped me… abused me.”

Afua’s son, I discover, was conceived during one of these rapes.

She cuddles him tightly and has given him a very special and poignant name, but I can’t disclose it here. She loves this little boy a great deal. He adores Imogen too.

Imogen tells me they have no idea who this man is or where he lives. The name he used with Afua and others was inevitably a false one. She tells me that people like him and those he works with target refugee camps with all the right things to say to some of the most desperate people in them.

Her captor was no help during her pregnancy or when her waters broke.

She made it to hospital to give birth but it was only when she returned two weeks later, with her unwell son, did professionals then realise she was in serious trouble. She didn’t have nappies or clothes. They kept her in for a few weeks and found a way to refer her to the Salvation Army (who hold the contract for care for trafficking victims) and then to BAWSO in Cardiff. She went into their refuge and remains there today. After a long, drawn out and draining asylum application process, during which she was told by officials that she had not been trafficked, she has finally (after appeal) been granted leave to remain in the UK.

At times the work Imogen does for BAWSO is unpredictable and harrowing. People who like to clock on and off need not apply. “It was Friday afternoon and I had been with her and her baby. I got home that night and knew things weren’t right. I kept thinking about her baby. So I went back and took them to the hospital.”

I ask Afua what BAWSO means to her. “It has changed my life completely.

I had no money or clothes. Now I do. They give me advice and help. Really they have changed my life.”

When we talk about her future and her ambitions, they are, like so many I am meeting during these interviews, quite simple. “To be settled…to work and to take care of my family.” Her son clings to her tightly.

And there, just as we begin to reflect on how far she has come, we have to stop the interview. The pain becomes too much and her tears begin flowing.

Here is a woman who had wanted to share her story with me even though it meant

more sadness. She and her son face starting life again in Cardiff. Afua is studying so that they can begin afresh. I think of the bond they will have as mother and son. I hope he will grow up completely in love with her. She is remarkable – a woman full of grace. She deserves the deepest joy.

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BAWSO www.bawso.org.uk BAWSO delivers specialist services to women from black and ethnic minority backgrounds who are affected by domestic abuse, FGM, forced marriage, human trafficking and prostitution. BAWSO supports over 2,000 women every year in Wales through four refuges, two safe houses and through their resettlement and floating support programmes.

Ben

Home Edinburgh

Ben

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“I was put on the child protection register at three days old” Ben tells me as we begin our conversation. “Mum gave birth and then went on a massive bender.

She left me alone in the house for a few days. Apparently they only found me because neighbours reported hearing a baby screaming all the time and the police got to my gran. They kicked the door down and I was all shrivelled – you know like when you’ve been in the bath a long time or you’re badly dehydrated. She’d left me in the cot or cradle or whatever it’s called.”

Ben is 22. He’s in touch with a charity called the Rock Trust in Edinburgh, where I’m meeting him today. The four and a half hour train journey from London, hurtling through the beautiful North East terrain, along coastal cliff edges and beyond rugged Scottish towns, allows for plenty of interview planning.

But little could have prepared me for his story.

After a short walk from Edinburgh’s railway station I arrive at the Rock Trust, an organisation working to reduce the city’s youth homelessness.

I’m greeted by the Trust’s Chief Executive, Kate Polson. According to the Trust 5,000 people have no home in Edinburgh; as many as 1,300 of them are under 25 years old. Kate used to be one of them.

“I ran away at 15” she tells me. “I lived in a car park.” Perhaps vindicated by what has since become her life’s mission, Kate’s decision is something she stands by. “I wanted a flat when I turned 16 but I still had ties back home – friends and family – so I didn’t get into the lifestyle of those on the streets around me.

I had something to lose and that’s what kept me in line. But most people on the streets feel they have nothing to live for.”

I’m struck again by the numerous charity leaders I meet who have personal experiences of the issues they now dedicate their lives to. For them it’s pure mission. It’s what makes their work unique. They are driven by something much deeper than their contract or pay packet. While politicians come and go, while some in power might make things a little better or much worse, I am once again reminded that it’s people like Kate who make our nation a hopeful place for 32

Ben

Ben

people that the rest of us tend to overlook.

“I sat beside people injecting all kinds of stuff. It was scary. Old men offering me places to stay…knives…guns…people throwing things at me… stealing from me. Nearby one night a man was set on fire in his sleeping bag.”

“For others it was like I wasn’t there. People would walk past and I’d be invisible. Teachers who weeks before had seen me in their classrooms wouldn’t notice me begging in doorways. You know those time lapse videos? When there’s a girl centre screen and the world is passing behind her in a blur? It’s like that. That’s about the only way I can describe it to you.”

Her experiences as a rough sleeper led her to want to make a difference.

They also shaped her views about how to help. I’m taken aback as Kate says that most services designed to support homeless people are more frightening than homelessness itself. “I would look at the queues of older men and want nothing to do with those places. Adult services put younger people off. Some teenagers much prefer to sleep in graveyards than to engage in projects because hostels are very tough places in which to thrive. In with 20 others – addicts, alcoholics etc. – it’s difficult. They’re also not very realistic or conducive to getting people help. We’ve chosen to run a shared flats model here. We can build people up in terms of dealing with bills, food and each other. In a hostel if things like food or belongings go missing, nothing gets done.”

We cut our discussion short because Ben has finished his group session and is free to talk to me. I’m led next door to meet him in the Trust’s boardroom.

He seems well known to staff. Sipping water and looking a little nervous, he opens with what he knows about those first few days as a newborn baby.

“I was born in Dundee. My dad did a runner when he found out Mum was pregnant so I’ve never met him. Don’t know his name. Mum had psychological problems. She’d been sexually assaulted by my granddad as a child and had fibromyalgia syndrome, or so she claimed. She ’d often spend most of the day in bed – gone on drugs, alcohol and her medication. I’m not sure about prostitution; I was too young to know about all of that stuff. My stepdad was a heroin addict and a dealer – he sold from our house – so he’d regularly be slumped in a chair downstairs. I got to know child protection early.”

“What was childhood like for you?”

“Chaos” Ben replies. “It was from about the age of nine that I realised my family was different to my friends’ families at school. They didn’t buy me

anything so I’d have to steal clothes and food from local shops. I’d get by on noodles. I’d take the stolen designer clothes, store them in a den with my pals and get changed into them when I left the house, just to become someone else for a while and try to show people I was in order.”

“I had a little brother who in my stepdad’s eyes couldn’t put a foot wrong.

He’d steal their things but I’d get the blame. My stepdad was…well…heavy handed shall we say. When I was ten he tried to bite my nose off.” I ask what caused a grown man to try to tear off his stepson’s nose. “There was money missing from his stash. It was one of those times my brother had stolen from him but he went after me. He was in an almighty rage. He picked me up and threw me across the living room and came in to bite me. Mum was just lying in bed like the wee junkie that she was.”

That was the first time Ben ran away from home. “I went to my pal’s place and slept in our den.” He returned home after a while and things got worse. “For about six months my stepdad decided we should change my name to ‘dickhead’ and that’s all I heard. He would say ‘dickhead do this’, ‘dickhead do that’.

He wanted it to be ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’. One day he had lost some money and attacked me again. Later he found it and apologised for shouting. He said ‘here’s a fiver but let me look after it, I’ll put it in a bank account for you’.”

He ran away again at 12 after another enormous row with his stepfather.

He attacked Ben badly and for the first time, Ben punched back. “When I fought he went mad…absolutely furious. I left for three days and eventually the police tracked me down. I don’t think anyone had reported me missing but I can’t remember.” They wanted to take him home but he tried to tell them how dangerous it was. “The police took me inside and told my mum they were concerned for my welfare. But she convinced them I’d be OK so they left. When they’d gone she turned to me and said ‘just you wait til he’s back tomorrow morning’, meaning my stepdad. They left me in real danger.

I ran again that night. Before I climbed out of the bedroom window to leave my brother came up to me and gave me £5 – they always gave him money and new things. I always remember that as our final moment. I never saw him again.”

A friend took him in and he remembers being given a regular social worker for a while. On timings and process his memory is unsurprisingly foggy. I find it hard to believe he was only 12 at this stage, having to cope without a home or a safe place to live. But he recalls the social worker telling him they couldn’t find

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Ben

any foster carers to take him and asked if he wanted to go home again. Reluctantly, feeling bad for his friend’s family having to look after him and the pressure from social services, he agreed to go back. He remembers walking up to the house with the social worker and seeing his mum waiting in the doorway. “She had two black bin bags behind her, which I soon discovered had all my stuff in – all dirty. She stood there and said ‘I don’t want you anymore’. She basically told me to fuck off and said that I could be someone else’s problem.”

“The lady I was with was stunned. She couldn’t believe it and said she didn’t know what to do now. I started crying but it was more out of anger.

I ripped the bin bags apart and threw things everywhere.”

Ben was placed in a children’s unit. He was much happier there describing it as a ‘better place ’. But despite his newfound refuge he continued to fall.

“Every few months we ’d have a LAC (Looked-After Child) review when Mum was supposed to turn up and discuss my situation. I remember it really clearly.

We would all go to a room and wait for her to come. I remember the silence of those meetings…the clock ticking…the waiting. We all sat there for ages but she would never turn up. After a few of these they told me they were taking parental rights away from her as I had a better chance by staying in the system.”

From there, aged 13, he began drinking. “I was still in school and my pals got me into it. We ’d be drinking cheap cider in the park…getting really pissed.

One day we started drinking heavily and the next thing I knew I was in hospital.

I spewed all over the place and ran out of the ward. I ran into someone ’s garden nearby. I was in bed clothes so I managed to steal a towel from their washing line to get warmer. It was early morning and really cold. From there I must have gone to the park because the next thing I know I’m back in hospital. A police office had spotted my feet coming out from under a bush – I had passed out. They said I nearly died in the cold.”

He says he was becoming a nightmare at school. “I’d fight with everybody.

Me and my mate had a competition to see who could get suspended the most.

I went through three secondary schools in the end. One year I was suspended more than 20 times.”

