Gangs: the social face of the non-family and exclusion

The growth of youth gangs reveals the impact of social exclusion, the break-up of the family and the absence of opportunities. Researchers and social workers warn that repression on its own will not solve a phenomenon fed by much deeper problems.

Silvio González

The organised presence of youth gangs in the United States dates from the nineteenth century, although it is claimed they already existed in 1780, which is why various researchers have called this scourge “the betrayal of opulence”. Tens of thousands of groups exist with a membership calculated at between hundreds of thousands and even millions of members.

Gang activity is present in all the states of the Union and is basically seen concentrated in the big cities and also in some rural areas, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents. The gangs are run on racial lines, although they can also be mixed. They operate from urban districts, prisons and even from within the armed forces where they traffic arms and explosives, according to various Pentagon documents.

The Uruguayan president of the Ecuadorian organisation “Ser Paz”, Nelsa Curbelo, an expert in youth gangs, says that young people who associate with criminal gangs are “soldiers of another war: one that is against injustice and exclusion”.

In the seventies, a new wave of urban gangs appeared, especially in the ghettos most impoverished by the unpopular war in Vietnam.

That conflict provoked severe cuts in social programmes and seriously affected the educational and health possibilities in communities where some ethnic minorities live.

At the same time there was an increase in racism and police brutality, all of which was exacerbated by a growing influx of poor immigrants. All that awaits these marginalised people is the detention centre and hopelessness at best, assuming they don’t meet their deaths at a very early age. Gangs are brotherhoods destined to protect their members and their communities from the prevailing social abuses.

Gangs as family

In the face of the disintegration of the family, gang membership has come to substitute it as society’s principal foundation. Family neglect, marginalisation and a high degree of social rancour are the intrinsic elements of the gang culture that is a pandemic not only in poor countries but also in the opulent first world’s most modern urban conglomerations.

“Violence and death are part of the risk of staying alive”, notes Gonzalo, a member of the “maras” in Los Angeles.

In the view of the social anthropologist José Manuel Espinosa García, the abandoning of children to the hands of childminders, constant television, alcohol-soaked relatives and a servitude that does not educate them, has forged a generation imbued with violence, death, assaults and rapes.

Any child under 14 will already have seen hundreds of thousands of violent assaults, rapes, robberies and armed robberies on television or in video games, a study by UNICEF points out. The authorities fight the gangs with violence, without ever giving them alternatives for work, education or health, which is why gang culture is also a matter of national security, highlights Time magazine.

The values instilled by families, combined with social, economic, cultural and even political factors, determine the rebellious conduct of these young people, in the opinion of Jean Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, authors of the book “The Betrayal of Opulence”.

In the Central American region families are broken up due to the lack of employment opportunities. Youth gangs are an effect of injustice and exclusion, say specialists like the clergy. Today’s young lad doesn’t believe in anything, for him all that exists is the emptiness he tries to fill.

And he does it through an accelerated and dangerous life among the gang culture. Many researchers have considered a hypothesis of aggression in children induced by TV programmes. F. Gadow and W. Sprafkin assert, “seeing aggressive behaviour on screen induces a similar behaviour in children, who learn it through imitation”. For Michel Rothemberg, author of “The effects of television violence on children and young people”, on average there is six times more violence in an hour of children’s television than in an hour of programmes for adults”.

Due to lack of attention in the family and at school, a need for acceptance, the environment they grow up in and the culture shock of emigrating to the United States where they are rejected and suffer racism, the newspaper Los Angeles Weekly points out.

Jail is never a punishment for a gang member; it means establishing oneself in a very high position in the gang, as someone who is very loyal and committed, ready to go to prison or die for the group.