‘On the frontline’: gangs, teachers, and the ethics of care

Abstract

Knife crime in the UK is on the increase, prompting an emphasis in education policy on the role of secondary schools in addressing gang violence. Very little is known, however, about how teachers in secondary schools experience this new role. This article helps to fill this gap in the literature by foregrounding teachers’ perspectives on gang violence in an East London secondary school. It analyses their teaching practices through an ‘ethics of care’ lens, understanding ‘care’ as an inherently relational practice based on mutuality and trust. The article shows how these qualities are being subverted by individualised approaches to care in education, which reproduce rather than challenge the violent care offered by gangs. It argues that the political dimensions of care must be reclaimed if efforts by schools to address gang violence are to be effective.

Keywords:

• Gangs
• youth
• violence
• education
• care

Introduction

In the UK, maintained schools have a statutory duty to support the wellbeing of their students and to promote community cohesion. Studies have shown how this responsibility has become more visible since the introduction of economic ‘austerity’ policies in 2010, which have been linked to increasingly complex social problems among young people in the context of growing inequality, stress, and deprivation (Bragg et al. 2015; Hanley, Winter, and Burrell 2020; Thompson 2020; Cowie 2022; Purdy 2022). These social problems include knife crime, which has significantly increased across the UK, and particularly in London (ONS 2024). ‘County line’ gangs have capitalised on gaps in open-access youth provision to recruit an increasing number of vulnerable children to traffic drugs from cities into smaller towns and rural areas (McLean, Robinson, and Densley 2019; Densley, Deuchar, and Harding 2020; Windle, Moyle, and Coomber 2020).¹ These gangs claim particular areas according to postcode, with knife possession being seen as a legitimate and necessary response to the threat of violence in the case of incursions (‘slipping’) across postcode boundaries (Silvestri et al. 2009; Riggs and Palasinski 2011; Adekunle 2016; Harding 2020; Soye 2024b).

In 2015, the British school inspectorate Ofsted published guidance for schools on addressing gang violence; secondary schools are seen to have ‘a duty and a responsibility to protect their pupils’ (Ofsted 2015, 4). Yet we know very little about how secondary schools – and the teachers in them – manage these duties and responsibilities, with the small number of studies on this issue being limited to primary schools (Waddell and Jones 2018) and school-based interventions (O’Connor and Waddell 2015). Sharkey et al. (2011) highlight a similar lack of research and theory on gang and school systems in the US. This article responds to this gap in the literature by presenting the findings of empirical research in a boys’ secondary school in East London. It uses an ‘ethics of care’ theory to explore the processes through which teachers at the East London school address gang violence. The article introduces the ethics of care theory below. It briefly gives an account of the research methodology before presenting and discussing the research findings.

An ethics of care

Fisher and Tronto (1990, 40) define ‘caring’ as an ‘activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’. They suggest that care is complex and multi-dimensional, involving four phases: caring about, i.e. noticing the need to care (‘attentiveness’); caring for, i.e. assuming responsibility for care (‘responsibility’); care giving, i.e. the actual work of providing care (‘competence’); and, finally, care receiving, i.e. the care receiver’s reaction to the caring process (‘responsiveness’). These phases are not distinct but integral and holistic. Care ethicists understand the caring relation as intrinsic to personhood and as ‘ethically (morally) basic’ (Noddings 2012, 771). According to Lawson (2007, 3), care ethics ‘begin with a social ontology of connection: foregrounding social relationships of mutuality and trust (rather than dependence)’. While ethically basic, care is also inherently political – Tronto (1993, 4) argues that ‘all moral theories have a context that determines the conditions for their relevance’ (also see Fisher and Tronto 1990; Staeheli and Brown 2003; Popke 2006). Feminist arguments for a political understanding of care depart from conventional liberal theory, which relegates questions of care to the private sphere, and places issues of justice in the public realm, separating ‘politics from morality’ and ‘public from private’ (Tronto 1993, 13). An ethics of care challenges this separation by considering ‘the ways that actions and relationships in the private sphere constitute political subjects’ (Staeheli and Brown 2003, 773). Tronto (1993, 3) emphasises that ‘all moral arguments are made in a political context’.