Along with his drinking and truanting he quickly fell into cannabis and crime. “I used to appear before these youth panels. Once I was up with 27 charges – stealing, robbing, drugs etc. They made me see a Drug and Alcohol support worker for 15 minutes every Friday afternoon.” Pretty sure of the answer, I ask

whether that did any good. “No. She would ask about my weekend plans and I would tell her I was going to get hammered, smash some stuff up and end up in a police cell.”

“At that point I think I lost all respect for authority. They couldn’t touch me.

I got into drone (Mephedrone) and cocaine. I was committing so much crime.”

Ben goes on to explain his elaborate funding scheme. “It was all done through parking meters. Someone told me about how I could use a piece of wood to trap the coins before they went into the machine properly. People would come to pay for parking, put coins in, get frustrated and walk off. Then I would go in and collect the coins. I could make £5-10 a day on each one and I did about 40 machines a day. I was known as the guy who did the meters. My mates went on to bigger things but I stuck with it for about three years. The council employed someone to try to sort the problem – he would drive around in a silver Mondeo trying to catch me at it. I loved that. Then I got bored and passed it all on to a mate to do…and then after a few weeks I read in the local paper that he’d been done for it and sent to jail. I turned 16 around then.”

Ben was in a cycle of drink, drugs and crime. He was drinking alcohol hazardously every morning – he says he and his mate would often get through four litres of cider before cooking bacon and eggs. “One day I remember we set an alarm just to start drinking again. I think it was a Sunday. We went to the park and got smashed. By 8am old ladies were up and walking their dogs, half asleep and still in curlers. Can’t remember much from there that day but before we knew it we came around in hospital again.”

Unsurprisingly it wasn’t long before his first prison sentence. He went down for 15 days just before Christmas. “It wasn’t bad at all. I was apprehensive at the start but I had friends in there. It was warm. We had meals, Sky Sports and a pool table. I was out the day before new year.”

Then he got a girlfriend. “My first one” he tells me. “Couldn’t be bothered with them until that point.” Still living in the unit he kept drinking and taking drugs, waiting for his tag to come off. He turned 17 at the same time as his probation ended. He moved into supported accommodation. “I was abusing the system badly. When I left the unit I had this ‘Throughcare and Aftercare’ money (a support scheme) and some money for food shopping if I turned on the emotion.

I drifted away from pals like you do when you get a girl.”

He moved north to Aberdeen for a job he was offered through his

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Ben

girlfriend’s dad. “It was in oil but it was onshore. He put me on good money – about £1,200 a month – with something for housing too. But drinking again one night it all kicked off. I was having a party with some mates I had invited up and we got into a fight. I wanted them to leave so I head-butted a guy and he punched me back. I fell over a table and he said something about it being a good punch but he hadn’t hurt me, I just lost balance. I got up and said ‘yeah and so is this’ and I rammed a ballpoint pen in his eye three times. The pen was stuck in his eye and he ran out squealing. Everyone went white and ran with him.

I didn’t know what to do so I locked the door, went to bed and fell asleep.

But I knew what was coming.”

An hour later the police entered Ben’s property and took him to the station. After a while in his cell refusing to co-operate and falling asleep, they told him he was facing attempted murder. It was later reduced to serious assault with permanent disfigurement. “I got bail and went home to finish all the drugs from the party. I was straight back into drugs and drink. My girlfriend stuck by me.” “Did you know the guy you stabbed in the eye?” I ask. “Yeah he was a pal.” “Did you blind him?” “No but I don’t think he could look up anymore, or something like that.”

The conversation moves on quickly. “From there I became a big figure in the area. I’d be invited to parties, punching people, fighting. Then one night I got really pissed, came home and put the frying pan on for some bacon. But I went to bed before I cooked anything with the gas still on. I woke up and the kitchen was completely black. The living room too. Everything was black. If I’d slept in that living room I could have been killed by the smoke. So that morning I abandoned the place without telling anyone. I went to a mate’s house. After a while the authority sent me a bill for £1,400 – still haven’t paid a penny of it” he laughs.

“What about the guy you stabbed? Did he ever come for you?” “I’m getting to that now” he says. Three months after Ben had stabbed his ‘pal’ in the eye with a ballpoint pen he was at a party. The police turned up looking for him so he jumped out of a third floor window. “I landed in a bush and snapped my leg in three places. The funny thing was that the ambulance had to call the fire engine to cut the bush down. They had to hack at it for ages because it was so thick and I was at the back. I was pumped full of morphine but I was also full of coke. They put metal bars and staples in my leg which I left for months – I couldn’t be bothered to turn up to appointments and didn’t take any medication,

to the point my skin was growing over the staples and getting badly infected.

My mate convinced me to go eventually.”

Months later it was time for his stabbing victim’s revenge. “I was at home drinking and one of the guy’s mates came in and punched me to stun me. Then the main guy came up the stairs to go for me so I grabbed a kitchen knife and half a pool cue. We were swinging at each other and I tried to slit his throat. A girl then screamed that someone had been stabbed so everyone legged it. It turned out that nobody had been, but me and my girlfriend then became so paranoid because he knew where I lived. Things got bad between us and I’ll be honest: I hit her. She had smashed me in the head with a glass so I punched her really hard in the face.

She got a big black eye. I’d never hit a woman before. It had all gone crazy.”

After the fight she ran to a friend’s house and Ben went after her.

“I remember the football was on when I got there. The World Cup. England on the TV. I trashed his place because I thought she was sleeping with him; I went nuts. They built all of that into my other case which was coming to court – all the criminal damage etc – so I got done as part of the stabbing charge. I got 22 months inside.”

In prison he was a contradiction. At times he charmed everyone from the Governor down – he talks about being given a ‘Governor’s pass’ which meant he had special privileges – and was put on a substance misuse course. He tells me that lots of people in there pretended to try hard on the course because they were chasing parole. But then he tells me that he didn’t bother with the course, and was abandoned by despairing professionals.

“I came out and went straight into a bail hostel, getting into more trouble.

I chased a guy down the street with a bottle after he attacked me. I was done again for breach of the peace and possession of an offensive weapon. With multiple offences in my history I was looking at a ‘three’ (a three-year custodial sentence).

I was expecting a big one but they let me off. I was given community. Couldn’t believe my luck.” At that stage his girlfriend distanced herself from him. “I could see her status updates on Facebook but we began to lose touch.”

His gran took him in temporarily even though he hadn’t seen her since he was six years old. She had tracked his case as a team member at one of the local social services departments. But after four weeks she could no longer deal with his drinking so he got his own flat and sunk even further into dysfunctionality.

“I ended up back in the same neighbourhood as the guy I had stabbed” he recalls,

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Ben

Ben

half smiling. “He found me. One day I was walking down the street when he put a black bag over my head and hit me with a hammer. I woke up with bruising and a fractured eye socket.”

In the midst of all of this he somehow began studying at college for a diploma. He also met a Polish girl who he says was “the best looking girl I’d ever seen” and she helped him with his studying. They drank together – “she got me into vodka” he said – and before long they started a relationship. He says that someone put a photograph of them kissing on Facebook and tagged him. At that point, when she saw it, it seems his distant girlfriend became his ex-girlfriend.

After completing his diploma, which took him some way to qualifying as a chef, he moved north again. “Someone told me there was a hit on my head in Dundee, but I don’t know if that was true” Ben says. He found his way into a job in a restaurant kitchen but again it all fell down fast. “I turned up to work pissed.

They sacked me. I got another flat.”

“Then one night me and my girlfriend had a massive row. I can’t remember much about it but we woke up to find all this blood on the walls. Neither of us knew what had happened. She left and I fell asleep with a pan on again.

The smoke then set the fire alarm off in the place and the fire brigade broke the door down to get in.”

After another failed stint in another kitchen job in the Highlands he decided to try London. He took a train to the capital, paid for a storage locker for some of his belongings and walked around the city. “I remember being really pissed in Trafalgar Square. Then I fell asleep on a bus going through Tottenham and all my money got stolen.” He had to walk back several miles to central London that night. “I slept on the streets and after a rough few nights decided it wasn’t for me.

I had nothing left so a mate arranged for me to get a bus ticket home. I waited ten hours in Victoria bus station.”

With nowhere to stay north of the border he went south to Lake Windermere, having somehow secured another job at a first-rate hotel and restaurant. “Looking back I had every opportunity I could have wanted. This one gave me a chance because they thought I had talent. Celebrities would come.

Reviewers would turn up. It was the place to be.” But before long he was “drunk and sacked again” Ben says. He tried Manchester but failed again, spectacularly.

Then he moved to Edinburgh.

“I went into a hostel here but got fighting early on. I was done for

common assault and shop lifting and sent to prison for 12 months. I got out last Wednesday.”

Last Wednesday? Listening to these stories it’s easy to assume these were events of years ago.

“I now have to see a probation officer once a week and tell them how my life is. I don’t know the city at all. All I remember is the zoo. I’m staying in a B&B. I’ve been out six nights and pissed for four of them. Last Sunday morning I woke up in some girl’s bed. Didn’t have a clue how I got there. She woke up and told me I’d turned up in this gay bar she was at and she’d invited me back for some drinks. And after getting pissed again last night I feel rough today.”

At this point our conversation jumps all over the place.

“Do you think this all started at home?” I ask. “Personally I don’t believe that. It’s not as if I’m sat there drinking thinking ‘if only my mum had loved me’.

I don’t think about that stuff. I must have a split personality disorder. I made those choices. When people meet me they think I’m a nice guy who just made some mistakes. But in a minute I could go out there and rob random people blind, get violent.”

He tells me he also had a little sister who was adopted at six months old.

“Don’t care about meeting her” he says. “What’s the point? I don’t understand why people allow themselves to get attached to things. Makes no sense to me.”

“I have no empathy for people. I have emotions…I’ll shed the odd tear when Man Utd get beat…but no empathy. I see all these people walking around in an orderly fashion outside and I can’t understand it. I can’t be in big open spaces, I have anxiety, but at the same time I’m a violent criminal who tries to kill people. Sad news doesn’t affect me. So if someone came in now and said my gran had died I probably wouldn’t even bother going to the funeral. Even after all she’s done for me. I don’t want this to make me sound cold. I don’t know why I’m like that but I just am.”

