Victim or Villain?
I had a harrowing insight into how some of the kids get involved in the gang culture recently. I started ghost-writing the memoirs of one of the ‘Lost Boys of South Sudan’ for a client who saw my details on Google. His story is only one example, but it shows how badly we treat young refugees in society.
We bring refugees and asylum seekers to this country, and then we dump them in sink estates or into care homes where they are prey to all manner of bad influences, gang culture, drugs, and knife crime.
A well-meaning missionary brought him here to the UK but got into bad company early on. The social services and care system failed him completely, and he ended up on the well-trodden route to the brotherhood of the drug gangs.
Following are excerpts of parts of his narrative as I have written it. His English writing skills are poor. Under the current government immigration system, he is lucky to still be here in the UK now because of his criminal convictions, but who knows now what the future will bring him? It is not his real name; we’ll call him Boy here.
“Boy was born in South Sudan but doesn’t even know his real birth date. His memories of his parents and family are distant. The memories that hurt are since that time.
Boy is not even claiming to be a nice guy; he wants to recite his story because he seeks redemption for his own sins. If you had his past, you might do the same. All those who clamor for kicking out the likes of Boy from the United Kingdom, or indeed whatever sanctuary they have arrived at, would do well to read his narrative, for they may form a different opinion. Of course, there are the hard-hearted who can’t change their viewpoint, but those are the ones who would finance the bombs and bullets that rain down on those poor and innocent children of the world.”
“Boy ran wild in England after escaping from the violence of the Janjaweed. He wriggled and used the system to fight his deportation back to the war zone. Boy was not a nice boy once he was brought to the UK, he took part in knife crime and he was sent to prison. To get out of prison, he claimed he had been sexually abused by the very missionary that got him away from the refugee camp in Kenya, and then Karma brought the demons back onto him. Was it the Janjaweed who followed him to the UK and tormented him for biting the hand of mercy? It might well have been for they tortured him until he was sectioned in an English Mental Hospital for six years fighting paranoid schizophrenia as the demons returned.”
“his plea for repentance, his plea for mercy from those nightmares, and most of all, his plea for forgiveness from the missionary. The missionary who died from cancer with charges of sexual abuse of a minor hanging over him! That is Boy’s legacy and the one those demons come for in the night. If you believe in Karma and the power of God to change bad people then pray for Boy he needs your prayers and he is trying to repay society now.”
“If Boy could repay the family of the missionary that he made false accusations against, he would, but he knows in his heart that he must repent many more sins before he will be free of those demons, the devils on horseback that appear in his nightmares, that come for him and leave the bloodstains and screams. Or the shopkeepers he helped rob with violence, will they forgive him yet? He knows that he has much more to do, and rightly so, many would say, but who would judge him when they saw what he saw before his teens?”
Memories and Dreams
His memories are thus:
“Those Arab bastards rode down the railway lines on horseback through northern Barakzal. Mostly riding white horses, I can remember their white clothes, traditional dish-dash or Djellaba, carrying the ever-present AK-47, the instrument of death invented by that Russian armorer Kalashnikov. The original description of their clothes, the garment the people of the Djellab wore, has been called ‘the slave traders’ sums these vile people up. These monsters would come and take women and children to sell as slaves in North Sudan.
These Arabs were not a real army but a militia paid by the North Sudan government to make trouble in the South amongst the Christian minority tribes like us Dinka. Those riders came as Mujahideen from neighboring countries like Chad, Ethiopia, and the Upper Nile region in the beginning. Later Janjaweed riders were from Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, paid by the North Sudan Government and with money from other sympathetic middle easterners, filtered through even Western allies in Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf states.”
“My Father and mother were in Juba, the main town nearby, with my two brothers and two sisters, and my other brother and I were in the village when the raids started. We got warnings of their coming and rushed to hide in the bush, just scattered here and there. When my brother went missing after one raid, my father came back to search for him. Then during another raid, my father and brother were killed. Returning villagers passed on that grisly news.
