Inside Aboriginal gangs: research may improve success of interventions
- EFN Staff | August 12, 2015
They spotted him while he was out with his wife at a Regina mall, five men from a rival gang who start making trouble, chasing him outside and down a back alley. Steps ahead of his pursuers, he ducks into a car.
“So what did he do?” asks Robert (Bobby) Henry, a researcher working to tell the stories of men in Saskatchewan’s Aboriginal gangs.
“I know what I would do; I’d be in the vehicle and I’d be gone,” Henry says. “They had knives; there’s five of them – I’m outta there. Not him. His reputation was on the line.”
Instead, the man grabbed a knife from the car, tied a leather jacket around his arm and turned to meet his pursuers. When it was over, the five attackers were on the ground and he, despite two stab wounds, was still standing – along with his reputation as one of the toughest knife fighters in the city.
Henry has spent the past four and half years working to gain insights about men in Aboriginal gangs – their culture, their behaviour, how they came to be in their situations, and how they got out. He hopes the knowledge can inform interventions to help Aboriginal youth leave gang life or avoid it altogether.
Henry worked closely with STR8-UP, an organization created and run by former gang members to help others get out of gangs.
Although Henry is Métis, from Prince Albert, he said his was very much a middle-class upbringing and it took time to prove himself both to the organization and to the men associated with it. At first, no one would open up to him, having had experience with researchers in the past that would ask their questions, poke into their lives, and vanish.
Henry took a different approach, based on a model of “relational accountability” and a photo voice research method. The men would get cameras and be asked to capture images that mattered to them, images that said something about their lives. The photos, and the stories that went with them, would go into a high-quality, printed book.
The proposal intrigued his prospective research subjects; it would make their stories, real, tangible, something they could own and share. Still, they were suspicious.
He explained to them that while he didn’t receive any material gains at the beginning, over time he would benefit from their stories and the knowledge they shared.
“They asked me, ‘so what are you getting out of all this?’” Henry says. “I told them, ‘I get to listen to your stories which will help me to get my Ph.D.’”
Now gathered into a book titled “Brighter Days Ahead,” the images and stories offer a glimpse of a world rarely seen or understood by outsiders.
It is a world of “hypermasculinity” – unrelenting violence, harsh codes of behaviour and punishment, but also of honour. Men spoke of the psychological toll of never showing weakness, of “putting on the face” to look dangerous, to look mean. Let that mask slip and you become prey.
Henry shares the words of a former gang member: “You hear the brothers at night, some of them, you hear them crying in the cells, and when you do, you hear a lot of people saying, ‘Who’s that crying? Who’s that little girl?’ You know, that crying stops. That’s what I mean by putting on the mask to wear, to belong, to be accepted.”
Gang life starts early, Henry explained during his successful defense of his PhD dissertation. Former members spoke to him of abusive home lives and indoctrination into violence from the time they entered school – one took a photo of his former schoolyard to illustrate.
“Here’s where a lot of this started for (gang members),” Henry says. “Not at eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, but at four and five where they were learning how to fight on the school ground because they were getting bullied. So they started to fight back, and that’s how they started to build their reputation.”
Success is possible in the gangs, Henry says, but it is success with limits unfamiliar to most people. A gang member might have tens of thousands of dollars from the drug trade or other criminal activity, but no easy way to spend it. One doesn’t walk onto a car lot with $50,000 in cash to buy a brand new vehicle, or buy a house and make mortgage payments with stacks of cash but no bank account or visible job.
“You’ll see these guys driving a cheap older car that they bought with cash, then they trick it out with thousands of dollars of accessories,” Henry says.
In some ways, men behave with honour and responsibility that would not be unfamiliar in broader society. Henry recounts how one gang member created his own $300,000 insurance policy for his wife and child. Facing a jail term of several years, he directed his wife to caches of money in secure locations around the city, set aside to tide them over while he was away.
It is an impulse that perhaps shows one possible road out of gangs: the desire to be thought of as a man, one worthy of respect.
“Prevention and intervention programs must focus on masculinity as a causal factor,” Henry says. “We have to understand masculinity is one of the main things motivating them. The performance that (gang members) are doing, it’s a specialized, localized performance but it’s something that we need to redevelop for community, or that communities must develop for themselves.”