“Do you not think or understand that people would be sad if you died?”

I ask.

“Who would be sad? Nobody gives a toss. My mum wouldn’t know if I was dead or alive. During my last prison spell I had no letters and no visits.

Nobody came. Nothing.”

“I know I need to lose that mentality. I really want to lose it but I don’t know how. It’s gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years.”

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Ben

As I look at him and listen to his account I have to keep reminding myself he’s only 22. I ask him what he wants for the future. “The future? I’ll either make it work or end up dead. I don’t want to die but I’ll only be another statistic… someone who left care. I don’t know.”

“But it’s only looking back in conversations like this that makes me realise how bad it’s been. It’s pretty fucked up isn’t it? I’d forgotten some of these things. I was badly abused psychologically, emotionally and physically I guess.”

The confusing thing about Ben is that he has all the talent and spark he would need to make a success of life. And he knows it. “I understand what it would take to turn this around and I’ve had loads of chances. Maybe this is the time. But it’s this wee little fucker called alcohol. Every crime I’ve ever committed since the age of 13 has been under the influence. I’ve been an alcoholic many times – waking up at 5am to drink bottles of vodka. Smoking weed made me paranoid and isolated but it’s the drink that’s done it.”

I find myself trying to sell the benefits of rehab to him but he says it wouldn’t help. “I don’t think I can go teetotal.” And besides, he really likes what drink gives him. “It’s my escape. What day is it today?” “Tuesday” I say. “Yeah it’s a bloody Tuesday and I should probably go back to the B&B, have dinner and behave. But when we ’re done here I’ll go and check my money, find a pub for the football and get wasted. I might end up in a cell tonight and back into prison – who knows?”

“Do you feel you’ve got nothing to live for, nothing to fight for?” I ask.

Silence for a few seconds. “Yeah probably” he says. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

The interview ends quickly and I thank him for his time. As he walks out of the front door his finger hovers over the self-destruct button again.

Months later Kate gets in touch to pass on news that Ben has found stable accommodation and has started a college course. Hope emerges once more and he begins to build again. Perhaps this time he’ll make it.

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Ben

The Rock Trust www.rocktrust.org The Rock Trust works with young people aged 16 to 25 who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. They advise, educate and support young people to build the personal skills and resources needed to make a positive and healthy transition to adulthood whilst avoiding homelessness.

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Amy Fear

Such is the sensitive nature of Amy’s situation, and the project which is helping to rebuild her life, that it was inappropriate for a male interviewer to visit. Rachel Butterfill from the Centre for Social Justice went to meet Amy on my behalf.

Buckinghamshire

Amy

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“The sound of the key in the front door was fear – absolute fear. When I heard it all I could think was: ‘what are we in for?’”

These are the words that haunt me long after Amy and I met. Amy’s house wasn’t the happy family home it should have been – it was a battleground. A place in which, long since isolated from friends and family, she had to confront constant abuse and terror.

Amy was first put in contact with The DASH Charity (The Domestic Abuse Stops Here Charity) through an Independent Domestic Violence Advisor (IDVA) after initially making an appointment with her GP. “I was there because everything that was happening with him, everything that was going on at home, was making me physically ill.”

She tells me that she first met her partner through a chance meeting at work. “It’s hard to look back now and think that I was in love, but I know I must have been.” He moved in within less than a month because he didn’t have a place of his own and was living on a friend’s floor.

“After that we were married and I was pregnant in a very short space of time.” She talks about how she has always felt independent, “I had my own job, my own place, my own life” but now “looking back I feel like he tied me down and trapped me.”

Problems soon emerged. “The moment we moved away and his name was officially on our mortgage, something switched in him.” He began to strip away pieces of Amy’s independence.

“One by one he eliminated all of my friends, I knew it was happening but I believed him when he told lies about them.” He didn’t like Amy leaving 44

Amy

Amy

the house, especially when she was going to see people he didn’t know. The only friends allowed were his friends from work and Amy soon found herself feeling increasingly isolated within her own community, family and home. With two small daughters who had to be her priority, Amy didn’t know how to tackle the beginning of this controlling behaviour. A quiet life was an easier life.

Then shortly after, the accusations started creeping in. Amy recalls attending a school carol concert, where the entire evening was punctuated with angry comments from her partner: “who is that?”, “why is he looking at you?”, “how do you know him?” Amy was embarrassed and confused by his behaviour and being unable to address it, it only got worse.

“There was a time when I had been out for two hours and despite coming back with bags full of shopping, he was seething with rage as soon as I stepped through the door: ‘how can it take that long?’, ‘where have you been?’, ‘who have you been with?’ It was exhausting.”

Amy often refers back to this time in these terms – exhausting, tiring, crushing, like being slowly worn down over time until there was less and less of her left. Every day he presented her with a new crime and a new infidelity that she was supposed to be guilty of, to the point where their daughters were growing up with a constant dialogue of accusation. “Nothing I did escaped criticism.”

When Amy decided to return to work part-time for extra money, he took a more sinister turn. Prior to this he had been controlling, jealous and critical but it was only now that the aggressive verbal abuse began. “He would shout and swear at me about anything and everything. Eventually I just had to stop talking to him. In fact if he was in the house, we all had to be silent.”

“Immediately after my first daughter was born, he wanted to be involved but soon lost interest and he had little interest in our second.” Like Amy, their young girls lived in fear of saying the wrong thing; a life lived treading on eggshells. I have never heard of this level of disassociation between a parent and their children and struggle to comprehend how they must have felt. “I know that his father used to hit him – maybe that’s why” she says.

Amy then describes the night that they left him the first time after receiving enough support and courage from an adviser. “I was told to pack a bag, leave the girls somewhere safe and keep it short – I just didn’t want that as my life anymore.” She goes on to tell me how terrified she was of him that night and how he wouldn’t accept that they were leaving. He threatened to call social services

and accuse her of abuse towards their daughters, then he blocked her car in the drive to prevent her from escaping. In the end, Amy fled with a friend who had been waiting for her.

They had to live in a car and sleep on floors. Amy was trying to keep herself together for her children but his shadow followed them everywhere. Every day he would turn up at the girl’s school and wait for the end of the day, waiting to find Amy. “The school was incredibly supportive but there were too many times where we found ourselves hiding in their offices until he gave up and went home.”

It was at this point that the courts served an occupation order on him to leave the family home. Even when he eventually did, hours before the deadline, Amy found herself trapped again. She couldn’t escape the messages, abusive phone calls, threats to her and the children. He wanted money and Amy gave it to him, hoping that he would be satisfied but it was never completely about the house, the money or access to his daughters – he wanted to be in control.

In a twist that shocks me but helps in some way to understand the power that this abusive control and manipulation can have over people, Amy tells me that feeling powerless, she let him move back in.

“The three of us were living in my bedroom whilst he slept in the spare room. I made sure I put a lock on my door.”

Now that the problems were out in the open, Amy and her partner were told to attend mediation, something she deeply regrets now. He used mediation as a chance to elicit more information from her and with that, gain more control.

“I was made to feel like our problems were just marital tiffs because I didn’t have bruises to show anyone.” Without ‘proof ’ that he was physically abusing her, Amy felt like the destruction of furniture in her home, the terror that he reigned over her daughters and the agony he caused her, amounted to little. They didn’t understand that “the mind games behind closed doors made me feel like I was actually crazy.”

When the children were six and eight, Amy noticed the abuse shifting from her to them. He blamed her for being too soft and would shout at them constantly until they hated being home more than they ever had before.

Then came an incident that made her realise how easy it would be for things to become more dangerous, for him to turn violent towards them.

Rather than wrecking a cupboard, or punching a door, she feared that he could attack them.

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Amy

Amy

She recalls him yelling so fiercely at one of their girls that it spurred her into action. “I was just looking at her, I didn’t want to intervene in case he took it too far but I was keeping eye contact with her the entire time and I could see she could barely breathe.” Seeing the damaged furniture around them, Amy didn’t think her fears were too far from reality and so she immediately left for her mother’s. She saw her two daughters flourish and play, happily away from their father. They cried and begged not to be taken home.

Fuelled by this, Amy fled the home once again and the three of them began living in a caravan in her sister’s garden. Concerned about the upheaval the children were constantly facing, Amy was ordered by the court to return to the area in which the children were supposed to be at school. She tells me how they lived in five different places over a four month period, desperately avoiding the family home.

The court appearances eventually wore her down. “He was able to stand there and lie.” He refused divorce and Amy says she was made to feel like a nagging wife, like she was being difficult and causing unnecessary stress to her children. She always felt like he was the one with the upper hand and eventually she was told by a judge that she “must start trusting her husband.”

“My confidence was totally destroyed.”

Entitled to three unsupervised visits a week, the girls had to be dropped off by Amy at the house even when they would go through the same pre-visit routine of crying and begging not to go. The eldest daughter would even pretend to be sick rather than spend time with her father. “I was ordered by the court to encourage them, I couldn’t be found to be saying anything discouraging and after everything they had been through, they resented me.”

Not long later, another occupational order was served forcing him to leave the property and allowing Amy and her daughters back, where they now remain.

Desperate to get at least supervised access to protect her children, Amy was still locked in a legal battle. “I was told that unless I could prove physical or sexual abuse then this wouldn’t be possible.”

Despite him not being allowed to have the girls overnight, Amy is still increasingly concerned about the visits that they are made to undertake to their father. She tells me about boat trips without life jackets, about days out with men from her partner’s work and most upsetting for her, how angry and withdrawn they are when they both return.

“I just want their voices to be equal to his, I want people to listen to what they want” but until they’re both older, the visits must continue and Amy must do all she can to help them both flourish at least partially free from his control.

Now Amy is engaged with DASH which helps victims of domestic violence recover and rebuild their lives. However she tells me about the problems that she had with the programme initially because she found the truth so difficult to face.

“They were telling me about patterns of controlling behaviour and I hated that I could recognise it all in him.” That pain of recognition was too great at first but with support she came back, re-started the programme and is now learning how to rebuild her life.

Since leaving, Amy has discovered that her partner had a history – not criminally recorded – of domestic abuse towards an ex-wife, and she envisions that he will eventually move on to someone else.

