Among the Hoods: My Years with a Teenage Gang

by Harriet Sergeant

Harriet Sergeant's three year friendship with a teenage gang, and in particular the gang leader, Tuggy Tug began when she was researching a report on why so many black Caribbean and white working class boys are failing. It was an unlikely friendship. She is a middle class, middle-aged white woman who writes for the right-wing press and a right of centre think tank. Gangs like Tuggy Tug's are responsible for the majority of crime in our inner cities. During the riots of August 2011, they were the young men setting our streets ablaze.

Over the next three years she got more and more involved with the boys. All the issues she had read about - single mothers, absent fathers, lack of education and social mobility, the criminal justice system - suddenly took on new meaning as she encountered not just Tuggy Tug and his gang but their relatives and friends. She enters their world and sees institutions through their eyes. It is a revelation.

She describes a dramatic three years. By the end of the book Tuggy Tug was found guilty of committing over a hundred street robberies. He and two other gang members are in prison, one is in mental hospital and one appears to be a successful criminal. In a remarkable, often funny and moving book, Harriet Sergeant describes how the friendship changed her and investigates the forces that turn potentially decent young men into misfits and criminals. As Britain faces the first anniversary of the riots, this book should be required reading for us all.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Politics, Crime

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harriet Sergeant ought to be someone I'm opposed to all down the political line. A journalist for right-wing newspaper "The Daily Mail" and member of Conservative Think Tank "The Centre For Policy Studies" and yet she has produced a book about Britain's underclass youth that shows a real sensitivity, empathy and willingness to engage with people she ordinarily would never come into contact with in her daily life; kids from the 'other side' of the street.

She befriends and mentors a gang of South London teens, as she tries to help guide them from a life on the streets and crime, but comes to see how they are stymied at every stage by indifferent, box ticking State institutions and donation-hungry charities that do little with the money raised. They are trapped by not only their poor standards of literacy (so that they can't fill in complex bureaucratic forms) and chaotic lifestyles that mean they rarely keep appointments, but the move to break away from the 'Hood to a conventional life with such a remote chance of success through the paucity of life skills, is actually a psychologically rupturing decision, since once you repudiate your gang family, there is no returning back into their bosom when society almost inevitably rebuffs your attempts to try and go legit. So most don't even attempt to. Her natural political 'position' ought the criminality is due to family breakdown and a lack of male parental role models, is actually quickly overthrown for a far more sophisticated analysis into the plight of these kids broken at a very early age.

We get a very insightful report into the poverty of these kids' experience. Where everyday things we take for granted are completely unknown to them. However, everything is monetised inside their heads in their vain attempts to translate them into meaningfulness within their own shrunken value system. We get the crushingly sad outline of how these kids often are hungry and commit street crimes just in order to be able to eat. Because Sergeant shows them a bit of love and loyalty, she is utterly accepted into their lives, whereas the never-ending parade of social workers, parole officers, foster parents and other carers change monthly so that no rapport is ever built up. Sergeant responds to the utter humanity these kids still manage to retain, though she can see that while one-to-one they are essentially decent young people, together in the gang they are vicious and egg each other on. They are bright but untutored. They are analytical, but in a completely unstructured, untutored way. Their analysis runs to what is required for survival, how to read the signs and symbols of life on the few streets they can traverse safely without fear of being jumped by rival gang members.

So as a portrait of the mindset of the likes of those involved in the riots of 2011 the book is a triumph. And props to the author for entering such an alien psyche so far removed from her own. But there were a few psychologically troubling issues that the book didn't deal with. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I did wonder at the exact nature of the relationship between author and the main boy named Tuggy Tug. I don't doubt the author's real intentions to help him and she does admit she made several misjudgements in her actions that possibly gave him false hope and exacerbated his problems. But I also wonder why she became quite so intensely involved in his life over the course of three years. Was he a pet project to save and redeem? Was he a different sort of son she emotionally adopted, the antithesis of her privileged son at a private school and who points out that while she has photos of Tuggy Tug on her phone, she has none of her own flesh and blood son? I was just a little uncomfortable that she didn't make space in the book to seriously analyse these questions in her own mental makeup, because unresolved I think they potentially have sinister resonances. As enlightening as her portrayal of the lives of these benighted youngsters is, I can't help feel that with a lack of full self-awareness as to her own emotional drives, then she was doomed to fail Tuggy Tug. That she would always remain on the outside, not merely through class, educational and value differences, but because her attitude towards him of redemption or salvation is patronising. I had the sense that she was akin to a colonial missionary and therefore unwittingly and well-meaningly exploitative. What's worse, a missionary within her own country, but one so divided from itself that it feels like a foreign land in places. Nor was there any examination of her ready acceptance of criminal behaviour in her presence, particularly in her car around drug taking or dealing. It's clear her sympathies increasingly slide over towards the kids because of the barriers she comes to encounter on their behalf. But at no point is she reflective about why she is prepared to stand their criminality, other than without it they don't get to eat. Again, she may well have perfectly acceptable or understandable reasons for putting up with it, but she fails to offer them here and I think such omission is problematic.