Ethical and moral questions of care are central to the teaching relation. In Noddings’ view, the primary role of education is to nurture the caring relation as an ethical ideal (1984, 1988, 1999, 2012). According to Noddings (1988, 222), teachers ‘model caring when they steadfastly encourage responsible self-affirmation in their students. Such teachers are, of course, concerned with their students’ academic achievement, but more importantly, they are interested in the development of full moral persons’. Noddings adds that the caring relation in education is not a ‘zero-sum game’ (1988, 222); instead, teachers can ‘use teaching moments as caring occasions’ (1988, 223). Similarly, Rogers (1969, 279) posits that ‘the “best” of education would produce a person similar to the one produced by the “best” of therapy’. Like Fisher and Tronto (1990), Noddings (2012, 773) points to the importance of attentiveness, suggesting that the teacher as carer ‘is first of all attentive, and watches and listens’. In order to take caring seriously as a relational practice, teachers must distinguish ‘between assumed needs and expressed needs’ (Noddings 2012, 773). For Noddings (2012, 776), ‘Caring also implies competence’; competent teachers ‘should be able to draw on literature, history, politics, religion, philosophy, and the arts in ways that enrich their daily teaching and offer multiple possibilities for students to make connections with the great existential questions as well as questions of current social life’ (Noddings 1999, 215 in Noddings 2012, 776). Yet caring in education is not only a matter of competence but also of capacity, or ‘the degree to which teachers can act on the basis of their competence’ (Häggström, Borsch, and Skovdal 2020, 2). Indeed, the contingency of the caring relation on educational structures, relationships, and resources means that ‘we must ask about the settings in which it can effectively take place’ (Noddings 1988, 224).

An ethics of care is relational (morally basic), political, and attentive rather than prescriptive. Within education, the caring relation can assist in moral development by confirming the personhood of both student and teacher. The article will use this understanding to analyse the research findings through an ethics of care lens.

Methodology

The research on which this article is based was conducted as part of a large EU-funded project. The project evaluated the effectiveness of social support programmes for refugee wellbeing in schools in six European countries, including England. Two schools in England participated in the project – an ethnically diverse boys’ secondary school in East London, and a mixed secondary school in Brighton & Hove where the majority of students were White British. As part of the project evaluation, I conducted pre-intervention focus groups with young people and teachers to explore the contextual factors influencing young people’s wellbeing in each school. These focus groups were supplemented by semi-structured interviews with young people, teachers, parents, and community workers in each setting. During focus groups and interviews in East London, young people, teachers, parents, and community workers reported concerns about the impact of gang violence on young people’s wellbeing (Soye 2024b). This article centres on the perspectives of six teachers, drawing on a pre-intervention focus group with four teachers (Ana, Hamza, Kate, and Sharon) and semi-structured interviews with four teachers (Ana, Hamza, Rohan, and Hassan); Ana and Hamza participated in both the focus group and individual interviews. All six had been teaching for more than eight years. All, apart from Sharon (a teaching assistant), were heads of year, form tutors, or members of the school’s pastoral team. These roles gave them deep insight into the social lives and backgrounds of their students. All were well-acquainted with the local context, having either grown up in the borough or another part of London, or lived in London for at least 30 years. The focus group and interviews lasted 45 minutes on average.