I ask her where she wants to be in ten years and she paints a very clear future – “I can’t wait for a time when the house is sold, when the children are old enough that their voices are louder than their father’s and when he will be gone.”

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The DASH Charity (The Domestic Abuse Stops Here Charity) www.thedashcharity.org.uk The DASH Charity supports women, children and occasionally men, who have been victims of domestic abuse. Through their outreach work, counselling programmes and the refuges that they provide, staff at DASH can help victims rebuild their lives free from controlling or abusive relationships.

Daniel Battle

Leatherhead

Daniel

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“When he was there I feared for my life. When I was eight I left a note behind our microwave saying, ‘If I’m dead then dad did it.’”

I had been due to meet Daniel a few weeks ago but, thanks to his securing a fantastic IT apprenticeship, it had to be rearranged for an evening slot. So in the late August sun I have made my way to a church building turned youth café in Surrey.

Amidst Surrey’s gated mansions, 4x4s and tailored commuters one finds pockets of acute deprivation. Walking the streets of some of its most deprived wards feels no different to being in the tougher parts of cities like Glasgow, Liverpool or London. The community I visit for my meeting today is hit hard by the same kinds of issues that I have found in parts of those cities and many others: family trauma, drug addiction, crime and anti-social behaviour, unemployment, truanting and debt are powerful forces working against people on the estates.

Some locals say it’s even worse for the poorest families here because they live in the shadows – quite literally in some cases – of some of the richest households in the country. Inequality stares them in the face. Yet like those other places this one, too, is lit up by the locals giving everything to turn things around and change lives. I have come to one such organisation: the superb Leatherhead Youth Project (LYP).

This area holds wonderful memories for me. Here I worked for two years as a Community Organiser, aiming to support local people to turn the neighbourhood around. I made friends here and got married. I found something to work for in life. And it was in partnership with Andy Gill, LYP’s entrepreneurial Chief Executive, that I set up a Friday night football project for the young people which I’m glad to know thrives to this day.

When I worked here, Daniel, who greets me with a big smile and warm handshake, wasn’t even in double figures. Today he’s 18 and building an exciting future for himself. But he’s had a childhood characterised by more strain than most of us might have been able to bear. We get straight to his story.

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Daniel

Daniel

“Mum has struggled with depression for as long as I can remember. She went into hospital when I was younger. Dad was physically abusive. He had anger problems and he ’d go for me and my brother.” Daniel describes growing up with his father in the house as “terrifying at times.” Like “a giant chasing me.”

His dad was careful to hide it though – apparently he made sure to slap and not punch to avoid any giveaway bruising.

“When I was born we were living with my gran but then found our own council flat” Daniel tells me. His father worked to try to support the family. “Dad drank a lot though – they both did actually. They’d get through a box of wine really quickly.”

The bouts of violence from his father were regular and without remorse.

“Did he ever apologise in the aftermath?”

“No, never. Not until much later actually when I was speaking to someone about it in front of him and I think then it clicked. I said how hard it had been.

At that moment he said he was sorry for it all.”

“How did the violence affect your mum?” I ask. “Mum was very anxious.

She sat and cried when he was beating us around the room... usually curled up in a ball and trying to hide. She didn’t want to believe it was happening. Me and my brother would run away from him as fast as we could. She didn’t talk about it.”

Breaking point came soon after. Daniel pleaded with his mother to kick his dad out. For a variety of reasons – including a notice from the courts – he did then leave, heading to Scotland with Daniel’s uncle for a while. After some time he returned “a changed person”. “He came back entirely different. It was as if he had dealt with everything. Our relationship is now quite close.”

One of the reasons the two men seem to have found reconciliation and a better bond is Daniel’s Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis. He tells me he had been beset with his own very explosive anger issues from a young age and then throughout his childhood. “In Year One, I was in the queue for a slide and I exploded when a kid tried to cut me up to use it before me. I ended up splitting his head open and then carried on using the slide. I lashed out a lot from a young age.”

His school years were traumatic on a daily basis. In primary school and secondary school, bullying followed him from lesson to lesson. “He was the one they always tried to wind up” says Andy, who has done so much to turn Daniel’s life around. He was an easy target for the crowds and a complex conundrum for

teachers. “I’ve been bullied my entire life. What I felt during those times will stay with me forever.” I ask how it affects him today. “Actually a couple of nights ago I got my recurring nightmare again. I have a deep fear of social situations becoming awkward. I told my dad who said it’s probably some kind of posttraumatic stress.”

In primary school he says he had no friends. He recalls the loneliness of existing on his own. He says he couldn’t tell the teachers because that would have exacerbated the problem. I ask whether his parents helped or if they attended parents’ evenings. “No” was the simple response.

Seemingly there was little he could do to change his circumstances or escape the strain. Around this time he says he also realised he was technically a carer for his gran and his mother, both of whom were struggling with daily tasks. He and his dad would provide some support in their homes which included cooking and cleaning. Like many young carers, he undertook this work willingly but clearly these commitments heaped additional pressure onto him at a volatile time. He began caring at eight years old.

In his early years at secondary school he says “I probably only went to 20 per cent of my lessons. The rest of the time I was bunking off, sneaking out of school and stealing from the local shops. If I was in class I was only there for about ten minutes. Someone would tease me or go for me and I would kick off. Full anger…there was no progression, I’d just turn instantly and they would battle to kick me out and bring me under control.”

“In the heat of those moments what was your anger like?” I ask. “I didn’t know what I was doing and can’t remember much of it. It was like I didn’t have control of my body. Afterwards it was all blank. But sometimes if I’d landed a massive punch on someone, I’d remember.”

They didn’t know how to handle him until, in Year Eight, Daniel was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. It was a very late diagnosis for a condition which benefits from earlier support to prevent problems escalating, and to develop coping strategies.

Although it was understandably tough to come to terms with at the time – he tells me his first reaction was “no I don’t want it so fuck off ” – this proved to be a turning point because it triggered some clearer support. “I used to hate having it and resisted it for some time. Now though I honestly wouldn’t change it. It’s opened up all that I needed to deal with my own anger.”

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Daniel

Daniel

Aside from the direct help he received after the diagnosis, things began to smooth over further in his relationship with his father. “I think Dad had similar issues with anger and would have been diagnosed when he was younger, had there been more awareness about these problems then. We talked about it and I felt how he felt sometimes.” He also connected with the youth project at that time – meeting Andy at a re-entry meeting at school – but change came slowly.

Andy tells me about how the youth café would be forced to shut down at times just to get him out of the building after he lost control. “Sometimes we had to get everyone else outside just so I could have the space to talk him out the back door.” As Andy tells me about how they had to handle him I am struck by the importance of consistent and thoughtful engagement with young people who have behavioural difficulties. “We had to learn how to manage him here but it took time. We came to see there was a window, perhaps just ten seconds, between calm Daniel and total anger. His fingers would begin to twitch just before he exploded. He’d throw things, storm off, or at times refuse to leave threatening to ‘trash the place’ as he stayed. One of our youth workers was pregnant and, as he lashed out against us once, she almost got hit by a flying object. That was the low point and we had to give him a cooling off period for a number of months. All the time we were trying to watch him and intervene when we saw the signs.”

It was tough enough with a dedicated youth worker tracking him. Near impossible, I imagine, for a teacher to cope with 35 other children in a classroom and many people attempting to wind him up.

Andy was also engaged with social services which by that stage had a team working with the family, concerned for Daniel’s safety at home. Andy was attending meetings about Daniel and the family’s progress. At the same time Daniel gradually managed to learn to cope with Asperger’s and his anger.

He received years of expert support from speech and language therapists, a tailored curriculum and learning environment at school to keep him away from conflict situations and techniques for managing his emotions. He learnt to distinguish between banter and bullying and how to respond to both. He also had to understand what sarcasm was – something made very difficult by his Asperger’s Syndrome.

“I used to experience as many as eight bursts of full anger a day when I was uncontrollable. That went down to a couple a month and now it’s only about two bouts a year. It’s really good now.”

His mum, he tells me, has moved out and is struggling with ongoing difficulties. He’s worried about her at the moment and says she needs help. I also ask about his brother who is clearly very important to him.

“Unfortunately he’s doing drugs most of the time at the moment – nearly every drug under the sun. He had a job but lost it. We both began with the substances when we were in Year 11. I quit though and dealt with the withdrawal symptoms. He never did. It’s hard to watch him go through it – he’s killing himself.”

“I had a dream the other night that I was walking along the road in a suit and I saw someone living and begging on the street. It was my brother. That’s what I fear for him.”

As we end, we look ahead. One of the upsides of his Asperger’s, Daniel tells me, is having an unusually high ability in certain respects. For him he is outstandingly talented with IT (he built his first computer in rapid time aged 14) and with mechanics. This has been a way through for him in difficult periods. And now he’s capitalising on his talents through an apprenticeship which promises a bright future. “I’d like to get married, have children and hold down a steady job.

I want to be settled down.”

I thank him for his time and we walk towards the door. But just then a friend of Daniel’s who came with him for our interview looks to him and says she has nowhere to sleep tonight. I discover she’s 17 and has been sofa-surfing around her estate for days with her boyfriend (a serious drug addict). By now it’s 7pm and she needs to find a new place to go. They seem unfathomably calm about it but I guess it’s all too normal for them now. A friend had just sent her a message to say he couldn’t help her. Andy’s charity would offer to help if she can’t find a place – they don’t let their young people sleep rough here and would be able to make arrangements in an emergency – but she seems to think it’ll work out. As I think about what tomorrow has in store, she’s consumed by the prospect of another night in someone’s lounge with no idea whether she’ll be safe or warm.

It seems the people I’m interviewing for this collection of stories so rarely have the chance to move beyond survival mode. It is an utterly draining and demoralising state.

Having battled adversity day after day for 18 years Daniel, at last, sees hope on the horizon. But as I witness in these final few seconds together, the battle continues for those he loves. Let us hope in time he can take them with him.

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Daniel

Leatherhead Youth Project (LYP) www.leatherheadyouthproject.com LYP works within the community to support young people by providing role models, practical and emotional help as well as opportunities which empower them to make changes in their lives.