As I came out of hiding, I would also meet other survivors. I remember finding a young girl whose parent’s bodies were rotting nearby, and I just took her hand and walked her back to the village. Others would do the same; it was our tradition to help those left behind.
In my tribe and in many areas of Africa, when the father dies, it is customary that an Uncle would take on his woman and family. After my father died, my uncle took me on. He was a bad man and made my mother work in the markets selling many goods while he would just get drunk on the local brew called Ariga, made from the maize that grew nearby. He was violent to my mother, and she also drank more of the brew. My uncle would beat all of us as he became increasingly violent. My whole life was becoming more brutalized by my uncle at home and by the ever-present risks from the to’s and fro’s of the war.”
Escape
On his escape across the country, sleeping rough and heading for the Kenya border:
“I began to team up with other boys; there were ex-soldiers and local gangs. I learned more ways to survive by thieving and burgling. I must have been aged about 13 or 14 when I jumped on a truck heading to Nairobi and lived rough in the same manner that I had now become accustomed to. The Kenyan CID arrested me a few times and returned me to the camp.
My life continued in much the same manner until a Red Cross Lady named Anna took me in and tried to help. So many good people tried to assist me, but I was running wild by then. I must have shown some goodness for them to take pity on me. There was also a former commander who took me in. This was my life until I was accepted as a refugee to come to the UK.”
“I couldn’t settle there; I was too used to the freedom of being a wild boy, I had turned feral. I stopped going to school and went out during the daytime drinking. The family in Birmingham couldn’t handle me so eventually, the missionary came there and took me on to Warrington and put me up with another friendly family. I kept on playing truant or got detentions continuously on the occasions that I was at school. I was getting into more and more trouble, and the missionary was not pleased.”
“In England, I was helped and taken in by a Missionary to Warrington, where they tried to make me go to school, but I refused to go. Social Services took over, and I was sent to Manchester. That was where my bad side grew as I got into drugs with a Jamaican guy and became part of a gang. I was still young but already part of the UK gang culture, I got involved in drugs, knife crime, and another life, but it turned out to be as bad as I’d escaped from. The gang robbed a Canadian with a knife, I was caught and sent to a Young Offenders prison, and from then on, it was more prison and mental institution for many years.”
“The Social Services recommended that I go to Manchester because it was more multi-cultural, but all I did was get in with more bad people like me.
When I got to Manchester, I was aged between fourteen and fifteen and in a care home. It was crazy there because the local gangs gave us drugs and slowly recruited us. After a while, they had me selling class ‘A’ drugs to other young kids and learned how to take part in many robberies. We robbed a shop at knifepoint, and the police caught only me. I was well-known to them by then. That case went to court, but I was found not guilty for lack of evidence.
I started off as a foot soldier selling crack and heroin for one of the older boys in the gang called Gucch. They would send me out on a bike to different streets, where I was told to meet the customers. I was so busy; the phone would ring every five minutes but return when it rained. There was a leader called Colonel, and because I had just come on the scene, I had to prove myself as trustworthy. He ordered me to go and rob a Pakistani shop at midday, and it got bloody, we stabbed the shopkeeper in the stomach, and he staggered out onto the street.
In the confusion, I had removed my mask, and I think someone recognized me. We returned and started drinking with the prize money, about a hundred pounds, and a load of cigarettes. Then in the morning, the C.I.D. came and arrested me and took me to Wilmington Police Station, where they tried to get me to grass on the other boy, but in the end, I was bailed. The gang still didn’t trust me because I was new and was having arguments with the older boy who recruited me. I was eventually let go for lack of evidence for that one.
By then, I was involved in street robbery daily and getting into fights with the children’s care home staff. I kept getting arrested and just didn’t care, I thought I was untouchable. I went to court again, and the Judge gave me a probation order. The probation officers put me on a concerned list and reported that I would kill or be killed before I was eighteen years. The gang kept using me, though and exploiting me, threatening me and telling me that I owed them interest and had to keep on robbing people. Then, I got arrested for robbing a Canadian student at Knifepoint.
