Could you have been lured into gangland crime as teenager/child?

Lyan

Doctor Nick wrote: »

Personal anecdotes are proof it is not as black and white as you say it is. There is lot more to it.

I'm not going to deny that it is a complicated issue. But a person who spends their life as an active criminal is not a victum of circumstance.

Raconteuse

Lyan wrote: »

I'm not going to deny that it is a complicated issue. But a person who spends their life as an active criminal is not a victum of circumstance.

Not a victim certainly, but shaped by their environment to a degree. A neglected child is of course more susceptible to criminality.

markc1184

Aint Eazy Being Cheezy wrote: »

Easily. I’m from Drogheda, minutes walk away from where young Keane lived. It’s always been a rough area. I turned to sport, and later, education to get out of it. I still go to Mountjoy a few times a year to visit friends who weren’t so lucky.

Pretty much the same as this. I'm from the same general area. Could have followed the 'lads' and gone in a different direction but ultimately chose my own path.

harr

No I am from a very small village and the nearest I got to drug dealers was trying a bit of hash at a school disco and I didn’t like it , after that it was sneaking a few pints. A few lads in secondary school were rough enough but that was down to family circumstances and they had to look after themselves from an early age but most turned out fairly ok . A friend of mine locally is a Dub and from a fairly rough part of tallaght as soon as he got married and started to have kids he moved down to the sticks.. he had friends who got into heroin and had some pass away from overdoses.
So he was adamant he wasn’t bringing kids up in that environment.

My parents were strict enough in my teen years and always had to know where and who I was with . I had plenty of freedom to do as I wished once I stuck to my parents set of rules. Glad now I had them looking out for me.

Lyan

Raconteuse wrote: »

Not a victim certainly, but shaped by their environment to a degree. A neglected child is of course more susceptible to criminality.

It's easy to make the correlation if you ignore that the awful parents may just be spawning innately awful people. I mean this area still needs a ton of research done but various twin studies all report strong genetic-criminality correlations between twins, even with adopted twins who grew up in different environments.



https://law.jrank.org/pages/784/Crime-Causation-Biological-Theories-Genetic-epidemiological-studies.html

Raconteuse

Yeah I don't believe it's entirely nurture at all. But I do believe environment can determine how far a person will take their awfulness. Like if they grow up with no boundaries, values, consequences, their capacity for showing their true colours is surely increased?

Lyan

Perhaps. The threat of punishment certainly appears to be the best negation of criminal behaviour.

MakingMovies2

iamwhoiam wrote: »

We reared three kids , we put time effort and energy into them . We drove them to clubs and sports and activities , we took them to parks and up thr mountains on a weekend . We sat with them and talked to them about everything . We went without so they had what they needed
We showed by example that to work hard is satisfying , we encouraged friends to come here and gave them space .
So call me smug or superior if you like but Yeh my kids wouldn’t dream of getting into crime because they are actually brilliant . And call me anything you like when I say “ yeh I did well “
Proper parenting is the absolute key to preventing a child being bad

This whole post reeks of a flex post you'd see on mumsnet.

maninasia

Wanderer78 wrote: »

Again, criminality is highly complex, the needs of those involved were probably never met, as they were growing up

I'm sure they didn't think about the victims of their crimes for a second.

iamwhoiam

MakingMovies2 wrote: »

This whole post reeks of a flex post you'd see on mumsnet.

It was in reply to this post and not just a random " I am brilliant " Post .But think what you like ., I am still of the opinion that parenting is the key to keeping kids out of crime and its damn hard work /




Originally Posted by the beer revolu View Post
There's a very unsavoury tone to some posts here. A real sense of superiority and smugness.
Essentially saying that they didn't and wouldn't have gotten into crime because they are so fcuking brilliant

sasta le

Or the flip side the wannabes.The type that could have become a major gangster because they knew a guy at 15 in school

iamwhoiam

iamwhoiam wrote: »

We reared three kids , we put time effort and energy into them . We drove them to clubs and sports and activities , we took them to parks and up thr mountains on a weekend . We sat with them and talked to them about everything . We went without so they had what they needed
We showed by example that to work hard is satisfying , we encouraged friends to come here and gave them space .
So call me smug or superior if you like but Yeh my kids wouldn’t dream of getting into crime because they are actually brilliant . And call me anything you like when I say “ yeh I did well “
Proper parenting is the absolute key to preventing a child being bad

Well do you know something. I think smugness is allowed. If you haven't been in these situations and experienced the sheer force and pull of life on the wild side, and all that goes with it then you know nothing of blowing one's own trumpet for being able to walk away from a life like this.