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Paul and Terry

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Paul and Terry

Paul and Terry

“Usually I’d be getting ready in the morning and they’d do a raid. My bedroom was at the front of the house which meant I could see the police coming. Sometimes they’d knock and other times they’d ram the door. I’d shout to dad so he could try to run away out the back.”

“How old were you during these raids?”

“I was at primary school.”

I’m listening to Paul who must be in his late 20s. The room is hot, the blinds are closed and security is tight. We sit only a few feet from each other.

What I know about this man and what I encounter are two very different things.

The headline information I’ve been given about how violent he has been in relationships – including with the mother of his child – and his overall level of aggression is haunting. He’s over six feet tall and very well built.

Yet the man who wants to shake my hand at the beginning of our conversation is mild mannered. He has been driven to the project by his girlfriend, he’s wearing a smart shirt and he ’s a little nervous. It is only as time passes during our session that his gentle giant persona is spiked by brutal, wrenching honesty.

Paul has been with the project for many months. This organisation works to manage risk and transform the behaviour of male perpetrators of domestic violence and to rebuild the lives of their victims. Behind its front door, nestled in a row of non-descript shops in the city centre, remarkable and deeply uncomfortable work is done. Their secure consultation rooms play host to a range of activities, from group sessions to one-on-one counselling.

I felt apprehensive about what I was likely to hear, and how I would write

about it. The staff have arranged for me to meet two of the men currently on its ‘perpetrator programme’. “They want to talk about everything – they want to be completely honest with you” one of the support workers says as I arrive.

This collection of interviews is supposed to break through casual stereotypes and to provide some context to the lives of people who are excluded or who choose to exclude themselves from mainstream society. In some cases as I listen to their life stories I can see reasons for their behaviour or understand why they have taken certain approaches to life. I hope some people who read these accounts will reflect not about how different these people were at birth, but in fact how similar they were to you and me. And perhaps readers might just begin to wonder how they themselves would have fared facing similar pain, chaos and violence in their lives from the early days. Because the truth is that at source, schoolboys walking the corridors of Eton aren’t very different to gang members prowling the streets of south London – they just happen to have been separated early by forces of privilege and disadvantage.

For obvious reasons though, I feel differently about the horrors of domestic abuse. I am nervous that by giving these men a hearing, by considering their experiences as children, readers will interpret my work as an attempted justification for their awful conduct. I want to be clear that it is not. Nor incidentally do the men or the staff I meet seek to use our time together for that purpose. They are adamant that there is never an excuse for abuse.

The men I go on to spend time with are fully engaged in their rehabilitative programmes and deeply remorseful about what they have done. They are working hard for the right to be given another chance one day but they know they may never earn one in people’s eyes. And yet it is clear: because domestic abuse is a deliberate choice the project also believes it is possible to bring these men to a place where they will choose not to be violent or aggressive. The team is working to prevent future domestic abuse by getting to its root causes, and offering phenomenal levels of help for partners shattered by it. The safety of those partners and their children is of paramount concern to the project’s dedicated staff team, and no chances are taken with them or with the tragedy of children caught in the cross-fire.

But, caveats included, I have chosen to write about these men. In planning this project I realised that if my collection of stories was to take on some of the deepest social problems facing our country, I could not and should not shy away

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Feared

The nature of these stories is so sensitive that the staff at the programme I visited felt it essential that the name of their organisation and the name of the city in which they operate be omitted. This is to protect the identity of the men and any victims.

The North of England

Paul and Terry

Paul and Terry

from perpetrators of domestic abuse, as ugly as that may be to face. As difficult as it is to argue with sufficient balance and sensitivity, it is vital that we work to end the tragedy that results in hundreds of thousands of female victims of domestic abuse every year.

With all of this in mind, I ask Paul about his earliest memories. He says his dad was usually in jail – he ’s been inside for a total of 27 years on and off – and his mum tried to hold down a job. The early morning police raids he describes were a regular reality as his house was used as a drugs portal by his dad.

He talks about missing a ‘guy figure’ in his life back then. Yet when his dad wasn’t in prison he would instead beat Paul’s mum having become drunk, and fight with numerous others in his job as a doorman, often with baseball bat in hand. “I remember he once forced mum to stand outside naked – he kicked her out like that in front of the house.” He was a bully but according to Paul, his parents set each other off. “When dad was out of prison they pushed each other around. He was controlling and wouldn’t let us out to play with others on the estate.”

Life at school was tough for Paul. He was bullied badly because of his weight and recalls seeking attention from others because he got none at home.

This materialised in some startling behaviour. “One day I got kicked out of school for being abusive to a teacher. I was moved to ‘naughty school’ but they kicked me out too. I didn’t end up taking exams so they just gave me my predicted grades – Cs, Ds, and Es mainly.”

“By the time I was 18 I had many friends who were selling drugs. I also saw my dad doing it. It was an escape for me because I could no longer deal with the shit at home.”

He moved to another city and began dealing copious amounts of drugs.

“Cocaine, crack, ecstasy. It went like hot cakes. I was making £3,000 a day in profit.

We would operate from a flat behind the bus station. I was seeing 100 people a day and my phone was always ringing.” He says he sold drugs to “everyone from people in posh cars to down and outs and prostitutes.”

“I paid rent with cocaine” he said. He was living a life that only the richest members of society can relate to. “I would go to town and buy anything I wanted.

All the fancy stuff footballers could get. I would buy diamonds for girlfriends.

I was surrounded by women, watches and champagne, cars and the most expensive clothes. We’d go to all of the top clubs and strip joints. VIP areas.”

“Where did you keep the money?”

“I had about £50,000 in shoe boxes at home and spent the rest. It was in fast and it was burnt fast.” He would give money to his mum and sister who knew where it was coming from.

Unsurprisingly his reputation meant it wasn’t long before Paul became a police target. Unbeknown to him undercover officers were sent to buy drugs and record him selling on film for several weeks. Then the empire began to come crashing down. “I was at home with my mate playing the Xbox when they raided.

The table next to me was stacked with crack and pills – thousands in value – and my flat had other stash hidden away in an alarmed box. The coppers came in and took me away. They ripped the place to pieces but never actually found the stuff in the alarmed box – shit at searching they were. At the station they showed me the films they had of me selling – hidden cameras – and I could work out which customers the officers had been. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been tricked.”

To stall proceedings he lied about his conduct, denied everything and got bail. Along with his friend who had also been arrested, he returned to his old ways until his day in court. There, justice caught up with him and he went down; sent straight to a prison on a two-year sentence.

“On the first night in there it hit me. When I slept I would forget about it all but when I woke up, I realised.” He quickly adapted though. He describes being moved around in prison, meeting new people, making friends. “On the final day I felt sad to be leaving.”

He describes farcical levels of drug use and dealing inside. “Cannabis was the main currency in there. Large amounts. I’d distribute to the entire jail.”

He says female officers would flirt with the male prisoners for attention and favours. “We’d push our luck with the women and sometimes they’d give back.”

He tells me his cell was known as the ‘boudoir’. Apparently you could get whatever you wanted in there. “Sweets, cigarettes, pot noodles…”.

“After prison I got a job at a toy store. They didn’t know about my history because I didn’t tell them.”

During his prison spell his girlfriend stuck by him and visited. But on release Paul discovered she had been unfaithful with several of his ‘mates’.

He went ballistic. Here, I am told, was his first choice to be violent towards a woman. “I smacked her in the face and threw her on the couch” he tells me, seemingly ashamed to the core. “I threw a bottle of vodka at her…and then

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Paul and Terry

I threw our dinner…I hit the roof. I locked her in the house until her sister came to the front door. Then I let her out and I ran.” After a few days he handed himself in but the case was delayed for a year. During that time he met a new girl, who had a daughter from a previous relationship, and he began dealing again.

But he committed to bringing the little girl up as if she were his own.

Before long his partner fell pregnant. He was moving “bin liners of cannabis”, undercutting local sellers and earning more money again than most of us can imagine. “But there was no trust in our relationship. I heard rumours she was with other guys so I would hit her. We ’d push each other and wind each other up. I once broke her collarbone.”

“Once I saw her getting out of a car with some new guy. I ran over, grabbed her by her top and went mad. He drove off and I walked away. She shouted at me so I ran back, beat her front door down and hit her hard. After that I realised: we were becoming my mum and dad.”

I ask Paul where his girlfriend’s young daughter was in the middle of this violence and why he didn’t stop to think about the unimaginable consequences for her too. “She would be crying in the living room or on the bed as I went for her mum. I didn’t acknowledge her. I was in such a rage.”

Then one day: breaking point. “We were in bed and my girlfriend began crying. She wouldn’t stop crying. We started fighting. I was telling her to ‘shut up’ over and over again but she wouldn’t. I hit her and her face blew up. I decided to throw her into the bath and push her head under. It seemed to be the only way I could shut her up so I held her under until she did. I was trying to drown her.

Suddenly she fell still. Then the realisation struck and I panicked as I couldn’t bring her around. I thought I’d killed her.”

He tells me that somehow, miraculously, his partner made a full recovery.

Paul spent more time in jail. As part of his criminal sentence he was connected with the charity I’m with today to try to end his violence. With their help, he was able to take control, deal with his anger, to assume responsibility for his past and the nature of his behaviour. “Without this course I’m on I would have killed the mother of my child.” They also work intensely with the victims at the centre, providing excellent support for those who are open to it.

His course leaders say he is beginning to change. He now sees his twoyear-old daughter every couple of weeks – she is in foster care having been taken from her mother. He began his access arrangements by seeing her in a supervised

contact centre for an hour. Now, because of carefully scrutinised progress, he is allowed to take her outside for a few hours – still supervised. The only issue reported has been his failure to check her nappy enough during visits. He hopes he will soon be able to take her on days out unsupervised. He seems genuine about wanting to become a decent father.

“What happened to the other child who witnessed your violence?”

“She’s in care. I hope to see her again. She’s six now. I last saw her when she was four. If I can get my life right I hope to apply for custody of them both eventually. All I want is a decent house, a job, my kids.”