This book is an essential read and a troubling one, for both good and bad reasons.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really important book that I think everyone should read. It is touching, shocking and depressing. It is about the underclass of young people in our country who are not able to access 'normal' life and Harry's struggle to help them to get a job. It is a portrait of failure of parenting, and the institutions of the care system, education and benefits which combine to produce a situation where a girl's best career opportunity is to get pregnant and a boy's is to join a gang and to commit robbery and to become a drug dealer. These young people really are trapped. The main character Tuggy Tug basically wants to get a job which pays £150 a week net from which he can build a life and get a nice house in the suburbs, but despite Harry's best efforts and with her connections she is not able to help him to achieve this rather meagre ambition, by the end of the book he is in big mans prison. The other members of the gang also suffer equally depressing fates.

I was shocked by how small these young peoples lives were, how dangerous and how hopeless. It really opened my eyes.

The books is a very engaging personal account, I would also have liked an 'academic' summary of the problems and Harriet's suggestions for improving the situation, as she is a member of a think tank advising on these issues, I think this would have provided a boarder perspective.

[Virginia Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really made me think.

[Andrew Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is both entertaining and disturbing. I couldn’t put it down. Now that I have completed it, I can’t stop thinking about it. The author does a great job at humanising the inhuman, and laying blame for gang violence where it belongs, the system that both profits from and neglects disadvantaged youth

Perhaps the most poignant moment for me in the text was the barrage of calls received by the author from hoodies eager to trade crime for a job that paid a miserly £110/week. Then the revelation that the program that made those jobs was defunded immediately after an election. £60k a year per hoodie spent on govt services that don’t work, but axe the one that might have… Hmmm.

Where I don’t agree with the author is the typically conservative view that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of a neglectful school system, that by the way, conservatives continually underfund. When I was last in London, almost ten years ago, some bright conservative spark suggested that the solution to after school violence was to put teachers at the bus stops. In the US, other conservative geniuses have suggested the solution to gun violence is to arm teachers. Sure schools have a part to play, but the idea that underpaid, over worked, continually marginalised staff at the bottom of the education system (ie teachers) are anything but disillusioned scapegoats is disingenuous.

But I guess the same is true for social services. It’s not the individuals within the system. It’s the system itself, that alienates not just the clients it serves but the people who work within it.

Maybe the real blame is the ideologues and think tank types that set the political agenda, but as the author works in the conservative arena, maybe we can’t go there..

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a journalists book about a London gang, and what life is like for people who are born into poverty and that the system lets down.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak and informative.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is simplistic in style but the author demonstrates decent capacity for reflection. She cleverly weaves statistics into the narratives of the boys and compares their lives to that of her own son, in a way that will help middle class readers to empathise with the gang as well. I'd say that this will stay with me for a while. I did not read this book from a naive standpoint but I learnt a lot about the struggles of black boys in particular; my own experiences have only been with the white working class. Racism is something that I'm acutely aware of and yet totally ignorant about, having never lived a life affected by it. It is disgusting that boys are being failed, but even more so that black boys are particularly at risk. That kind of statistic has no place in a civilised culture. Sadly, these illiterate boys can't speak up for themselves, and any allies are ruthlessly shouted down. I hope things can change. Everyone has a right to a future.

[D.J. Cockburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An insight into the underclass that is often invisible even to the people who share its place. Sargeant could very easily have taken the opportunity to preach, but she takes the far more courageous approach of juxtaposing her own prejudices and misconceptions with the lives of a street gang she befriended. This should be required reading for anyone expressing an opinion about an underclass they have never met.

[Niall O'Conghaile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and well written (although she didn't use paragraph breaks to differentiate speakers, which made the dialogue confusing at points), Among The Hoods is actually quite depressing in its conclusion: that when kids are abandonned by the state there is very little that can be done to improve their lives. I do also question the author's motives somewhat, as the descritopn of her first introduction to the boy Mash has an allusion to physical attraction. Still, worth reading.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it possible to see the good in a heroin dealer? Is a person who commits violent crime innately bad or a victim themselves? if the latter then who is to blame - society, single teenage mothers, schools or the state? Does it make sense to give a child in care the right to refuse to see a dentist and do well meaning charities tick boxes and achieve little? This book may change your views.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story and she has some important things to say about poverty, illiteracy, foster care, and "the system". However, the book would be stronger if it was 50 pages shorter. One thing that could be edited out is her constant descriptions of what everyone wore.

[Linda Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling read for anyone with a social conscience combined with a major reality check on what really goes on in our society. Disturbing but don't avoid reading it, everyone needs to.

[Richard Slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book went a long way towards helping me to understand for the first time the teenage gang culture in London. it's really excellent.