Motivator

People don’t want to admit it but anyone who gets roped into this kind of life has had it bred into them. Nearly all lads who I’ve known in my life that ended up going down the wrong path were failed by their parents either totally or in some way shape or form.

I can remember some lads from school who came from terrible environments but were determined to pull themselves out of it by going to school despite being given no support from home. One particular chap had older brothers that used to go to school so when he started it was a red flag for the teachers so to speak. He couldn’t have been more different from his brothers or the rest of his family, the school quickly realized it and helped him as much as possible. He used to be given cigarettes going to school so he could sell them to pay for his lunch each day. It was awful. To be fair to the school they looked after him. He did his junior cert and was on course to get his leaving but he dropped out halfway through 5th year. The environment he grew up in became too much and he eventually fell victim to it.

His parents were scum, his brothers were scum and it was all he knew growing up. He had a terrible name but was a genuinely nice fella in school. He ended up doing time for robbery etc when he palled around with his older brothers gang.

Raconteuse

I think plenty of people are in agreement that it's bred into them.

iamwhoiam wrote: »

We reared three kids , we put time effort and energy into them . We drove them to clubs and sports and activities , we took them to parks and up thr mountains on a weekend . We sat with them and talked to them about everything . We went without so they had what they needed
We showed by example that to work hard is satisfying , we encouraged friends to come here and gave them space .
So call me smug or superior if you like but Yeh my kids wouldn’t dream of getting into crime because they are actually brilliant . And call me anything you like when I say “ yeh I did well “
Proper parenting is the absolute key to preventing a child being bad

I'd say there are parents who do their best and their children still end up influenced by gangs though. That kind of environment makes it much tougher.

MissD93

I went to a very quiet rural secondary school where the majority of my friends and other students lived in the country side , and there was very little chance if any of anyone turning to criminal activity at all. However what I've seen in the last few years is there was a major downside to this as a lot of very intelligent people I know who you would regard as coming from "good" families were quite naive when they went to college and at that point because they're no longer living at home it would take longer for parents to notice. I've heard an array of stories that range from girls ending up in terrible situations to lads who went to trinity who ending up owing a ridiculous amount of money and had to work of his debt doing drop offs and the like.

maninasia

MakingMovies2 wrote: »

This whole post reeks of a flex post you'd see on mumsnet.

You don't like it but it's very likely the truth.

maninasia

the beer revolu wrote: »

There's a very unsavoury tone to some posts here. A real sense of superiority and smugness.
Essentially saying that they didn't and wouldn't have gotten into crime because they are so fcuking brilliant.

Your post reeks of trying to tell others what to think because their tone doesn't agree with your tone.

Don't tell others what to think or say.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

A friend of mine is from a rough part of Galway city. When he was 12 or 13, he briefly delivered packages between houses in his estate that he thinks probably contained drugs. I don’t know how he was roped in or who put a stop to it. I would never have guessed he would ever have got messed up in something like that if he hadn’t told me. He is such a kind, gentle guy. His own conscience may well have been what stopped him. Well, whatever stopped him, thank god. He knuckled down, did well in school, went to college and is very successful.

Irishphotodesk

Haven't kept in touch with primary school classmates, but one guy was allegedly a leader in the IRA before he was shot and killed, another guy in same primary school class was on charges of murder/attempted murder (he was allegedly caught standing over a guy while holding a shotgun, not sure if the guy was injured or dead).

So... Could I have been influenced into gangs as a teen.... No.... Once friends were involved in criminality I drifted away from them, some of my friends - I have recently discovered went into drug dealing and have been successful enough to get shot.... They are still alive and earning thousands per day (rumour) but live very much day to day looking over their shoulder.

I was however accused of injuring a minor (following taekwondo lessons - it was alleged that I practiced some moves on a kid younger than me - I have zero recollection of this, but I didn't hang around with my taekwondo friends or goto lessons after this (it wasn't something that was reported to gardai, other kids parents told mine what their child said I did) ... I kept my head down and enjoyed my schoolwork, went to college got qualified ... Then spent the last 20+years working in a different field.