He ended the relationship with the mother of his child recently. She pushed him down the stairs and split his head open during a confrontation. In another incident she spat at him and launched a verbal tirade in the middle of a shopping centre. He tells me he didn’t retaliate to any of it, that he had no desire to be aggressive, and that this is a sign his work with is beginning to transform him.

“I just want to do it right for my daughter now.”

As I talk to the staff before heading home, I discover that a few weeks ago Paul had called his former partner to apologise for all he had done to her. He told her he knew words would never be enough to make it right.

Another man I meet that afternoon, Terry, is being given another chance too. His behaviour has been equally disturbing and proves difficult to digest. Like Paul, he too has left behind numerous victims, tremendous pain, violence and deep anger. His childhood was similarly chaotic – a violent dad who abandoned him at two years old and his brother at six weeks. His mother and stepfather would spoil his little brother whilst ignoring him. He describes growing up in a form of ‘isolation’ where he watched family life happen around him. At school he would fire verbal abuse at female teachers and once took a baseball bat to people who approached him. At ten he went into a secure unit because the schools couldn’t cope. “For 12 months the taxi would run me there and back, morning and night.

Mum wouldn’t allow me to stay there. I did my school work in a padded room with foam toys.” He muddled through secondary school and settled a little. He was formally adopted by his stepfather at about the time his biological father made it known he wanted nothing further to do with him. “That hit me hard” Terry recalls.

As I am often finding during these interviews, his grandparents became a refuge. When his granddad passed away Terry starting using hard drugs, including

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Paul and Terry

ecstasy and amphetamines. After finishing school he secured a supermarket job through his stepfather and, for a period, did OK. It wasn’t long though until the drugs did their worst. “I got sacked for violence against my manager” he tells me.

He was then involved in a car crash. They hit a tree at high speed. In the burning wreckage of the vehicle, with the engine on fire and as his trousers were melting into his legs, Terry says his uncle (the driver) tried to swap seats with him to avoid blame. “No tax, no insurance” he explains. “I tried to stop him but he overpowered me and told them I had been at the wheel. We were cut free and taken to hospital.” After using the seatbelt marks on his jacket to prove he had been in the passenger seat, not on the driver’s side, Terry secured compensation from his uncle. Even more disturbing than this though: when we return to the subject of his uncle later in our conversation, he tells me he had been convicted of terrible child abuse, including, he says, throwing a baby against a brick wall when he was a younger man.

At 17, Terry became a father. “My girlfriend was 16 or 17” he says.

“I was in Magaluf when my son was born so I met him three days later. I went from the airport to the hospital. It was raining. I was in flip flops, shorts and a vest. I just wanted to see him….we were so happy.” Six weeks later though Terry found his partner in bed with his ‘best mate ’. After more turmoil with her – in which he was banned from seeing his son for several months and a cousin of his former partner stole the child for several hours – his mother and stepfather were then awarded formal custody. His ex-girlfriend was arrested and told the authorities she couldn’t cope.

At 18, he decided to ‘live life ’. Knowing his son was safe, he went wild.

Drugs and women were a daily combination. Then he says he fell in love, but the relationship quickly turned violent. “This girl had known appalling pain when growing up, including being sexually abused by the father of one of her former boyfriends.” As Terry tells me about her it is clear that she had been surrounded by violence and knew little else as a way of dealing with anger.

In their new relationship they were both violent. He recalls the first time he tried to push her down the stairs and how, after chasing after her, he ripped the door from its hinges and threw it at her. The awful stress of this for her triggered an asthma attack and, as Terry ran to find her inhaler, he broke down.

He confessed what had happened to his dad and, after group discussions, they decided to give their relationship another go. “She said she still loved me but

didn’t know how to help. She said she was scared of me.”

He goes on to say that over time “we would wind each other up – head butts, strangling, biting, punching, knives.”

Then she fell pregnant and somehow, as if a switch was flicked, he stopped the violence towards her in fear of damaging the baby. “She told me she should get pregnant more often.” He refrained from violence by making different choices, showing that it is possible to change men like this.

His baby was born – a little girl – and their relationship improved.

It wasn’t long, however, until a Family Support Worker reported bruising on their daughter’s face, hip and abdomen. “Social services took our children away saying they thought we had caused non-accidental damage to her.” Investigation after investigation followed – they are still investigating at the time I interview Terry – but it looks very likely that she actually has a condition which causes her to bruise easily. Terry is adamant with me that there was no abuse. He and his partner are now in serious therapeutic programmes. He has unsupervised contact with his boy and they are working on contact for their daughter, subject to the medical tests. “I’d be lost without this place” he tells me.

On the way home I reflect that some people will say these men should be locked up for the rest of their lives. Others will say they don’t deserve a hearing or another chance. And when you consider their appalling track record of violence against women, and the damage done to the children who witnessed it all, it is difficult to disagree with that sentiment. I feel shaken and disturbed by what I have heard today.

And yet it seems, even in these grim events, even in the worst of all cases, change is possible. It doesn’t mean the past is forgotten or criminals like Paul and Terry are suddenly justified. It doesn’t mean we cover over these issues or seek to belittle the trauma they have caused. But if change is possible and we choose to work for it, which the team here demonstrates we can, perhaps the innocent children I have heard about today will grow up knowing fathers determined to break the devastating cycle of violence they have created. Perhaps they will know fathers who don’t choose to abuse. Instead, if we work for change, perhaps their children could grow up to know real men.

And I suppose the alternative to change, to the work of this dedicated and committed team, is new victims, more violence, more abuse, more crime and more pain. And ultimately I think that is no future. That is no justice.

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Mac

Territory London

Mac

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“My friend died at the hands of a rival gang – they beat him with a hammer when they caught him in the wrong territory. That’s when we realised this was getting serious” Mac tells me. He was 16 at the time.

I have been introduced to Mac through a friend and former London gang leader. I want to find out more about the street gang underworld that thrives in a shockingly high number of towns and cities in our country. I have glimpsed it through contacts at the Centre for Social Justice but like most, I have little true understanding of it.

The young man I interview today managed to break out of his gang.

Tragically though he has lost several young friends to violence, and he knows many others will never make it free. But he wants to talk to me to try to reach them. He speaks from personal experience about the hold that ‘Gangsterism’ has over young boys growing up, looking for a family and somewhere to belong. Yet now he walks as a different person. Mac says “I want to expose my story. People can change. As I press forward I want to reach back for them. I hope and pray that someone reading this will be touched.”

Mac was born in central Africa. His mother, who he cannot remember and knows has since died, decided he had a much better chance in this life if he lived in Europe with her French-speaking sister. He says those kinds of decisions are common where he was born but I cannot imagine how tough it must be as a parent to ship a ten month old child off to a foreign land, knowing that will likely be the last time you hold them, aware that you will never see them grow up or be there for them in the future. “It’s just what happens where I’m from” he says.

At eight years old his aunt moved him from France to London. He says she was scared and couldn’t speak English. As he learnt the language, he was given considerable responsibility. “I translated for her…did paperwork…benefit forms. That kind of thing.”

Home was tough. “Scarce. We had the bare minimum. I shared a bedroom with my aunt, which was tough because there was no personal space. That ended 66

Mac

Mac

up being one of the reasons I spent more time out on the estate later on. There was no PlayStation. No TV until very late on in my childhood. We were behind most people because we just couldn’t afford it.”

He also had little opportunity to communicate with his mother back in Africa. “They had poor technology there so we couldn’t be in touch much in the end” Mac says.

His first serious brush with trouble came aged ten. He and his mates had broken in to a local factory and hotwired a forklift truck. Mac was leaning off the back when it ran over his leg and he passed out. He spent a long period in hospital. “I remember lots of pain and crying. But I couldn’t communicate well and my aunt didn’t know how to react. They were devastated I had been behaving that way.”

As a result of the injury his studies were affected badly and, as Mac began secondary school, his head was turned further. “My world became bigger…I saw faces I’d never seen before.”

In the first week at secondary school he stole a mobile phone. “I didn’t want to be poor any longer. I decided that I would do all I could not to be poor.

I saw this phone in the PE box and took it.” Mac could sell phones for between £50 and £150. That was a lot of money for the family. “But some of it would go towards me buying the latest trainers because I wanted to keep up with others.”

In Year Eight he branched out. Pick-pocketing and muggings enabled him to swipe more mobile phones to sell. “I went after people walking by themselves on their phones.” Sometimes he took major risks: “I took the youth club worker’s PDA and made big money on that.”

“Did you feel guilty about targeting these innocent people?”

“Never. It’s just what I had to do. And my lying skills were impeccable.”

In Year Nine Mac developed networks within his local community.

“I started selling weed. I would go halves with a mate and people knew my number when they wanted it. New connections opened up for me.”

“Did the police ever make life difficult for you?”

“Not really. They were nowhere. Plus I had security against them and plans to avoid trouble.” He then goes on to tell me about some of the concealment techniques he would use on his body to prevent drug detection during a physical search by officers. They are clever tricks which helped him to avoid scrapes and scrutiny.

It wasn’t long until his network was formalised. The dealing and robberies united a number of young, drifting boys. “We formed a gang. It was some people from school and people outside it. I had many contacts and it was a high crime area. To begin with we met in a park and didn’t have much to do.

No one was motivating us. So we came together. We co-ordinated. We wanted to be famous…to be known.”

I’m interested in his remark that no-one was ‘motivating’ them. He says that they had an outstanding teacher who “got us but, if I’m honest, was white, so we couldn’t fully relate.” Mac says “we needed something closer to home, something we could identify with.” He means a father figure. “I was actually leading something of a double life – in school good, at weekends bad.” But that badly-needed male role model was missing.

He then moves to the day his friend was murdered. When they were told about the brutal attack, reactions were mixed. “I thought ‘wow’…but we still downplayed it. It was a rival gang. They got him.” He doesn’t want to speak about it any further.

In Mac’s gang, members had specific roles. “I was always about the money. Others were out and out violent. Some were our fighters. But for me it was about the pounds. They called me ‘Banks’ and I only fought if it came to the worst case scenario.”

Guns began to complement knives. It got aggressive at that point.

“We knew people who knew people. I used to hold weapons for the older lot.

