Unimaginable pain

Wednesday 17th April 2019 I woke up and changed my Facebook profile picture to the image of a ribbon in support of the "Croydon says no to knives" campaign. It was a small gesture in support of the mothers, fathers, siblings, family and friends who have had to deal with losing a loved one to knife crime.

I have been thinking about it constantly today for a number of reasons. Someone I have known for many years has had to endure this loss, someone close to me has been faced with being robbed at knife point and as an adult I have been robbed at knife point.

I was an adult when it happened to me and it was long before knife crime became the epidemic it is today. I was traumatized and felt uncomfortable and unsafe in an area I had lived in for the majority of my life.

When I had my babies I watched them grow up and simultaneously watched my local area become more and more unsafe and I made a difficult decision to move out of the area and leave the country I called home so that I could prevent my boys from becoming a statistic and either the face of a child who was murdered or the face of a child who had committed such a nonsensical, heinous act and taken the life of another. I did that so that I would inevitably never have to experience the unthinkable, unimaginable and heartbreaking pain of losing a child I had given birth too and raised.

As a teenager I began working in youth centres and was privileged enough to work with amazing, caring adults that showed me care, helped me on my path to adulthood but also taught me valuable skills about how important it is to nurture our young and the youth. I witnessed these same youth centres close down one by one due to a lack of funds because our government decided that these vital resources were no longer necessary. I then eventually went into the teaching profession and once again was privy to witness the valuable work that these teachers provided and was able to witness first hand the impact young positive male role models within schools gave to our young boys who lived in an area predominantly made up single parent families, including my own children. These men gave up their time to effect change within these young boys lives and it made a considerable difference. But all too often further budget cuts mean that fewer people are entering the teaching profession and this means fewer positive male role models for our young men.

These two issues have contributed to the decline in our children's behaviour, but they are not separate or isolated issues. Parents nowadays struggle to financially support their family and within a two parent household both mother and father are required to work 40+ hours in order to simply live from hand to mouth, pay check to pay check and this means less quality tine for their families. Now imagine the same situation within a single parent household. It often means that the single parent is working as hard as they possibly can but sadly to the detriment of their children, who are often times left to their own devices and as such turn to their friends, the street and gangs. The children have then adopted this mentality that they have to rep their area or postcode. Postcodes that none of us own as it just happens to be where we have bought, rented or been allocated housing. All of these things culminate in a culture of isolation, despair, disenfranchisement, hopelessness, lack of positive influence and a sense of self preservation.

It is heartbreaking to know that as parents we are restricted from being able to protect our children and offer them any form of positivity, because even if we want to some of us cant afford to buy memberships to football clubs or camps, martial arts lessons or other such activities.

Sadly the decisions that are made for us as adults, as parents and as children are made by people who have no clue about the reality we live in. Remember these same people more than likely come from privileged backgrounds, attended schools such as Eton, and universities like Cambridge and Oxford and have no concept of what it is like to grow up in an inner city and witness the devastation, deprivation and hopelessness that so many of us have witnessed. How then can we ever hope for our governments to make decisions that will be of benefit to the majority of society, when their idea of reality is so far removed from our own. They make decision about their own pay rises that are usually more than the rate of inflation, while the rest of us are lucky if our annual or bi-annual pay rises are in line with the national inflation rate. More and more people access food banks, such things never existed when I was a child, while government ministers are lucky enough to have expenses paid for and some even dupe the system into paying for extravagant restorations or renovations to their homes or the mortgage on their second home paid for.

Our society is made up of two different worlds and these worlds will never have a need to collide and as long as this remains the case there will never be a time where things improve for the people who live in the real world. Until we unite and make things happen for us and until we begin to run for and vote in people who are representative of US we will continue to have to deal with the negative effects of decisions made on our behalf by people who care little for us, if they care at all.

For all the people who have lost children, my heart bleeds for you and my wish is that WE as a collective can fight hard enough that we can save the ones who remain with us.