In recent years, media reporting has fuelled public concern at the rise in knife crime in the UK (Deuchar and Martin 2015; Grimshaw and Ford 2018). In contrast to sensationalist media reporting, gang violence was said to be a ‘taboo’ topic among the school leadership, and teachers who spoke to me about it regularly sought assurances of anonymity. Although they were keen to share their own experiences of addressing gang violence – this was something they cared deeply about and which they felt was a genuine threat to their students’ (as well as their own) wellbeing – they were concerned that sharing these perspectives might jeopardise their careers. Given the sensitive nature of the topic, it was important for me to establish a relational research ethic rooted in value, respect, reflexivity, and reciprocity. According to Pittaway, Bartolomei, and Hugman (2010, 234), ‘the principle of reciprocity suggests that the risks and costs associated with participation in research can be offset by the delivery of direct, tangible benefits to those who participate. To achieve this, researchers need to return to the community something of real value, in forms determined by participants themselves’. I listened carefully, mindful of how the institutional environment as well as my own positionality would influence what, when, and how much the teachers would be willing to share with me. It became clear that for them, the ‘real value’ of this research was to (anonymously) amplify their concerns about the impact of gang violence – and measures being taken to address it – on student and teacher wellbeing. I used pseudonyms to anonymise the names of people and places in the research. I have not included individual job titles so that teachers are not identifiable. Information sheets and consent forms were provided to all participants, and ethical approval was granted by the University of Sussex.

I followed a thematic coding approach to manually analyse the research findings. Braun and Clarke (2006) describe ‘thematic’ analysis as a highly iterative process that involves reading and re-reading data, coding, generating initial themes, and review. I returned to the data many times to consolidate the themes before collating the findings, which are organised around Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) four ‘phases’ of care: caring about (attentiveness), caring for (responsibility), care giving (competence) and care receiving (responsiveness). Like Häggström, Borsch, and Skovdal (2020, 2), I understand these phases not as distinct but as overlapping and interdependent. The next section presents the research findings.

Findings

This section reports the experiences of teachers in addressing gang violence, following Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) emphasis on the processual and phased nature of ‘care’. It shows how teachers at the East London school witnessed gang violence on an everyday basis. In this context they were forced to take on responsibilities far removed from their traditional roles, leading to stress and burnout. They reported a lack of resources to address gang violence in the classroom, ultimately pointing to the transformative potential of education for gang-involved youth.

Attentiveness

Being attentive firstly means noticing what is happening around you. Teachers at the East London school had a detailed knowledge of their students’ family backgrounds. Rohan, for example, said that many parents of students at the school had multiple jobs and worked long hours. He described how, in the absence of open-access youth provision, gangs would take advantage of vulnerable young people outside school:

So it’s…the concept is they have no parental control as soon as they leave us, and maybe their parents get back at six or seven. So they’ve got like a three-hour gap of where they’re chilling in the park, chilling in the road. And they have that…older boys have the opportunity with the boys. And they just get them in that way, say buy them trainers, buy them a top…

Rohan added that, in his view, gang involvement was ‘all about belonging’. Another teacher, Ana, also spoke of the sense of belonging that gangs offered vulnerable students:

It’s definitely a sense of community, and they’re like family, basically. They prey on vulnerable kids, so they’ll groom them very easily. There was a horrible case of a kid who was neglected at home and would be like, scavenging, basically, for food in bins around [large shopping centre in the borough]. And the gangs were kind of watching and they’re like, ‘Oh look, we’ve got you this pair of trainers’, and like, ‘Come into McDonald’s and we’ll buy you a meal and stuff’. And so it’s like if they’re- if that’s the only person who’s kind of offering you that…sanctuary, well, immediately, that’s something desirable.

Studies confirm that community risk factors for gang involvement include material inequality, relative deprivation, and lack of social and economic opportunities (Harding 2020; Grimshaw and Ford 2018; Soye 2024b). Hassan emphasised that gang membership was not contingent on ethnicity or ‘race’: ‘You can join a gang, it doesn’t matter what colour skin you are [laughs ironically] …it’s about postcodes’. Here Hassan actively challenges racialised depictions of youth violence in the UK media (Wessendorf 2014; Gunter 2017; Akala 2018; Nijjar 2018). Hamza observed that children of an increasingly young age were now being drawn into gangs:

I’ve been here six years now, and I’ve seen in the last three or four years how it’s getting, you know, worse. At first you think, you know, sixteen, seventeen- seventeen is the peak offending age. And now we have kids who are in Year Nine, 14 years old, on the fringes or actively getting involved. And some of our boys, they tend to be very heavily involved where they don’t hide it.