I’d take the gun to school to show it off. Knives too. Sometimes we’d use pepper spray on bus drivers.”

“Being there and in that gang became all about survival. That was what it meant for us to live. It was what we had been given.”

“I left school and got deeper. By then we had more than 100 members.

We had bandanas. Colours. Flags. It was like we were fighting for our own country. We got dragged into postcode rivalries. If someone was wearing other ‘colours’ or on our territory then they were the enemy.”

The violence and criminal activity escalated further. “We moved to gun robberies. We targeted corner shops and banks. We went after the vans with the boxes of cash.”

As he explains to me, they planned the ambushes on the cashpoint deliveries with military precision. “We had a change of clothes ready. We would charge at

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Mac

the person holding the box and they would give it to us because they weren’t paid to resist. We had our guns and if we had to, we would have been prepared to shoot. It was what we called ‘all in’ – we would always be clear with each other: ‘go hard or go home.’ There could be no half measures. The maximum we took from one guy was £25,000. But they’ve tightened up now. The cash gets sprayed if the box is taken and for the major deliveries the police aren’t far away. It would be tougher today. Better technology is used.”

Mac also tells me about ‘stick up kids’. ‘Stick up kids’ were younger gang members who would be tasked with stealing money from others in the area. They would rob robbers. Take from drug dealers. They would show no mercy.

But for 17-year-old Mac, immersed in gang life by this point, he found the money was still slow. “It wasn’t stable so I went OT.” OT, he tells me, stands for out of town. For him that meant he travelled to Ipswich for two weeks at a time.

He would take copious amounts of drugs with him to sell to locals. He speaks in graphic terms about those OT experiences.

“I stayed with a woman who worked as a prostitute. I slept on her floor in a body warmer. She was an addict so I paid my rent in rocks (cocaine). I had a knife and the drugs on me at all times because it was never safe there. There were crack heads everywhere wanting to buy from me.”

Tragically his main source of business was women selling sex on the streets.

I think back to the remarkable One25 project I visited in Bristol this year and my interview with Cathy which features earlier in this book; these are the forces they are fighting to get women free.

I ask him to describe the living conditions in the house. Slowly he says: “In a place like that there is no structure. No Mummy and Daddy. No warmth.

It’s always cold. Nothing is clean. Everything looks abandoned. There ’s no care. No food. No morals. There is rarely anyone in.”

“But there are lots of needles. Foils. Paper. Spoons. The cleanest things in the house were probably the needles.”

The people living in the house spent most of the day looking for money for their next fix. “They would burgle a house or steal on the street for the next hit. They would do anything for the fix.” On the occasions the woman he was staying with was short of money to pay him for drugs she would cross a line which shocked even Mac. He lowers his voice and speaks slower still. “Sometimes she was short – sometimes it was only £1.50 short – so she would offer me her

14-year-old daughter for the night to make up the difference.” He is quick to add “…but I still had morals. I knew that was wrong.”

But no matter how grim it was when he was ‘in the country’ as he puts it, he made about £2,000 a day. After two weeks working the local clientele in Ipswich he returned to London with close to £30,000 in his pocket. For this kind of money desperate people will put up with almost anything. Especially those worn down by poverty. He saw it as a down-payment in order to find a way out. And that, if we are honest enough to acknowledge it, is the pull we are working against in our efforts to help young gang members make different choices.

During one stay in Ipswich his quest for money, fame and glamorous ‘gangsterism’ hit a brick wall. “A contact I made had asked if I wanted to stay in a different part of the town. Somewhere warmer, cleaner and safer. She and her boyfriend lived there and said they had room. She was an escort but she seemed much more stable. One night after I had cleaned up I was in the lounge with all my stash on the table. I was watching the film American Gangster for some inspiration and there was a knock at the door. It was police officers following up on her failure to meet bail requirements. My drugs were everywhere. They then searched the place and found my ID. I ended up in prison for more than a year.”

At this point I ask whether he had ever stopped to think about the dangers; both the physical and legal risks. “I never expected to get caught or for it to come crashing down. It was a shock. Even when people died or got seriously hurt I never thought it would end up being me.”

Listening to Mac now I can tell that time inside hit him very hard.

And as with so many others I have met during this process, it turns out that his lowest point became his turning point. He says that prison was like a big youth club for the boys there. Many of them had no family. “I could have gone bigger from that point. It was a new network. But from somewhere the Christian values of my upbringing echoed in my head. I had to face myself each night. I asked myself if this was the direction I wanted to walk in.

I thought about all I had wanted to do in life as a child.”

“When I was young I had hopes and ambitions like everyone else but my environment pushed them away. Back then I had to do what was realistic.

But I still had those dreams within me.”

“What about your aunt?”

“She was devastated when I was sent to prison. I didn’t want to see her or

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my family because of the shame. Eventually she visited – she cried a lot. I was ashamed of what I had done.”

Mac didn’t change immediately. He came out and took a while to leave the gangland paths. “It was a case of slowly but surely. I continued to invest but not hands on. I got a return from that business but I started in college.” He had met someone who began to show him he could leave that life behind. This remarkable woman – a local church pastor – has a story I will write another day.

Mac is a work in progress. I get the sense he knows he always will be. But aren’t we all? “I still have friends involved. I can see that they’re prospering in that scene. But it’s a coward’s way out. You’re not really trying anything. It’s an empty way. What would people say of you if you were to die? It’s empty.”

He’s now at university studying Economics. He got out but thousands don’t. That’s what drives him to tell his story. He proves that transformation is possible and I only hope that message reaches those who need to hear it. People like Mac are our best hope.

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Arthur

“It was like throwing snow into a furnace” Arthur tells me.

“I’ve never been back. I won’t. The films are quite realistic but after they die the actors get up and walk away. Well my friends didn’t. We had to leave them there. They’re still there, somewhere.”

Arthur, 88, stormed Gold beach on D-Day. On 6th June 1944, after a hellish night crossing the channel in a flat-bottomed landing craft, he re-traces his story of that infamous moment. He says the dark journey to French waters was “terrifying.”“You just hoped you wouldn’t be one of the unlucky ones” he says.

He was 18.

He struggles to talk about it even now. “In my regiment we lost 318 men that day. Many more were wounded.”

“HMS Belfast was firing at the Germans over our heads as we ran to shore.

We were charging into a barrage of bullets. It was a blur. I didn’t have time to be scared. There was so much noise. Many things whistling and fizzing past your head.”

Having survived the assault he tells me about liberating one of the French towns and bedding in. He says some of the French women who had married occupying German soldiers shot at him and his colleagues as they marched.

“People talk about faith and I don’t know. But I do remember walking down a French village lane in convoy. As we went, the man in front of me got shot.

I picked up his gun and took to the front of the line. In my mind for some reason I knew there was a church at the end of the road where we could shelter. I saw the image of it in my head. I don’t know how. We carried on and sure enough we found that church, exactly as it had looked in my mind. I’d never been there before. Well how can you explain that?”

A week after landing and making his way into northern France he was wounded badly – shot in the back. “I was rescued by a Para who took me away in his jeep.” He was sent for treatment in Liverpool and recovery in Blackpool.

“I returned to France soon enough…re-joined my unit for the attack on Le Havre.

Shelling fell nearby and during that attack I lost some of my hearing.”

Having recently commemorated the 100 year anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, and the 70th anniversary of D-Day, I ask about whether our country does enough to honour his generation and to value older people. “I don’t think so, no. For instance the other day I was collecting something in a shop and in the queue behind me was a young woman. It takes me a while to do these things because I only have use of two fingers on each hand now. She shouted at me to hurry up because, according to her, ‘she didn’t have all day’. Normally I let those things pass but I turned to her and said ‘if it wasn’t for people like me, you’d be speaking German now’ and I carried on.

The rest of the people in the queue cheered.” His confession that he usually lets those comments pass him by paints a sad picture of his treatment by others.

Briefly we digress and I ask about Sir Winston Churchill’s leadership.

“Well he was seen as a troublemaker until the war started. A warmonger and a maverick. But then it all made sense for him. He would lift people. His speeches gave people encouragement.” He still can’t quite work out why the British people then kicked him out of office. “One of those things” he says.

I could talk with Arthur for hours about his service to our country in the Second World War but it is clearly difficult for him to dwell on what he saw in combat, the pain he experienced and the trauma he has carried with him ever since. We move the conversation on.

I have come to Crowborough to meet him through the award-winning charity Rotherfield St Martin (RSM). According to its Chief Executive, Jo Evans, RSM exists to ‘enable older people to lead active and fulfilled lives for as long as possible...cherished and cared for by their own community’. In large part, as with Arthur’s story, this is about fighting loneliness. Jo describes her charity’s work as “being the difference between a life that isn’t a life and a life that is.” With a tiny annual budget of £70,000, RSM employs five staff and relies on the efforts of more than 100 volunteers. They help more than 350 older people in the local area.

Through others I have met with the Centre for Social Justice I know that loneliness is hidden behind net curtains, front doors and false smiles. It tears into many people’s lives, especially in those later years. According to Age UK, more than a million people over the age of 65 say they are often or always lonely.

Polling we commissioned at the Centre for Social Justice found that 370,000 over 75s spend ‘zero hours’ with other people on a typical day and 246,000 over 75s

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spend Christmas Day alone – with 40 per cent of them having children living in the UK. This isn’t just tragic, it’s dangerous. Research in the United States found that loneliness carries the same personal health risks as those associated with smoking or obesity.

Left unchallenged, loneliness can trigger depression, destroy self-esteem and spark serious decline. “Without work and family many people don’t feel validated any longer” Jo tells me. Often, she says, members have experienced the pain of their loved ones dying which Jo is convinced can prove fatal for them.

“People die of a broken heart, they really do. One of our members called recently and told us he didn’t want to live anymore, he wanted to die. After a bereavement there’s often rapid deterioration of self-worth and value. I see people become less interested in life. They might get depressed, their physical health will suffer and then they end up on serious medication.”

Death is of course part of what RSM has to deal with regularly. She tells me she went to a large number of funerals last year. “I had one yesterday as it happens, one of our members.”

Loneliness doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor or male and female.

In fact, as I discover again with Arthur, background is no particular marker for risk at all.

