Summer Institute at Brock Univesity Explores Gang Exit for Youth

By Neil Armstrong

Photo contributed  Tamari Kitossa, associate professor in the sociology department at Brock University in Hamilton, Ontario

As politicians and police grapple with the rise of gun violence in Toronto, academics, educators and social workers among others will meet at Brock University in Hamilton, Ontario to focus on youth and gangs.

The Summer Institute for Peace in Civil Society will present “Beyond Gang Exit: Communities of practice, researchers and a case for a domestic peace dividend” on July 18 and 19.

Tamari Kitossa, associate professor in the sociology department at Brock University and lead organizer of the summer institute, says part of the reason the institute exists is to figure out ways of conflict resolution, identifying the sources of conflict, and to bring together different stakeholders into having this conversation.

“We keep saying that our youth are the future, so on and so forth, but they’re a number of reports that have come out quite recently in the last two weeks about the level of poverty in Canada and how this is having a detrimental impact for youth. And so we can’t separate the fact that we’re basically designing poverty by policy, and that one of the consequences is that young people are having to develop strategies of coping for themselves, and one of them is, in fact, youth gangs – that’s how kids are coping.”

He said there are programs and expectations that youth should exit gangs, “but there is a) inadequate incentives and supports for doing so and, b) a great deal of ignorance about the ways gangs provide supports for youth, though of course there are significant down sides: interpersonal violence and collateral injuries to others.

Kitossa says the institute wants to begin from thinking about “how do we model conflict resolution, how do we build conflict resolution capacities such that youth can begin to emulate the way that we solve problems.”

 “We’re throwing police at them, we’re throwing prisons at them and what we need to begin to think about is that police and prisons are not the solution to the problems.”

Professor Kitossa noted that people are doing things in various countries and across Canada to enhance peaceful measures in society.

However, he thinks they have not had spaces where they can have academics, practitioners, educators and social service deliverers in one space to begin to think about what conflict resolution looks like in the practice of social work and in schools, for example.

He said the institute is about creating a space where they can look at practices and theories of change, and then “figure out how we can have some sort of collaboration around research and around program development.”

This community engagement project comes out of another project that was held in November 2017. The focus of that one was prison abolition, conflict resolution and peace building.

The conversation was around how to institutionalize this and they figured that one of the best places to begin is with the youth.

Asked what he would say to Chief Mark Saunders and Premier Doug Ford about the current situation in Toronto, Kitossa said he would suggest to them that the first place to begin is to take a step back and look at “the context and the conditions in which the so-called youth gangs that we fear so terribly -- those conditions in which they’re being formed.”

“So, we’re looking at the symptom and treating it as a cause so I would suggest to them that they look very squarely at public policy and I would suggest to them that they look very squarely at policing practices.”

Kitossa said “virtually every five years there are “gang sweeps” in the city of Toronto and this has been happening for the last 30 years.

“When are we going to recognize that this is déjà vu? We keep doing the same thing and the police keep making these big announcements – oh we found guns, we found drugs, then how come they’ve been doing this every five years. So we need to bring civil society into the solution or the resolution of these problems because we know that the best way to deal with conflict is through informal mechanisms. This is not to say we don’t have formal mechanism, but the moment you put formal mechanisms in front of informal mechanisms that’s the moment when we lose the capacity to solve conflict before they manifest themselves into major problems.”

Photo contributed   Yafet Tewelde, program director, For Youth Initiative is one of the keynote speakers.

Kitossa said there are people currently working on truce-making between gangs but they are not heard from in the news media.

“Those are the people we need to talk to because we need to understand that we cannot do away with conflict among human being. In fact, conflict is productive, it’s good; it helps us to figure out where the moral boundaries are, where things are working, where they’re not working and when we need to do things differently. And that maybe sometimes the people that we have conflict with, we’re actually imposing on them ways of being that are actually harming them.”

He said civil society groups are engaged in conflict resolution but they are not being supported. He noted that they are the ones that are bearing the burden of ensuring that youth get appropriate services.

Yafet Tewelde will be presenting on the need for alternative justice mechanisms from government to address root causes of violence and criminality, particularly amongst youth and racially marginalized communities.

“I will be arguing that gang registry is useless and not a legitimate means to address criminality,” says Tewelde, program director, For Youth Initiative, whose keynote presentation is “Gang Registry and Black youth in Canada” on the second day of the institute.

Carl James, professor and Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University will give the keynote presentation entitled -- “‘Gang’”: Trope, trap and youth agency – on the first day.

[An edited version of this story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, July 12-18, 2018.]