148 11 GANGS AND CHILD SAFETY Catherine ward 1 Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town Adam Cooper Extra-Mural Educaion Project and the Department of Educaion Policy Studies, University of Stellenbosch ABSTRACT Children involved in gangs are both more likely to injure others and to fall vicim to violence. Prevenion aims to prevent them from gang involvement in the irst place, or to disengage them from the gang if they are involved. Suppression intervenions seek to suppress gang acivity and thereby, to prevent violence and injury. Early prevenion is cheaper and easier than disengagement or suppression operaions, since the later are far more labour intensive. Successful intervenion programmes operate in more than one domain – for instance, prevenion programmes may teach children social skills and help parents with parening skills, while disengagement programmes may help young people with recreaional opportuniies and employment, and work collaboraively with the community. Successful disengagement programmes always include opportuniies for employment, since one key driver of gang involvement is economic gain. Suppression programmes that focus only on suppression run the risk of inciing the gangs to lash back with violence. Therefore, these should always be accompanied by other intervenions that provide opportuniies for employment (and other aciviies, such as pro-social recreaion). Intervenions that combine prevenion, disengagement and suppression are only successful insofar as they successfully achieve inter-agency co- operaion. Although many intervenions have been implemented in high-income countries, a number of them focus exclusively on boys and few of the implemented intervenions in low-to-middle income countries have been thoroughly evaluated. All novel programmes, or adaptaions of programmes (for instance, to include girls), should be evaluated. keywords: gangs, prevenion, suppression, disengagement INTRODUCTION In the case of gang-related injuries, child safety has to do with prevening intenional injuries, oten commited by other children. North American literature suggests that young people who idenify themselves as gang members are more likely to commit violent acts and more likely to become vicims of violence, than those who do not (Huf, 1998). The primary prevenion of gang-related injuries, therefore, has to do with prevening children from joining gangs. Secondary prevenion has to do with helping children who are already in gangs to separate from them, while teriary prevenion seeks to suppress gang violence. Gangs range from informal groups of young people who “hang out” on street corners (Pinnock, 1980), who might commit minor acts of delinquency together, and who might be drawn into illicit aciviies by other groups while others incorporate young people into a more formal structure that is run by adults and may even have links to organised crime 1 To whom correspondence should be addressed: Catherine Ward, Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa. Email: catherine.ward@uct.ac.za