He tells me about his childhood years. They were far from easy. His father died when he was six years old so his mother took the family to live with his grandfather, a local coffin maker in Crowborough. He recalls the strict Methodism within which family life was conducted and the few shillings a week which his mother had to live on. At 14 he moved to be with his father’s family in Halifax.

“Quite a change” he says, without elaborating. “I was then called up at 17 and a half… it was 1943. My choice was either the mines or the forces. I wasn’t ready to go underground so I opted for the Army.”

The war ended and, as Arthur puts it, “everybody went mad in celebration.” He returned to the UK and took a job with the Royal Mail, working his way up as a postman. Each day began at 3:50am and his rounds, aided by a bicycle, would at times stretch six or seven miles in all weathers. He would have to balance ginormous parcels as he rode. But he knew that thousands of others couldn’t get work when they came out of the forces and so he says “I felt rather lucky to be alive and fortunate to have a job.”

He used to deliver Death Telegrams. “I told people to prepare themselves

for bad news and to be careful as they opened it. One woman stood in front of me in the doorway and read news about the death of her husband. She stopped, looked up at me and told me it was the best piece of news she’d had in years.”

Others, more predictably, became overwhelmed with shock and sadness. In a quiet and pained voice he tells me that “I once delivered a Death Telegram to a pregnant lady informing her of her husband’s death. She collapsed to the floor as she read it. Later I discovered her baby was born disabled and I always wondered if it was my fault for breaking that news and causing her to fall. I thought about it a lot.”

He went on to date his future wife in unusual circumstances. “We’d been at school together and met again at the Post Office. One night after work I had been stood up by the girl I was due to see so I asked Cath, who was walking by at that moment, whether she wanted to come to the pictures with me. She said yes thankfully.” “Do you remember which film you saw?” I ask. “No idea. But I don’t think we watched much of it in the end…it was the days of the back row.”

There’s a twinkle in his eye.

For Arthur and Cath life was a combination of working hard and bringing up their two daughters. He tells a number of stories about being a father and later a grandfather, as well as life as a Postman. He’s reluctant to give me advice as a father of two young children. Another mark of his humility.

Soon though he skips to the night he lost his wife, 13 years ago. “I’d been caring for her for three years until the night she died. We had been downstairs together that evening. She wanted to sleep so I helped her to climb the stairs and get ready for bed because it was a struggle for her. I went downstairs to collect something and, when I returned to our bedroom, I found her. She had died.”

His voice strains with sadness.

Like many people who lose their life partner suddenly, Arthur says his world caved in. In both a practical and an emotional sense it was a period of enormous upheaval. “I had been helping more but I never truly realised how much Cath did until I had to do it all by myself. Washing, cooking and cleaning.

It was hard to accept she had gone.” For five years he was also caught in the middle of a family feud, which started at his wife’s funeral, and contributed to his isolation. It is resolved now, to his great relief.

Without Cath and family nearby, life became extremely lonely very quickly. “I wasn’t seeing anybody from one day to the next” he says.

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In the silence between his sentences a loud clock reverberates around the room. Behind his chair is a stereo and in front is a television. “I didn’t go out much when I lost her.” Life alone in any lounge, all day every day, would be soul destroying.

Pointing to the photograph of Cath as a young woman, one of many which adorn his walls, he tells me that he misses her every day. “There was a programme on the television about Malta recently. I recognised some of the scenery and turned to her to remind her that we ’d been there.” He looks to what must have been her chair in the living room and he becomes vacant for a few moments – his mind clearly with Cath. “But of course she wasn’t there.”

He pays for some home care but the staff are unreliable, he says. “Often they don’t turn up. When they do it costs me £18 an hour for a cup of tea, a made bed and a few other simple tasks. They only tend to stay for a few minutes though.”

I mention the polling we did at the Centre for Social Justice which found so many thousands alone on Christmas Day. “Well I would have been one of them” he says, “sitting in here on my own on a day like that, but last year I was taken up to Rotherfield St Martin for Christmas lunch, the first one they had done, and it was marvellous.”

One factor which many older people understandably struggle to deal with is coming to terms with reduced mobility. For Arthur this was particularly difficult. “I used to cover many miles a day but now with my physical limitations it’s hard to keep up and accept it.” He looks out of his window to the garden he has had to surrender. He can barely walk or carry things these days.

Jo Evans remembers that he would telephone RSM to say how lonely he was on occasions. “I do get a bit depressed sometimes” he tells me. For a D-Day veteran and a member of perhaps the most remarkable generation our country has ever produced, I can sense that these are tough conversations for Arthur.

But RSM has broken that despair and created new relationships for him.

Aside from home visits, Arthur attends the charity’s centre once a week. “I now look forward to Mondays” he adds. “I have made new friends.” This, it seems, has given him enthusiasm. He often uses his mobility scooter to travel to the local supermarket café for lunch. “They know me up there as ‘trouble ’” he delights in letting me know. And what about technology? I ask whether he has access to the internet. “Never used it – no idea what you’re talking about.”

He is reliant on a frame and a stair lift to make his way, very slowly, around the house. Pulling himself up gently out of his chair he offers us a tour of his home.

We make our way next door to what must have been the dining room. “Only the second time in a month I’ve been in this room” we hear as we look at his china collection and a few hand-me-down paintings. On his table is a Christmas whiskey box and other items neatly positioned.

As we move upstairs he tells us that he has nobody to help him to have a shower at the moment so he doesn’t use it. These are the basics of life which must be so difficult to adjust to going without. In his bedroom Jo helps him to put his shoes and jacket on ready for lunch in the local supermarket restaurant. Over his bed hangs an emergency cord. He also wears an alarm around his neck so he can alert people to his needs should he fall or get into difficulty. Life seems pretty fragile at Arthur’s.

Our time with him has come to an end. It has been moving to be with Arthur. I’ve been humbled by another form of dangerous disadvantage in our society, but inspired by how his life has been transformed by Jo’s team.

I could see this relationship had come to mean so much to him. Here had been a man devastated and drifting following the death of his wife after 61 years of marriage. He was completely alone. Here was a man who could easily have slid away, virtually unnoticed, in a house steeped in memories of those no longer with him. But Jo and her team are giving him his life back. A member of the greatest British generation, a man who lost so much so that we could be free, is flourishing once again.

It was hard to leave him. At the bottom of his stairs, as we pack up to go, Arthur reaches for Jo’s hand. With his voice cracking a little he says “thank you for all you do.” They hold hands in silence and Arthur bows his head.

“We love you Arthur” Jo says, “you’re a wonderful man.”

I imagine Cath would be extremely proud.

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About the author Rotherfield St Martin www.rotherfieldstmartin.org.uk Rotherfield St Martin hosts a multitude of daily and weekly activities including exercise classes, hydrotherapy, ‘knit and natter’ classes and bridge afternoons to bring together the elderly population of the village and surrounding area. Their volunteer driver scheme means that there are no barriers to enjoying the services, reintegrating back into a community and reducing older age isolation.

Christian is the Director of the Centre for Social Justice, a leading independent UK think-tank. He is also a member of the Government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, led by former Labour Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn.

He advises the Children’s Commissioner for England and is a Board member of Yarlington Housing Group, which provides affordable homes in south west England. He was formerly the Centre for Social Justice’s Policy Director and speechwriter to its Founder. Before entering politics he worked as a Community Organiser, employed by a partnership of residents, local authorities, police, schools and civil society organisations to help people overcome poverty, crime and disadvantage. Christian is married with two young children.

About the Centre for Social Justice The Centre for Social Justice was established to put social justice at the heart of British politics. Its policy development is rooted in the wisdom of those working to tackle Britain’s deepest social problems, and the experience of those whose lives have been affected by poverty. Its research process is nonpartisan, comprising prominent academics, practitioners and policy-makers who have expertise in the relevant fields. We consult nationally and internationally, especially with charities and social enterprises, who are the champions of lifetransformation. In addition to policy development, the Centre for Social Justice has built its Alliance of more than 300 poverty-fighting organisations that reverse social breakdown and improve communities. We believe that the surest way a Government can tackle disadvantage and poverty is to enable such individuals, communities and voluntary groups to help themselves.

The Centre for Social Justice was founded by Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2004, as the fulfilment of a promise made to Janice Dobbie, whose son had recently died from a drug overdose just after he was released from prison.

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Notes 1 Centre

for Social Justice, Fully Committed? How a Government could reverse family breakdown, London: Centre for Social Justice, 2014, p15

2 Department

for Education, Children looked after in England, including adoption, London: Department

for Education, 2014, Table A1 [accessed via: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/childrenlooked-after-in-england-including-adoption--2 (10/02/15)] 3 Office

for National Statistics, Violent Crime and Sexual Offences, 2011/2012, London: Office for National

Statistics, 2013, p29 [accessed via: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_298904.pdf (10/02/15)] 4 Office

for National Statistics, Intimate Personal Violence and Partner Abuse, London: Office for National

Statistics, 2014, p1 [accessed via: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_352362.pdf (10/02/15)] 5 Department

for Education, Pupil Absence In Schools In England Including Pupil Characteristics: 2010/2011, London: Department for Education, 2012, Table 1.1 [accessed via: https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219291/sfr04-2012.pdf (10/02/15)]

6 Prison

Reform Trust, OUT FOR GOOD: taking responsibility for resettlement, London: Prison Reform Trust, 2012, p63 [accessed via: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/ Portals/0/Documents/OutforGood.pdf (10/02/15)]

7 Centre

for Social Justice, No Quick Fix: Exposing the depth of Britain’s drug and alcohol problem, London: Centre for Social Justice, 2013, p13

8 Office

for National Statistics, Working and Workless Households, 2013 – Statistical Bulletin, London: Office for National Statistics, 2013, p1[accessed via: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_325269. pdf (10/02/15)]

9 Department

for Education, Children’s Homes Data Pack, London, Department for Education, 2014, p4 [accessed via https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/388701/Childrens_Homes_data_pack_Dec_2014.pdf (10/02/15)]

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Generously designed and printed by Gina Miller, Miller Philanthropy

Generosity heals communities MARCH 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9930570-4-5