ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 29, 1996 TAG: 9601290085
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN KOREM
FOR THE first time in U.S. history, kids from affluent homes are forming their own deadly gangs in suburbs and upscale communities in growing numbers. This same terrifying trend is presenting itself across Europe, from England to Switzerland to Hungary.
In the late 1980s, I watched gangs unnervingly form in my own Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas, as well as in countless other prosperous communities across the United States. Many people assumed that urban gangs were expanding, but the facts were that most affluent youths were forming their own gangs without inner-city gang influence.
As a father, this prompted frank discussions with my own three kids. My response as an independent investigative journalist was to find out who these new gangs were and how to stop them from forming.
In 1992, we experienced the first drive-by shooting at our local high school, where 93 percent of the students go on to college. That same year, national surveys revealed that almost 20 percent of nonurban youths considered gangs in their neighborhoods to be a significant threat to their welfare.
Just a couple of months ago, after one of my son's football games, two suburban kids associated with gangs drew guns, pointing them at each other's head. The incident occurred not in a dark, blighted neighborhood but in front of a local pizza parlor.
Today, it is common for 50 to 250 gang members to reside in the average middle- or upper-middle-class community. In the suburbs of Dallas, for example, Farmers Branch and Plano each have 150 gang members, while Richardson has 100.
Gang-related homicides have occurred in such diverse affluent communities as Appleton, Wis., and Arlington, Texas. According to juvenile officers, the number of affluent gangs is growing, with no end in sight.
So who are these kids?
Virtually every youth I interviewed in 11 countries over the past eight years came from a home with one of the following: divorce, separation, physical or sexual abuse or a severely dysfunctional parent, such as one who is an alcoholic.
Ruptured or broken homes often act as a magnifying glass on kids' rebellion, colliding with their anguish, loneliness, frustration and fear. That these moneyed youths go to the best schools and live in sleepy communities resistant to other kinds of crime doesn't seem to be a deterrent. Their profile doesn't excuse their crimes, but what they do is statistically predictable.
In the mid-1980s, I predicted that gangs would appear in affluent communities because the number of kids in deteriorating homes from upscale neighborhoods was skyrocketing. By the late 1980s, the number reached a critical mass, and these youths found one another. Bang. Now you have gangs. Not simply kids with a nervy subculture edge, but those who commit crimes.
Numerous affluent gang types and variants have appeared. Some, like the Down for Life gang in Minneapolis, specialize in burglary and engage in shoot-outs. Others, like skinhead gangs, attach themselves to extremist ideologies.
In my book on suburban gangs, I predicted that leftist-anarchist gangs similar to those in Europe would surface. Now they are here. What are leftist gangs? They are like the flip side of skinhead gangs. In Salt Lake City, kids from up to $1 million homes joined the Straight-Edged gang, broke into furniture stores, shredded leather couches - protesting the use of animal hides - and took to the streets with clubs and chains to do combat with other gangs.
Because affluent youth gangs are an international trend, they inspire one another across the Atlantic through conduits like the music subculture and the Internet.
In a 1993 lecture to Swiss police, I explained that gangs were likely to appear in Switzerland, even though it doesn't have rundown urban communities. The country's divorce rate was rising, and specific types of raw-edged graffiti had begun to appear. When I returned in 1995, gangs were a perceived trend.
So what can be done about affluent gangs?
As a lay volunteer working through a local Dallas church, I and others initiated a strategy that resulted in what is believed to be an unprecedented success story.
Over a period of six years, we worked with more than 400 acutely at-risk youths from a neighborhood loaded with gangs. During those six years, not one youth joined a gang, even though a third of the kids had seen shootings and stabbings.
What did we do?
We neutralized the ``missing-protector factor'' in each of their lives. Simply stated, the missing protector factor is when a youth is faced with a crisis and doesn't have an adult to call upon for help.
The missing-protector factor was first identified by Dr. Maria Kopp, a noted Hungarian sociologist, and, when layered on top of a shattered home, is the one key factor that dramatically increases a youth's vulnerability to gang recruitment.
To neutralize the missing-protector factor, we gave at-risk youths who weren't in gangs our personal phone numbers, and we committed ourselves to be there for them, night or day, if they called.
The only qualifications of a protector are: 1) To be able to relate to a youth, 2) to live close to a youth and see him or her at least once a month and 3) to maintain weekly phone contact. Protectors don't need to have the ability to solve all of a youth's problems. Parents can't do that. Protectors just need to be there and try to help.
No other prevention strategy has this track record in the United States or Europe.
Affluent gangs will be with us long into the next century. The choice is taking pre-emptive action now or engaging a new uncontrolled form of terrorism in the future - the very near future.
Dan Korem, author of ``Suburban Gangs - The Affluent Rebels,'' wrote this for the Dallas Morning News.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
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