'Cut Short' – A Story of Youth Violence, Told By Those Wrapped Up in It

What happens to the young people living in a city’s most densely populated area when gentrification has torn away the fabric of their community? What use is a thinly stretched police force with a proven history of racist policing to that community? What happens when funding for vital services and spaces is bled dry in the name of austerity? What are the consequences when a vulnerable young person begins to understand that society doesn’t value their life? 

These are some of the questions that Ciaran Thapar’s debut book Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City seeks to answer, as he details his own experiences as a youth worker and mentor in and around Brixton, South London from 2015 to 2020.

New to the area and keen to volunteer, Ciaran first enters the local community centre with the fresh-faced eagerness of an undercover fed, but the centre’s tireless manager Tony puts his skepticism aside and takes him under his wing. Cut Short goes on to lovingly and respectfully chronicle the lives of Ciaran’s young mentees as serious youth violence becomes an epidemic. Disruption at home and exclusion from school leaves Carl exposed to the trap of life on the roads; Demetri’s proximity to violence in ends makes him determined to understand what’s driving it; and the murder of Jhemar’s brother, Michael Jonas, shapes him into a fierce advocate for young people in his community. 

Just as powerful are the stories of Freddie and Abdoul, who briefly enter Ciaran’s orbit before being swallowed up by the systems that have failed them. Freddie’s needs are clearly not being met by his secondary school, but he’s benefitting from the discussion groups Ciaran’s hosting there until he’s permanently excluded for bringing in his mother’s bread knife. While working in Wandsworth prison, Ciaran reconnects with Abdoul, a familiar face from the local community centre. The roots of a potentially crucial intervention are severed as Abdoul disappears, presumably shipped out to a different prison.

In 2018, 135 people were murdered in London; 45 of them were young males aged between 15 and 24. These tragedies don’t occur in a vacuum. They take place in a storm of austere policymaking, demonisation and racism, which pushes those already at-risk even further towards the margins of society. By placing the transformative journeys of Carl, Demetri and Jhemar at the centre of that storm, amid a careful analysis of the complex economic and social factors that keep it raging, Cut Short makes a compelling, human argument for a public health approach to addressing serious youth violence.

VICE caught up with Ciaran, Demetri and Jhemar to talk about the book, the value of youth work and mentoring, gentrification in Brixton and more.

VICE: Ciaran, Cut Short is “about” serious youth violence but its scope is so much broader than that. What do you want readers to take away from reading the book?
Ciaran: It’s a story about British life, told through quite a specific lens. It’s a story about what it means to have lived in this country for the last five years, explored through the lens of south London youth culture and the experience of young people from a particular area, in a particular era, under a lot of pressure. It tries to represent an ignored and very oppressed, underserved community, but the story is broad and it talks about a lot of different things that are transferable and relatable. For example, there’s chapters on politics and social media; these are obviously issues that orbit youth violence, but they’re also issues that relate to a lot of different things. So the book has a narrow focus in that it tries to solve certain problems, but I feel it’s a story that anyone can relate to. 

How undervalued is youth work and mentoring, in your opinion?
Ciaran: I think there's been a decades-long decimation of the idea of being a youth worker. So there's a financial divestment that’s taken place, which is part of the wider project of divesting in public life in general, the takeover of private money. Private space is prolific too, especially in London – removing the space in which youth work might take place, be it a youth club or a community centre. I think as a result of that, there is actually a sort of cultural divestment from youth work and other roles that belong in the public sector. I think the average person on the street has been encouraged to care less and less about them. 

“Mentoring” has become quite common parlance in professional circles. It’s quite a normalised term. Maybe that’s partially to do with consultancy becoming so normalised, and people managing everything like a business. So mentoring as an idea exists in lots of people's minds. What I don't know is whether a young professional working in London knows how to use that mentoring idea to help people outside of their workplace. I guess what I tried to show in the book is that just by signing up to mentor Jhemar, it’s changed my life, and it’s changed his life, and hopefully created a social good. I think mentoring could save a lot of lives and do a lot of good if it was more democratised, outside of professional settings.

Among all the very glaring negatives of gentrification, could that be a positive?
Ciaran: London's always been a very unequal city, designed for the rich, and that's not changed. But I think what maybe is changing is the exposure to different lives. Jaja Soze says in the book, “We used to live on that street and the rich kids lived on another street, and we didn't even know they existed. Whereas now it’s in our faces.” That exposure, I think, creates a tension that can be really negative if it’s not managed right, and it obviously isn't being managed right. We have people being displaced, and people struggling, next to people who are buying multimillion pound flats and sometimes not even living in them. But I think that exposure does present a really wonderful opportunity that I hope Cut Short shows some of the value of. 

As a fresh faced newcomer to Brixton, familiar with the area but definitely an outsider, by showing up and being persistent, I feel like lots of people gained from that effort. I learned so much and I became a stronger and better person for it. I've been able to serve young people as a youth worker. I can go to Brixton and walk around and feel a part of a community. I think if you don’t forge those local connections, especially through voluntary means where you don't expect payment at the end of it, it must be very difficult to feel part of an area. I think that's the division that can rise unless people step out of those little bubbles they live in.

Demetri, Jhemar – how much has the ends changed because of gentrification?
Demetri: I can see it; changes in demographics, in the way the roads actually look. There are roads that don’t exist anymore. Buildings gone, shopping centres gone. The other day I got off the train, and I hadn’t taken the train since they started demolishing the shopping centre. Usually, when I’d come off the train I’d see the shopping centre, innit. So I was with my friend, we got off the train and I couldn’t see it. I thought we got off at the wrong stop. It’s mad.
Jhemar: Ciaran was actually one of the guys that taught me about gentrification. It’s not something I would’ve learnt in my everyday life. Ends has changed a ridiculous amount. Businesses that were there before, people trying to make a living, have been pushed out by wealthier people. That’s altered the type of people you see around Brixton. Obviously there’s no issue with that. But it’s almost like the gentrification in Brixton has put price tags on people, in a sense.  