One such student was Hussein, who had previously been stabbed on the streets of East London. Teachers suggested that he had turned to gang membership for protection. Hussein wore a flashy ring and had been found with three phones, including a Nokia ‘brick’ phone² and lots of condoms – ‘Not for sexual use, but to put drugs in’, said Hamza, drawing on visual cues and personal knowledge to determine Hussein’s status as a gang member (Carson and Esbensen 2019). Ana remarked, ‘The way that the kids are around him, it’s quite obvious that, like, he is clearly fairly high up [in a gang] and there’s definitely stuff going on. And like…he associates with a lot of other kids who are definitely involved with really terrible kind of crime things’. While perceptions of gang membership are subjective (Carson and Esbensen 2019), Ana’s observation is consistent with studies which find that the onset of gang membership is associated with a substantial change in emotions, attitudes, and social controls conducive to delinquency (Melde and Esbensen 2011).

While students like Hussein appeared to actively ‘perform’ their identities as gang members (Harding 2020, 39), Hamza commented that ‘there are some who hide it in school. They won’t show that they are involved, but when they go outside…you know, because I live in a local area, I know. I know. I see some of them quite a bit. I know the areas they hang out in’. As Carson and Esbensen (2019, 5) note, ‘gangs and gang members may be hesitant to advertise their affiliation while at school’; more broadly, ‘adolescents have a penchant for significant interactions with peers outside of adults’ eyesight’ (Brown and Klute 2003, 344). Hamza’s embeddedness in the local context gave him an unusually cleareyed view of his students’ activities outside school – a view which, he observed, parents often lacked:

I had a kid who, for three years we’d been saying, you know, ‘He’s behaving like this, he’s showing signs of this’, and his mum didn’t believe it, until recently she said, ‘You know what, he’s doing it at home now. Can we get social workers, can we put a tab on him, can we do this?’ – and we’re like, ‘We’ve been saying this for four years’, and it just doesn’t hit home until you see it yourself. That’s the problem.

Harding (2020, 36) contends that the social field of the gang ‘constitutes a landscape where adults [including teachers] are not in control; they neither understand it nor inhabit it. Consequently, they are unable to keep their children safe from harms they neither recognise nor identify with. Often they are just absent’. In contrast, Hamza and other teachers are acutely aware of the ‘harms’ of gang violence, and indeed spend much of their time convincing young people’s parents of the same. Bearing witness to gang violence on an everyday basis, they cannot simply look away.

Responsibility

The East London school took responsibility for addressing gang violence in several ways, with teachers bearing the weight of this burden. The school had a number of policies in place to provide a ‘neutral’ territory in the context of local gang violence (Sharkey et al. 2011, 51). The school had a ‘no-coloured jackets’ policy. Hassan explained,

That’s got to do with the gang thing. So, you know, obviously in America they have the Bloods and the Crips and the red and the blue. And over here, certain gangs have certain colours. And so just so that kids don’t look like they’re affiliated to certain gangs, it’s discouraged to wear bright colours.

Home time at the East London school was staggered so that students from different schools in the borough (potentially living in rival postcodes) were not leaving school at the same time. Teachers were placed as monitors at the school gates. Hamza described how he had recently intervened in a fight between two students who were linked to rival gangs:

You know, there was an incident…a child in my year group a few weeks ago. He’s involved in gangs. He had an issue with another boy in the school whose brother is in a rival gang. They had a bit of a fight. We tried to stop him. We restrained him. I personally restrained him, kept him in a room for approximately three hours, where two and a half of those hours he was trying to storm out. And then the police came. Even while the police were here – CID [Criminal Investigation Department], undercover gangs unit – even once they were here, he was still trying to storm out the room because of how strongly he felt about this boy who’s in a rival gang. And that was three hours where literally I was absolutely, you know, my body was killing because imagine having to restrain someone for two, two and a half hours.

Hamza’s story reveals the embodied impact on teachers of addressing gang violence at school (‘my body was killing’). During the focus group, teachers described themselves as ‘police officers’ and ‘security guards’:

Ana: [We’re] psychologists, parents, police officers, security-

Hamza: Social workers-

Kate: Yeah, security guard … It’s quite suffocating, I find. It’s like, you never feel like you can go home and think, right, we did that, that’s sorted.

Hamza: It’s an unforgiving job.

Here we see the psychosocial (‘suffocating’ and ‘unforgiving’) impact on teachers of dealing with gang violence at school. Hamza argued that these roles and responsibilities were far beyond the remit of the teaching role: ‘We’re teachers. We’re meant to teach. But at the same time, we’re social workers, we’re police officers…’. He emphasised that teachers were being forced to take on the responsibility of addressing gang violence without training or recognition in education policy:

It’s literally, we’re being told by the government to do all these things that, you know, we’re not trained for, we’re not paid for. And, you know, it’s not our job. But I see the government and the parents, kind of, you know, they take a bit of a backseat. And we’re put on the frontline along with the police… I would say that us, police, and social workers, we’re literally on the frontline fighting this battle where the government and the politicians and even a lot of the parents are literally hiding in the background. And it goes back to why so many teachers are unhappy in the profession as well, you know, overworked, underpaid, things like that. So it all ties in.

As Hanley, Winter, and Burrell (2020) suggest, in the context of economic austerity, changing roles and responsibilities (without training or recognition in education policy) can substantially impact teacher wellbeing, potentially contributing to high levels of burnout within the teaching profession (also see Kinman, Wray, and Strange 2011). Hamza reflected that ultimately, changing roles and responsibilities for teachers at the East London school were ‘to the detriment of the child. If we are distracted doing these things, then it affects how we teach’. As we will see, this has particular implications for young gang members who still cling to the hope of education.

Competence

Competence includes capacity and resources to enable dialogue. Teachers at the East London school felt it was important to talk to young people about gang violence. Sharon remarked,

When we had extended registration about stabbing, and we told the Year 7s, I said, ‘You know, I know two boys that are in prison for murder, who didn’t actually murder anyone, they were just there – be careful what you get wrapped up in, who your friends are, and all this’. And you know, they were absolutely shocked. It’s worth saying, isn’t it?

Sharkey et al. (2011, 51) observe that gangs meet the need for esteem through glamour and popularity. They contend that schools can in turn protect against gang membership through education on the reality and consequences of gang membership. However, teachers at the East London described a dramatic reduction in resources, funding, and impetus to do so:

Kate: The reality of it is, we came here with the gangs issue, and we cracked that gangs issue, and now it’s come back. We have none of the resources that we had when we were having to deal with it before. And also, I feel it’s been pushed under the carpet, so [to Hamza], you’re dealing with it at Key Stage 4, but we’re talking in Key Stage 3 about the glamorisation of it, with kids who are not yet involved in gangs, but we’re trying to crack out the glamorisation. You’re talking in your little corner, we’re talking in our little corner, but nobody’s talking about it officially, together. And that’s a real danger. It’s almost like, ‘Well, let’s pretend it’s not happening, because if we just talk about it in that corner and that corner, it’s not real’. And yes, it is real.

Ana: That’s kind of the problem, though, in a way, with PR, isn’t it, because the world’s gone a little bit kind of PR crazy, you have to worry about the image of the school, which is something that you shouldn’t really need to worry about. You should be worrying about the education of the students within it, but you have to worry about like, how is this message being, you know, put across? And if you’re going to do work on gangs, ‘Well why are you doing that, do you have a problem with gangs, or what is it that’s going on with this school that isn’t going on in other schools?’. I think that’s kind of a shame, that we have to be worried about how things are going to be perceived.

Hamza: Yeah, it’s like taboo, isn’t it?

Hamza echoed Kate’s emphasis on the reality of gang violence. He noted that while teachers couldn’t stop gang violence, they confronted it on an increasingly regular basis:

It’s literally at our doorstep and it’s, you know, things we can’t stop. The other day – this is all anonymous, isn’t it? – I would say probably three weeks ago, we found a knife outside school… We went out and saw it and literally it was, you know, this big knife just lying on the floor, right outside the school, so we had to wrap it in a black bag and try not to, you know, bring any attention towards it and then bring it into school. And then the police came and picked it up … it shows you how close to home the danger is and the seriousness of what we’re dealing with. And those are just some of the stories. There are many, many, many more. And it’s just literally getting worse every year.

Hamza felt that the education system had failed gang-involved youth, but still felt the weight of personal responsibility:

You know, I take my job very personally, very seriously. It does feel like, you know, we’re not doing a good enough job. And it’s not that I blame myself, but it still makes you feel unhappy. It’s like the system, isn’t it, so it’s not like my fault, but I still feel like I’m not doing a good job.

He added, ‘If the child is involved, we can’t do anything. The only thing we can do is educate them’, reiterating his earlier emphasis on the primary role of the teacher as to teach.

Responsiveness

Gang-involved youth at the East London school responded to education in different ways. In Hamza’s view, young people tended to lose an interest in education after becoming involved in gangs:

It’s a case of, literally, we’re playing- it’s between us and gangs. So the gangs are saying to them, ‘Why work hard, we’ll give you some money now’, and we’re trying to say to them, ‘Work ten years, work hard, and get a good career’. So it’s either quick money or ten years of hard work. Kids nowadays are only gonna choose one option, unfortunately. That’s the difficult part. I feel like we’re really fighting a losing battle at the moment.

During our interview, Ana talked about Jordan, one of her students: ‘He sits right in the front because he needs to be focused and stuff, and he has been involved with gangs for ages. But it’s so difficult, I think, for him to see any other route for his life to be successful, like to have the money, and the rest of it’. At the same time, however, Ana suggested that Hussein (the student introduced earlier) was a notable exception to the rule:

With Hussein, he is like this kind of like ‘bad boy’ and everything. But at the same time, like, I’ve never had a problem with him in my classes. You can see that drive and that motivation of like, ‘I want to do well’. And he…it’s interesting because he’s got a lot of friendships in that class of like, kind of not very nice friendships, like kind of naughty gang stuff. Um, but when I ask them to get into their own groups, Hussein will always team up with Kwame, the one from Uganda who wants to be a doctor. So Hussein will team up with him and another kid called Andriy, both of them like super studious, like very nerdy, like no cool factor at all [laughs]. But like they’ll always team up and they’ll always work together. So it’s interesting to see, like what kind of choices he makes. And I don’t know what percent the gang thing is more of an element of survival. And actually, when he’s given the kind of space within a class, where it’s like he’s safe, he chooses to go for the more, like, studious persona.

While other students were likely to be aware of Hussein’s status as gang member, Ana’s account points to the possibility of equal status in the classroom, where even the ‘bad boy’ will collaborate with the ‘very nerdy’ students. As Carson and Esbensen (2019, 18) find, while current and nonactive gang youth engage in ‘mutual delimitation’, ‘It seems that students are “going to get along” regardless of their gang status’. Ana’s emphasis on the classroom as a ‘safe’ space is important because it suggests that this quality is critical for Hussein to cultivate a ‘studious persona’. Sharkey et al. (2011, 51) posit that education that fosters belonging can protect against gang membership. Hanley, Winter, and Burrell (2020, 8) also find that teachers see ‘feeling safe’ as crucial to attainment in the context of austerity. Hussein’s situation challenges stereotypes by showing that gang members are still responsive to the ‘care’ offered by education. As will be discussed in the next section, education’s potential to act as an alternative to gangs offers an important source of hope for gang-involved youth; at the same time, it throws the fragmentation of the teaching role into sharper relief, exposing how much young people stand to lose when teachers can no longer ‘teach’.

Discussion: care in context

An ethics of care framework allows for a critical assessment of the particular care obligations assigned to teachers and the degree to which these obligations meet their own moral understandings and interpretations of ‘care’. Complex issues of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and ultimately, responsiveness, are central to this assessment. In the East London school, teachers’ understanding of gang violence is informed by their teaching experience, pastoral expertise, and knowledge of the local context. Their attentiveness to gang violence contributes to a deeply nuanced understanding that challenges racialised stereotypes in the media. In highlighting gangs as important sites of ‘community’, ‘belonging’, and ‘sanctuary’, teachers demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of the factors leading to gang membership that is consistent with the literature. For example, De Vito (2020, 766) finds that, in the absence of a secure attachment to primary caregivers, gangs provide an alternate source of ‘unity, love, affection, and attention’. Similarly, Ruble and Turner (2000, 128) argue that gangs should be viewed as ‘family systems who care for, protect, and support one another’. In contrast to a relational ethics, gangs offer violent forms of care, not premised on mutuality but by a highly structured hierarchy of leaders and followers, often involving intra-group conflict to maintain order and control (Harding 2020). As Stretesky and Pogrebin (2007) note, gangs influence identity development through violent norms.

Students who become gang members may lose interest in education (Esbensen et al. 2011; Pyrooz 2014). And yet gang membership is not a ‘done deal’; linear narratives of a ‘student’ to ‘gang member’ trajectory are too simple. Rather, we have seen that care in education continues to offer a fragile but hopeful alternative to the violent care of the gang. Ana, a teacher, demonstrates the value of care in her account of teaching Hussein, a likely gang member who maintains an interest in education in spite of expectations to the contrary. Ana takes an anti-essentialist approach, seeing Hussein’s involvement in gangs as about ‘survival’. In doing so, she recognises him as much more than a gang member; as Noddings (1984, 193) suggests, ‘When we attribute the best possible motive consonant with reality to the cared-for, we confirm him; that is, we reveal to him an attainable image of himself that is lovelier than that manifested in his present acts’. By cultivating a ‘safe’ space where Hussein can adopt a ‘studious persona’, Ana allows him to imagine an alternative future to gang involvement, thus ‘assisting in the construction of his ethical ideal’ (Noddings 1988, 223). In caring for him through education, she recognises that ‘what we reveal to a student about himself as an ethical and intellectual being has the power to nurture the ethical ideal or to destroy it’ (Noddings 1984, 193).

The stakes, then, are high. What is revealed to the student about him or herself as an ethical being when the teacher becomes ‘security guard’ and ‘police officer’? We have seen how individualised approaches to care violate the subjectivity of both teacher and student. The teacher’s body is weaponised, and the agency of the student is, in turn, denied – they become the object of brute force and control. Mutuality is stripped away. If relational care is ‘a fundamental feature of our being-human’ (Popke 2006, 507), care without relation dehumanises, reproducing rather than challenging the violent care offered by gangs. When the teaching role is depoliticised, trust between teachers and students, typified in Ana and Hussein’s relationship, moves to shaky ground. Parallels can be drawn with criticisms of the police, who in recent years have been described as a ‘quick-fix’ for community safety in an ‘increasingly punitive and authoritarian political climate’ (Joseph-Salisbury 2021, 578). Weapon-carrying among young people is consistent with a lack of trust in the police (Brennan 2019). Will education head the same way?

While teachers at the East London secondary school do accept the responsibility of speaking to young people about gang violence, they see themselves as ill-equipped to do so, echoing teachers in Waddell and Jones’ (2018) study on preventing gang violence in primary schools. The removal of resources to address gang violence through dialogue – a critical component of relational ‘care’ in education (Buber 1947) – is arguably symptomatic of a broader trend towards the ‘responsibilisation’ of teachers in neoliberal education policy (Done and Murphy 2018). While there is a discursive emphasis in education policy on the role of secondary schools in addressing gang violence (Ofsted 2015), there is a lack of resources to make this a reality through relational caring practices. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘a curriculum stripped of opportunities for dialogue is wholly insufficient for the education of character’ (Soye 2024a, 14). Teachers at the East London school experience nagging feelings of guilt and despair at being unable to ‘care’ for gang-involved youth as they would like to, despite recognising that the fault lies with the wider system. Häggström, Borsch, and Skovdal (2020, 7) similarly find that when the care needs of students ‘exceeded the teachers’ competences, resources and emotional availability, those teachers lacking appropriate support were left with feelings of guilt and powerlessness’. Emotions matter, because they tell us something about the effects of ‘care’ on the individual, and this is a key area for further research; while Noddings (2012) focuses on the feelings that motivate the carer to realise the caring relation, what emotions arise when the carer is unable to care as they would like to?

This article shows how teachers ‘care’ for gang-involved youth. Importantly, it amplifies teachers’ voices on an otherwise ‘taboo’ issue, thus fulfilling an ethical responsibility on behalf of the researcher to produce ‘politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995, 417). To paraphrase Hall (2019), the research raises significant questions about the role of ‘care’ in education, the labour required, and the (lack of) value attributed to the work of caring for gang-involved youth. It makes a timely contribution to our understanding of how teachers deal with gang violence in one specific context, creating a useful basis for future research. More comparative studies are needed to account for the influence of different contexts on processes of ‘care’ for gang-involved youth at school. Densley, Deuchar, and Harding (2020, 4) point out that while media attention on gang violence often focuses on London, ‘Violence is a national issue’. Future research should explore how teachers in secondary schools both in and outside London address gang violence. More studies are also needed in primary schools; as Waddell and Jones (2018) note, resources to address gang violence are often focused on secondary schools, yet early intervention is critical.

A key limitation of the article is that it reports the perspectives of a small number of teachers. There may have been selection bias – for instance, the teachers who took part in the pre-intervention focus group may have been pre-disposed to a relational ethics of ‘care’, indicated by their interest in sharing their views on student wellbeing. Not all teachers at the school are likely to have taken the same approach to care. Future research should gather the perspectives of a larger number of teachers in order to account for the influence of individual identities, attitudes, and behaviours. It should also hear from gang-involved youth about their experiences of ‘care’ at school; as Noddings (2005, 1) argues, ‘When we adopt the relational sense of caring, we cannot look only at the teacher’. An ethnographic approach would allow for a more thorough examination of care practices for gang-involved youth at school (Häggström, Borsch, and Skovdal 2020), avoiding a reliance on reported perspectives.

Conclusion: taking care seriously

Relational practices of care are essential to the human condition. In the classroom, these practices offer gang-involved youth a hopeful yet tenuous alternative to the violent ‘care’ of the gang. They point to the transformative power of education, and have implications for exclusionary policies such as expulsion, which may be counterproductive for gang-involved youth (Carson and Esbensen 2019). There are also implications for whether, and how, the caring dimensions of the teaching role are recognised in education policy, for example in performance indicators. Ultimately, however, ‘care’ in education must also be a question of politics; depoliticised approaches are not consistent with a relational ethics and reproduce, rather than challenge, violent norms. As Tronto (1993, xi) argues, to return to an ethos of care that is inherently relational is to ‘take caring seriously’. Care for gang-involved youth must be reclaimed as a social and political relation (Noddings 2005; Popke 2006). Schools and teachers cannot – and should not – address gang violence on their own; it is essential to mobilise entire communities in preventing youth violence (Peterson and Skiba 2001; Waddell and Jones 2018; Roberts 2019). Schools themselves must also be adequately resourced so that teachers have the capacity to engage young people in dialogue about gangs.

Ethics approval statement

Ethical approval for the research was granted by the Cross-Schools Research Ethics Committee at the University of Sussex.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the research participants for taking time to share their perspectives with me. Many thanks to Professor Linda Morrice for her helpful comments on the manuscript. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by Horizon 2020 (grant agreement ID 754849).

Notes

1 The term ‘county lines’ refers to the phone numbers, or deal lines, connected to this activity.

2 County line gangs use cheap, disposable, and old-fashioned phones to receive orders and contact young people to instruct them where to deliver drugs. These phones are changed frequently to avoid detection by the police (NSPCC 2023).