It was a different time when I grew up, drugs were available but not to the extent they are now, some criminals know more about law than some gardai and the law restricts gardai from actually catching lawbreakers.

spurious

BeerWolf wrote: »

"Want the latest iPhone? Carry this over to that place!"

Not exactly hard to persuade a child with something. More so on poorer families that can't afford, with a high desire for materialism that they couldn't get otherwise.

The law seriously needs to be harsh and come down hard on people that exploit children.

There has always been temptation to get nice things easily.
The difference is, in some homes, you go home with your fancy iPhone and serious questions are asked about how you paid for it, in others, nobody even notices, or else they get you to get them one.

I taught a great number of lads who ended up involved in crime and many of them are dead now. Almost all started on the petty end of things and escalated over the years. Not all the family would have been involved, but nobody questioned the two week holidays in Florida including a cruise at Christmas in a household with no income apart from social welfare payments. The extended families might not be directly involved, but they all benefit.

Many of them had absent or ineffectual parents, or a history of crime and imprisonment in the family, but that said, the couple of sociopaths that I taught showed their true nature early on and at least one of them came from what appeared to be a very normal and supportive family.

I think for general 'low level' criminality, it's a parenting fail, but for some extreme sorts, they are damaged in some way and would have been like that regardless of home.

branie2

Thankfully I wasn't

mariaalice

Interesting discussion on this morning on Newstalk about this subject, a contributor who works in the area believes that we have a very traumatised society cause by the number of children who were in industrial schools and it has reverberated down the generations a bit like theories about how the famine traumatised Irish society, seem a bit unlikely but who knows.

The crime reporter opinion its becoming a parallel business, but a business non the less.

Bobblehats

Montage of Feck wrote: »

Designer track suits don't appeal to me, pure scuzy looking. Maybe if a more style conscious gang along.

Wish I looked regular enough to pull them off but I don’t, too odd a head for that stuff must’ve bn the only mosher in the group back in drimnagh mid nineties failed to get with the trend

But then most of them went on to be headbangers of the more modern variety. And envious of skangers and their merle grey tracksuits is a new low for me..

fattymuatty

Probably not. I grew up in the middle of nowhere. When I left home at 17 and moved to a city I was :eek: at some of the carry on. I remember this lovely girl threatening to put my head through a window when I said I didn't have fag to give her, I was so confused at what was happening, I had never come across something even vaguely like that before. I was totally sheltered and had no experience of scumbags at all. My dh grew up on a rough council estate in Galway and even now there are big differences between what we both see as normal behaviour going by what we grew up with. I would have wet myself at some of the things he describes like they were perfectly normal(and this wasn't gang level stuff) so I don't think that the gang life would have been for me.

Somedaythefire

Nah, I was too sheltered and too much of a scaredy cat for that.

Diceicle

Possible but very unlikely.
Grew up in a rough area but moved away early. A distant part of the family tree would be connected to that type of life but we don't have much contact with them. One of that side spent a good few years away after he got lifted. He got out a good while ago but has since been murdered.

Diceicle

mariaalice wrote: »

Interesting discussion on this morning on Newstalk about this subject, a contributor who works in the area believes that we have a very traumatised society cause by the number of children who were in industrial schools and it has reverberated down the generations a bit like theories about how the famine traumatised Irish society, seem a bit unlikely but who knows.

The crime reporter opinion its becoming a parallel business, but a business non the less.

I've had that theory for a while too. Not that I have any qualifications to back it up. What show was that on?
It makes sense though - hurt people, hurt people, as they say.
The pain from the industrial schools / Christian Brothers etc has built a generation who turned to alcohol and drugs to dull their pain. They become alcoholics or junkies and are bad parents with chaotic lives. This is the chaos the kids are raised in and those kids become alcos or junkies as a result.

Edgware

Lyan wrote: »

Perhaps. The threat of punishment certainly appears to be the best negation of criminal behaviour.

You could have ended up as Leo's dealer.

Raconteuse

Diceicle wrote: »

I've had that theory for a while too. Not that I have any qualifications to back it up. What show was that on?
It makes sense though - hurt people, hurt people, as they say.
The pain from the industrial schools / Christian Brothers etc has built a generation who turned to alcohol and drugs to dull their pain. They become alcoholics or junkies and are bad parents with chaotic lives. This is the chaos the kids are raised in and those kids become alcos or junkies as a result.

Yep, makes perfect sense indeed that young adult heroin addicts of the 70s/80s could have been survivors of institutionalised abuse.