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about serious youth violence?
Ciaran: There’s a perception that the young people who become involved in violence do so because they're inherently bad individuals, as opposed to products of a system that is pressing and pressuring them every day. You could speak on that in terms of schooling; an under-appreciation of how going to an overwhelmed state school compared to a very elite private school clearly provides a young person with a completely different experience of British society. Or the media, simplifying everything down to “this evil young person has done this”, posting their mugshot and moving on, as opposed to talking about things on a deeper level. I think it's a philosophical problem, actually, that seeps into lots of different areas.  

Jhemar: I’d say the biggest misconception is that everything is gang-related, when really and truly these things can happen for a number of different reasons.

Demetri: There’s the idea that youths involved in violence are villains, innit. I feel like a lot of that is to do with the media. They’re proper demonised. But them man who do the maddest things, I can tell you for free that they have the maddest backstories and have been through crazy things. I think everything’s linked, so if you demonise someone, it makes sense to throw them in jail for a long time. But if you know they’ve been through bare stuff, you want to put stuff in place for prevention… but that costs money.

Demetri, Jhemar – you’ve both sat on panels and contributed to discussions about serious youth violence with policymakers. Did those experiences convince you there’s a genuine desire among them to address that violence in an effective, nuanced way?
Jhemar: Having the opportunity to go to places like the Houses of Parliament and be involved in different youth boards, I feel like people who have the power to make change don’t want to make as much of a change as they claim, because they’re not personally affected by the violence. When there are campaigns by people affected by it, in the areas they come from, you very rarely see governing bodies or MPs getting involved. Really and truly, MPs should be pulling up and chatting to those people. 

Demetri: People want immediacy. Youth violence is not something you’re gonna fix overnight, you can’t fix it in a year. It’s gonna take bare years and long-term things to be put in place. But politicians operate on terms, innit. They’re gonna be in office for X amount of months or years. They can’t do long-term fixes. So every time something outrageous happens, it’s like, “We’re going to give the Met this much more money, we're going to put more police on the street.” That’s not going to do anything, but for the general public it looks like they’ve done something.

How impactful was having a mentor like Ciaran, and how are you finding your own mentoring work?
Demetri: I met Ciaran through “The Access Project”. He didn’t pressure me, but he was bare encouraging me to sign up. Even the first convo we had, it was interesting. And in the interview, he didn’t ask me no interview questions. It was just bare chatting. So from then I thought, ‘This guy’s different.’ He wasn’t pretending, he was genuine. In a good mentoring relationship there’s no hierarchy. So he doesn’t pretend that he knows everything and that I have to listen to him. He could say something and I could be like, “but…” and he lets you explain things. 

Being a mentor myself helps me understand Ciaran more. Sometimes I’ll be talking to youngers, and they have new slang that I don’t know! And they’ll come at a question from a mad angle that I’ve never thought of before. I’m like, ‘Rah! You man are 12.’ It’s nuts.

Jhemar: Having a mentor was crucial. I get very bored very easily. It's easy for me to be a nuisance. Having a mentor enabled me to use the energy I would’ve had to be a nuisance in more positive ways. Where I’m from, it’s very easy to fall into what the rest are doing around you, because that’s what you’re used to seeing. You get desensitised to the violence. It would’ve been very easy for me to pick up a knife. A lot of young people don’t understand the value of life because they don’t feel like their life means what it should mean, if that makes sense? Life is there, but there’s not really much hope for that life because there’s no guidance. Mentorship plays a massive role when it comes to guidance.

One thing I really enjoy about being a mentor myself, and something I’ve realised about my relationship with Ciaran, is you’re the tool which helps that young person find out more about the power that they have. That’s one of the biggest elements of it. If a kid doesn’t understand the power they have, how can they use it to impact their society or their environment in a positive way?

Ciaran, how did you make sure the stories of the book’s young heroes were told ethically and respectfully? Were they involved in the process of writing the book?
Ciaran: I wrote the book with them. All three young men were paid a wage to write it with me. They were paid for their time, but then they're also earning for the rest of their lives from earnings from the book. I wrote the book, but every single word about each of them was pretty much directed by them. There's not one sentence written in there about them that they haven't refined, okayed or contributed to. The success of the book had to be a shared thing. There was no way I was ever going to write the book without that. And it all starts with those human relationships.

Jhemar, Demetri – why did you feel it was important for your stories to be told in the book?
Demetri: I’m a man of few words, so making sure I got all the details out and learning to elaborate was a learning curve for me. But I feel like it’s good to see a positive Black hood story, innit. ‘Cause you know them ones where it’s always, “This is how I made it out the hood.” Fam, not every Black youth in the hood makes it out. Some man are still here, just doing good stuff, do you get it?

Jhemar: Ciaran was the one who made it sound like my story was important. I didn’t really think my story was that important at all, to be honest. Before, I was very desensitised to a lot of the stuff I was experiencing. I’m thinking my story is just another day in the ends, innit. Ciaran broke it down to me and made me realise that my story is very powerful. That’s what engaged me to be part of the book. Me being involved in the book let me relive my story and reflect on it again. I feel like that’s one of the most important bits. I’d argue I’m a living testimony to what can happen when you use your experiences in a way that lets you learn from them.

@RKazandjian

Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City by Ciaran Thapar is published by Penguin Books and available to buy now.