Know who your teen is hanging out with.ģ. Psychology Today offers a helpful list to guide parents and concerned friends who want to help a teen get out of a gang.ġ. But when you get locked up your homies aren’t really there for you.” Recently I asked a 17 year-old girl I am working with why she joined a gang and this is what she said “It felt like my family when my dad’s side of my family wasn’t accepting me. To be successful gang prevention needs to look first at what gangs are providing and then find alternative ways to meet these needs. If a teen is feeling unsafe in their home our neighborhood or have been bullied at school, the idea of a group that has their back no matter what happens becomes appealing. If a teen feels an inability to achieve economic or social success in a conventional way, a gang offers a structure to meet these needs through criminal activity. For example, if a family is broken and not meeting a teens needs for love and acceptance a gang can offer a sort of makeshift family. If you look at Maslow’s Hierchy of Needs as a model for what a person needs to survive then you start to see a teen’s perception of what a gang could offer. Human behavior is often aimed at meeting needs and the decision to join gangs is no different - kids join gangs to meet their needs. I feel like a lot of kids in the world don’t understand how much they could lose by being in a gang, until it is too late.”Īs a case manager at Youth Services, I work with a lot of kids who identify themselves as associated with gangs at many different levels. I lost my dad and brother to gang involvement (shot and killed). I tell this story because I want people to know everything I lost because of gangs. So I stuck the gun out the window and pulled the trigger three or four times and we drove off. He took me to a rival gangs members house and gave me a gun. One of my homies who had gotten a little too drunk said he didn’t think I was “down” and didn’t know why he was letting me drink with him. “That night we had a party and all got drunk. I did not have to get jumped in because my dad was the leader of my gang, but I still had to prove loyalty. The day I got the initiation into the gangs was a day I will never forget. Not long after though it went from hanging around my sisters to “putting in work” with my older home boys. All I wanted was to be around my sisters so I figured if I hung out with people they hung out with I could be around them. “It all started when my sisters stopped coming around me. I never killed anyone but I caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. I had to do a lot of things that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I was willing to do whatever it took no matter what. I feel like the whole reason I became a gang member was because I wanted to be a part of something and feel like I fit in. “I was nine years old when all my gang activity started. This is a story written by a 15 year old Youth Services participant: