The last time Mary Bokassa saw her 14-year-old son alive was around lunchtime, on his first day back to school after Christmas. She had no way of knowing that within an hour and a half, her child would be dead, stabbed 12 times on a bus in broad daylight in Woolwich, south London.
And yet, as his mother explained in a bleak and haunting interview, his death was a shock but not a surprise. Her son Kelyan had been targeted by gang members trying to recruit him since he was six, she told the BBC: “I tried to prevent it. I’ve tried so many, so many times. I screamed it, I said, ‘My son is going to be killed.’” But the family hadn’t, she said, got the help they needed. She had fought for her little boy and she had lost, and there is something about the starkness with which she said it that will have stopped parents across the country in their tracks.
Kelyan was a caring boy, according to his mother, and his teachers called him “funny, kind and ambitious”. But he was not an angel. An aspiring drill rapper, he had been expelled from school, spent time in care, and lately got into trouble with the law. He was on the way to meet his social worker when he died and, according to the BBC, was due in court shortly himself on charges of carrying a machete. But he was also 14, and every 14-year-old is someone’s baby; a kid who ought to be clattering in from school to raid the fridge and getting nagged to do their homework, worrying about their first kiss. His mother used a word we have heard a lot over the past few days to describe what had gone wrong for him. He had, she said, been groomed.
That adult criminal gangs are using increasingly sophisticated tactics to recruit schoolchildren should not be news to anyone. For years now, everyone from the National Crime Agency to children’s charities has been warning about the threat posed to thousands of vulnerable children by “county lines” operations, or organised crime networks expanding out of big cities into suburbs and market towns as they seek a bigger market for drugs. And as the then children’s commissioner, Anne (now Baroness) Longfield, pointed out in a report five years ago, the parallels with what happened to the young girls raped and trafficked by organised networks of older men in Rochdale or Rotherham are striking.
Just as with grooming gangs, it’s children already dealt the most difficult hands in life – those with tough home lives, excluded from school, in care – who are cynically and systematically targeted. Boys barely out of primary school are lured in with gifts of money, phones and trainers their parents couldn’t afford to buy them, and then told they must now work to repay what they owe – usually by moving drugs and money around the country. If they refuse, chilling levels of violence and intimidation follow. It’s a form of trafficking in which adult gangsters maximise their profits by making children do their dirty work, and Mary Bokassa is not the first mother to claim that when she tried to get her son back, the authorities let her down.
After the 2017 murder of 14-year-old Corey Junior Davis, known to his family as CJ, an official review found social workers in Newham, east London, had failed CJ when he confessed that he was being coerced by gang members into selling drugs. A bright boy who struggled with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), CJ had also been expelled from school and sent to a pupil referral unit used by gang members as a recruiting ground. Though he was so frightened that he had bought himself a bulletproof vest and Rambo-style knife for protection, the inquiry heard he had been treated like a criminal instead of social workers seeing him for what he actually was: a child at risk of exploitation.
Boys such as this, Longfield has argued, aren’t freely choosing a life of crime any more than 13-year-olds in Rochdale were choosing (as some police officers wrongly concluded two decades ago) to become sex workers, and in both cases what they need is swift protection from predatory adults. But it can be hard to see that hidden vulnerability beneath the surface of teenage boys, outwardly radiating bravado, groomed to become perpetrators as well as victims of violence.
It’s only when they’re lying bleeding on the pavement, crying for their mothers while some passing stranger holds their hand, that suddenly the world starts to see them as the children they still are. Kelyan is thought to have laid flowers a few weeks before he died for Daejaun Campbell, who was stabbed not far away in Woolwich, last September. Daejaun’s death made the headlines in part because a woman who attempted to save his life remembered him crying: “I’m 15, don’t let me die.”
There are no easy answers here for a government elected on a promise to halve violent crime within a decade. But Scotland has in the past done exactly that, thanks to a public health-led approach focused on the root childhood causes of violent behaviour. Now the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is leading a cross-government “young futures” unit designed to bring together the threads of everything that is happening in young people’s lives, from a mental health crisis that may be aggravating offending rates to the loss of specialist youth services. (One recent analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that teenagers in neighbourhoods where all the youth clubs in walking distance had closed – as 30% of youth clubs in London did between 2010 and 2019, thanks mostly to budget cuts – were 14% more likely than their peers to have a criminal conviction.) Building on Longfield’s work, Cooper envisages a Sure Start-type service for teenagers, where parents could get help before children start going off the rails.
It’s a promising start, but the budget Cooper has managed to scrape together for it doesn’t yet seem to match the scope of the government’s ambitions, and so far there is little public clamour for it to become a priority. But that, in turn, relies on all of us seeing children at risk of gang exploitation for what they really are. If not, there will be more mothers who recognise the path their children are on all too clearly, but don’t know how to stop it; and more children dying, in broad daylight, in front of horrified adults wishing only now that there was something more they could have done to help.