The Judge remanded me in custody, refusing bail because the police said I was too dangerous and would almost certainly re-offend. From prison, they gave me a case worker who returned to the care home and asked questions. I was getting distressed in prison and made up a story to get out. The caseworker asked me about the missionary and if he was abusing me, so I agreed, and they began investigating my story.
The lady case worker who took down my story sent a report to the Judge when I came up for sentencing, and my false accusations worked because the Judge gave me two years’ probation. That started further investigations, and the press got involved, then my story was in all the Manchester newspapers. The softer sentence didn’t change my ways, and I went back to gang life, selling hashish and robbing people and other gang dealers. Then the gang’s elders and rival gang members were getting shot and murdered on the streets, and it brought on a paranoia, so much so that I was getting flashbacks from Sudan. I had to get away and change my way of life and moved to London.
I ended up at a hostel in Shepherd’s Bush and did my best to stay out of trouble. I was between seventeen and eighteen by then, and it was 1998/1999. Going straight didn’t last long because I got back on drugs and got into a fight with another tenant at the hostel. They threw me out on the street at 02.00 am, and I was suddenly homeless. I broke into a nearby private apartment block and slept in the laundry, using the quilts and bed sheets to keep warm. In the morning, the security came and chucked me out on the streets again. I was on another downward spiral and saw the number for the homeless hotline, and they found me a hotel in Queensway for the weekend. I called Westminster Council and asked if they could house me anywhere, but no luck as far as they were concerned I was from Manchester and should go back there.
I then took to sleeping on buses. I would just keep getting on buses until the terminus, then get on another one. After a while, I ended up at Piccadilly Circus, the ‘Dilly’ where so many other hapless individuals have hung out over the years. That was when the paranoia came over me.
I suddenly heard voices in Swahili telling me they would kill me and my family and cut out my stomach. South Sudan memories were flooding back. I was down at Piccadilly Underground, and many voices came; there was Bob Marley singing with loud guitar noise “Songs of Freedom.” There were other things happening all around me, I grabbed a metal bar and waved it around all the time, hearing the voices saying they would get me and kill me. An underground worker came and calmed me down, telling me there was nobody there and I got out and went to a pub, but they followed me.
I told everybody in the pub that they were going to kill me and cut out my stomach, and the police came and took me around to the A & E at the hospital, but I was so scared that I curled up and barricaded myself in a room at the A & E. A nurse tried to calm me down again, but I wouldn’t open the door. After a while, the police came, but I wouldn’t believe who they were, I thought they were the mafia coming to kill me. They sectioned me under the Mental Health Act, and I was taken to St. Anne’s Mental Hospital.
I spent many years under the care of the hospital. When I was due for release on license, the Home Office wrote to me stating that my Refugee status would be revoked on the basis that I had been convicted of a serious offense and constituted a danger to society in accordance with their bullshit act, etc. So much blah blah about the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 S72 and paragraph 339AC of the immigration rules. How would I know what that was? I had been under the influence of either people or drugs since I was under the age of 10 years.
The Home Office invited me to explain why my refugee status should not be revoked. This was in 2016, and I had to get lawyers involved. On the 1st of February 2017, the Home Office revoked my refugee status on the basis I described in the paragraph before. I appealed, and they went back through all my history, and the time that I had been sentenced to time in Chase Farm Hospital under section had also shown up on my records. The psychological assessment at my appeal found that I had been suffering from a chronic psychotic illness, which was confirmed by my testing.
The mental status tests found that I definitely suffered from paranoid schizophrenia along with a pervasive developmental disorder and an Intellectual Disability, and my I.Q. was found to be in the lowest 1.5% of adults in my age group. The tests also showed that I had an obsessive concern for my safety, along with psychosis, paranoia, etc. The report highlighted that it was quite clear that whilst medicated, I had no difficulties with substance misuse or associating with anti-social associates, apparently my two biggest risk factors. I was deemed to not be a serious risk to anyone in the UK and more of a risk to myself.
The full report found that my experiences and trauma as a child in South Sudan provided sufficient stress to trigger psychotic symptoms in anyone who had survived such a life of running from tormentors, being forced to participate in murder, and to being raped by a trusted abuser.
