Immigrant parents in the UK, fearful of gang knife violence, are sending teenage sons back to their countries of origin, a community worker said Friday, after a boy sued his family for putting him in a Ghana boarding school.
The comments come a day after a judge ruled in favour of the parents of the boy who “tricked” him into going to Ghana to be educated because they did not want him to become “yet another black teenager stabbed to death in the streets of London”, their lawyer said.
Junior Smart, of the St Giles Trust whose work includes helping young people leave gangs, said far from being an isolated case, the parents’ actions were actually “very common” because “no-one wants their child to be killed”.
“I wouldn’t want to say they’ve kidnapped their children -– they haven’t — (but) they have exercised parental authority,” he said.
He said parents, who began to see their once-polite and well-behaved sons carrying or getting interested in knives, appearing in grime music videos and rowing with other gang members, were taking matters “into their own hands”.
Countries to which parents have been returning their children included Ghana, Romania, Jamaica and Sierra Leone, Smart told AFP.
He said parents were resorting to such extreme measures reasoning that “you (gang members) got to my son here, you’re not going to be able to get to him in Africa, Ghana, Romania or wherever”.
And they were telling their children “now you’re not going to have your mobile phone, you’re not going to have access to the internet and you’re not going to be able to talk back to me because everyone where you’re going to talks to their parent with respect”.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said last year knife crime in the UK had become a “national crisis” after a spate of stabbings involving teenagers.
One 15-year-old boy was even knifed to death at school earlier this month. A fellow pupil has been charged with his murder.
– ‘Desperate’ parents –
The teenager who took his parents to court had been taken to Ghana and enrolled in a boarding school.
His lawyers had sought to have him returned to the UK where he was born.
But the High Court in London ruled on Thursday that the boy was “at real risk of suffering greater harm in returning to the UK than if he were to remain” in the West African country.
“I recognise that this is, in many ways, both a sobering and rather depressing conclusion,” the judge, Anthony Hayden, added.
Hayden said the teenager, who cannot be identified because of his age, had been involved in criminal activity and was at the very least “on the periphery” of gang culture.
Although he accepted the parents had deceived him, he said they had acted out of “desperation and fear”.
The result was that he was now away from “the malign influences” of the other teenagers he had surrounded himself with, he added.
Figures for national deaths from stabbings are hard to find. But 10 teenagers died in stabbings in London last year and 18 in 2023, the Metropolitan Police told AFP.
Among this year’s victims was 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa, who was stabbed to death in January on a London bus in broad daylight.
His mother said he had been groomed by gangs.
Nationally, excluding the northern city of Manchester, there were 50,973 offences involving a sharp instrument in 2023/24 compared to 36,000 in 2010/11 — a 41 percent increase, according to official figures.
har/jkb/phz
