Cape Town experts review policy for gangsterism

INTERVIEW/Samantha Waterhouse

“When the issue is children and teenagers armed with guns, it is not enough to be familiar with gangsterism, or to simply have good ideas. You have to research, evaluate the data, test it, make sure the information gets to the decision makers. And that they listen,” the message is driven home clearly by COAV Cities Project coordinator for Cape Town, Samantha Waterhouse (right)  in an exclusive phone interview given to Comunidad Segura given from her home.

And ‘they’ are listening in South Africa.  As the COAV Cities Project came to a close in 2007, it organized a Seminar on Organized Armed Violence held this past December 13th. “It was a great success, very fruitful, reached the right people, a range of government departments, and we were able to reach people who are delivering services at the local level, and we can expect a change in funding patterns for 2009.” 

As its most promising result, the Province’s Department of Community Safety has announced it is to revise its anti-gang strategy, traditionally based on a criminal model, “to include our policy recommendations” that look at gangs in all their complexity. Waterhouse, who is a member of the child protection agency Rapcan, (Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect) is already helping draft the new initiative. 2008 also begins with monthly meetings of a ‘Coordination Forum’ designed to bring different levels of governments and various agencies together around public safety “we have asked for this all along, and now we have been invited to act as the secretariat because of our COAV experience.”

Samantha Waterhouse  praised the COAV Cities Project as “an absolutely invaluable experience for our project – the involvement of other cities encouraged a high level of expertise.” And reminds those who work in the field, that youths in organized armed violence need more than policy with a ‘gang’ label on it, they need policy and services that tackle the social void on which they thrive.

The COAV Cities Project held a Seminar at the close of 2007 to introduce policy recommendations for child involvement in armed violence. How did it go? 

Seminar held on the 13th of Dec was very fruitful, it was held jointly with the Department of Community Safety, the ISS the Institute for Security Studies, and Rapcan, we reached the right people, a range of government departments, and we were able to reach people who are delivering services at the local level. It introduced the Children and Gangs Project Policy Paper Series and the Child Participation Study.

What was the most significant accomplishment of the meeting?

The greatest success is that we were able to put the message across that the different departments in the province need to work with each other. It is a fact that each (government) department understands gangsterism, there are, and there have been in the past, quite a number of programs tackling it. But the fact that departments did not talk to each other has also led to a lot of duplication and a lot of gaps.

In practical terms?

The Department of Community Safety has decided to take advantage of our recommendations regarding COAV to re-launch their official anti-gang strategy. In the past the anti-gang initiatives were very much based on law-enforcement, policing and criminal justice. Now the entire gang strategy will be updated to heavily include COAV recommendations, especially in the area of crime prevention.

As a result of the seminar we were invited by the Dept. of Community Safety to help write their new gang strategy, and it should be up for comment in February.

Proof that government agencies are listening?

The Dept. of Community safety has understood this and it has also translated into a new initiative for 2008, the Coordination Forum to meet initially monthly and soon every second month to get the different departments talking to each other. Meetings at the community level will be held even more often.  Rapcam as been invited to act as the secretariat for that forum based on the COAV work that it has carried out. It is an important step forward.

What is next?

Our main task for 2008 has been to get the COAV recommendations inserted as well as to pilot the quality of the programs available to kids.

What does that mean?

There have been a lot of programs, but of poor quality, not based on research, instead of testing out things in practice and drawing out the lessons learned.

What specific needs are you hoping to meet?

One thing is to train people in how to design programs. Often programs are thought up based on may seem like a good idea, only it may not be a good one at all. One program, for example, planned to take kids to visit prisons thinking it would act as a deterrent for offending. It is important that we (policy makers, practitioners) understand the risk factors present that lead kids to join armed violence, such as alcohol use, domestic violence, and so on.

You mentioned in Coav recommendations, that gender plays a role in gangsterism, such as negative masculinity, could you comment on that?

 
At Rapcan, Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, we run a program along with other organizations targeting boys age 10-13 on sexuality, talking about relationships, about being boys, programs that encourage positive male role models, such as the big brother/big sister programs.

It is important to have in mind that a program that encourages such positive role models may not be primarily about that, it may be that the program targets something else but provides the necessary setting for such bonding to occur. So that for example, any programs about domestic violence in general will be relevant for gang issues.

So that means offering a range of different programs to target a specific issue?

For example we have say, 15 communities identified as needing particular interventions. It is important to understand that gang programs are not just about cleaning the graffiti off the wall. We should not look at the population through the lens of crime. What drives gangs is inequality, domestic violence...Gang projects that only focus on gangs are clearly not going to solve the factors that feed gangs.

Could you tell me about the Child Participation Study?

From the outset we wanted to include how children saw gang violence. We decided to run a separate child participation study because we thought it would be far more adequate than to invite a handful of kids to sit through our day long meetings. This was a conscious decision. The title of the study speaks for itself: “It feels like it’s the end of the world” Cape Town’s Youth Talk About Gang and Community Violence. We then incorporated the recommendations made by the children interviewed into our policy paper series. Both the study and the policy paper were launched at the Dec 13th seminar, it appears to be separate because of the different agencies involved.

What is the next for this year?

This year we would like to focus on pulling together all those organizations that work in
Prevention, Early Intervention, Diversion and Reintegration (pre and post sentencing with diversion sometimes event being pre court) getting all the NGOs together, auditing who is doing what or where, build a body of evidence on this.

You have also been working on the draft of a new Juvenile Justice Bill. How does it relate to gangsterism?

I have been simultaneously working as of January 2 on the new Child Justice Bill. The idea is to create a legislative framework that takes crime prevention- and enables diversion for young offenders. We don’t want situations for example, where children involved in gangs are more harshly treated than those who are not. We also want children who were involved in gangs whose gang involvement has been due to the intervention of adults, see this as mitigating grounds for the child and aggravating grounds for the adult.

What has been the COAV Cities project impact on your view of child gangsterism?

My general comment is that it has been an absolutely invaluable experience for our project – the involvement of other cities, it encouraged a high level of expertise. The fact that it has been such a comprehensive and  thorough process- addressing so many different levels and then building our responses.

It lays down the foundations for the next 6-10 years. Its been exciting to see the Dept. of Comm Safety the Dpt of Education and Justice, the heads of police getting together.

By the end of 2008/9 we will begin to see them spending money differently – start allocating funding to prevention.

There was already a lot of information on the topic, what was missing was a firm understanding of what was needed. Now they (goverment depts.) talk about a 10 year, 15 year time frame, instead of 2 years… This is significant.

From Comunidad Segura:

The COAV Cities Project

The COAV dossier: Children and Adolescents in Organized Armed Violence, futures at-risk

Read Further:

Children and Gangs Project Policy Paper Series (PDF)

From the Institute for Security Studies, ISS, in South Africa, the executive summary of the child participation study: “It feels like it’s the end of the world” Cape Town’s Youth Talk About Gang and Community Violence