Damilola Taylor: In Remembrance

Viv Ahmun remembers Damilola - a life of promise that was cut short, and looks for solutions to stem youth violence.

This Saturday it will be ten years since the country was shocked by the brutal and fatal stabbing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor.

Unlike so many in his postcode, Damilola had a vision and a life purpose, but tragically one that was cut short by two brothers who had themselves been failed by the adults and institutions charged with their safety.

Ricky and Danny Preddie had long since lost any hope or vision of a better future and therefore had nothing to lose on that fatal evening when they rounded on the defenceless young boy and unwittingly took his life.

Damilola was a 10-year-old on the cusp of his hormonal and psychosocial rights of passage into manhood, and like Stephen Lawrence and many others before him, he had much to offer our society that he will sadly not have the opportunity to realize.

It seems appropriate that the tower blocks where he died have since been raised to the ground. But the sad fact is that the scourge of serious youth violence in the North Peckham area, or indeed in the sink estates where the overwhelming majority of this youth-related violence takes place, has not disappeared with them.

We now accept that the root problems are not embedded in the concrete and steel of these sprawling estates, but in the social policies that created these communities of poverty and despair. In the last ten years 138 teenagers have been slain in London alone.

Ever since the passing of his wife Gloria, Richard Taylor has been working to ensure that their son did not die in vein, and his memory lives on. Richard Taylor has neither avoided the glare of the media nor allowed his grief to consume him, and he has worked tirelessly to turn the family’s tragedy into an opportunity for change.The Damilola Trust is dedicated to combating youth violence and is a fitting tribute to their son.

The Trust has become a beacon of hope for those youngsters in desperate need of something to believe in. Ten years on we look forward to further investing in Damilola’s legacy at the Spirit of London Awards– on Saturday November 27th - by celebrating the achievements of young people in the arts, music, sport and community activism, but many are mindful of the challenges ahead.

Some think that we have yet to develop a full understanding of the root causes of increasing youth violence - they could not be more wrong. The last ten years have seen significant progress primarily in relation to the coming together of professionals and policy makers around the development of understanding in relation to the factors driving youth violence.

Increased understanding both in relation to the causes and effective solutions to youth violence has resulted in the steady growth of interventions proven to produce genuine outcomes.

Police, politicians of all parties, young people, academics and frontline practitioners all believe that the solution is a multilayered one that requires long term financing. Professionals now believe that early intervention, focused around family support and investment in the reduction of trauma and violence in the home of those families and children in the most deprived areas, is the way forward.

It is widely believed that early investment in the lives of these families and the vulnerable young will greatly reduce levels of youth violence in our society as a whole, a view substantiated by a steadily increasing body of research.

Last week’s announcement by surgeons and the police of a new collaboration after a successful pilot scheme in which more than 100 NHS hospitals shared anonymous information about knife crime victims with police, reinforces the widely held belief that youth violence is a public health issue, which if not addressed early on will escalate into a criminal justice and public safety challenge for us all.

“We cannot allow the hard won progress achieved over the last ten years in relation to staff training and early intervention working with schools, young people and their families, to be sacrificed to a false economy of shortsighted savings,” said Bevan Powell, recently elected chair of the Black Police Association. “Failure to act appropriately now will ultimately cost us dearly both in financial and social terms in the very near future.”

At a recent strategic planning event I attended, hosted by senior officers in the police force, from across government and key delivery services, the police made it clear that they now firmly believe that information sharing must increase and that early intervention is where we have to invest our limited resources in order to maximize the benefits.

They took every opportunity to make it clear that they do not believe enforcement can solve this problem and that we are dealing with poverty and with ill-informed and violent families, further frustrated by poor education.

Whilst the coming together of key players involved in reducing youth violence has served to reinforce current understanding regarding best practice, the opportunity to make further significant advances was lost as a result of the widespread cuts to the public sector and third sector.

The Coalition and opposition parities have been slow to come forward with creative solutions to the financial crisis threatening to unravel ten years of progress, despite the fact that solutions exist.

One such solution being explored by decision makers is the Social Impact Bond, or SIB, as it is more commonly known. Here for the first time we have a solution that provides the private sector with a genuine incentive to invest in social initiatives.

SIBs align government policy priorities with the interests of non-government investors and social service providers. For example, the West Midlands Region Connect Project achieved a 17% reduction in the reoffending rates, nationally running at 73%, of 40,200 individuals leaving prison every year .  

On this basis it was estimated that national implementation of a SIB to resettle prison leavers could deliver cost savings to government of £900m over five years. SIBs are based on a commitment to share the savings resulting from greatly improved service outcomes with investors, enabling them to make a profit from investing in effective social care.

Such solutions are more than viable, but as yet politicians are giving them limited attention with only a few pilots planned for next year.

Clearly there is still some way to go in terms of developing SIBs and obtaining the buy-in required to generate the widespread benefits we all say we want to see. The call must be for government to do all that it can to put these options in place as quickly as possible.

The recently launched 99 percent campaign celebrates the fact that 99% of young people have nothing to do with violent crime and want to live productive lives free of violence, drawing our attention to the fact that in London the total number of people under 20 years of age accused of serious youth violence in 2009 was 1336, a mere 0.07% of the under 20 population.

Having said that, this tiny percentage has caused immense damage to our communities, and greatly impacted on the quality of life for an increasing number of the law abiding 99% that once counted Damilola Taylor amongst their number.

The final point therefore is that much has been achieved in preparing the ground for change, now we must all work together to ensure that change is achieved in memory of all those young people who unnecessarily died at the hands of another young person.

Viv Ahmun is a social entrepreneur and social policy advisor, senior partner at Coreplan UK, interim director of the 1990 Trust (Social Policy and Human Rights think tank), and a service development advisor with 25 years experience in developing and running national and international services.