Gangs have long been affiliated with drug use and drug dealing and vice versa. Street gangs are the leading distributors of illicit drugs in the U.S. How do they get so powerful? By recruiting teens.
Teenagers have a need to belong. If they feel left out at school, at home, in life, they can often turn to gangs in order to have a sense of belonging. Someone up top, some violent repeat offender, uses innocent teenagers, turns them into errand runners who take the risks, take the chances and end up behind bars themselves while the top guy stays in the shadows, reaps the profits and continues to recruit other teens and sell drugs, often to innocent children.
The sad truth is teens join gangs like other children join the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and FFA. They want to feel needed and nurtured, they want to identify with something that accepts them for themselves. They see the gang they have joined as family.
Most gang members are using drugs and alcohol as well as selling them. If your teen has acquired new friends, seems to be changing in ways that signal drug use, perhaps even have acquired some things that you did not pay for.
Unfortunately, the very reasons teens join gangs could end up being risk factors in the long run. They join together to feel needed, yet they are seen as the troublemakers they are in regards to soliciting drugs, violence and street graffiti, so they increase these tendencies, making matters even worse for themselves.
A good way to keep your child from joining a gang is to stay involved. As a legal assistant in the juvenile division in California at one time, this writer made a promise to stay involved with her children and not let them be raised by a system. Switching to a job in a youth recreation center, I was able to earn money for my family and be a part of my kids’ after school program as well. I did not send them off to soccer, I coached their soccer teams. I did not send them off to sleepovers, I encouraged them to have the sleepovers at our house.
Getting support at home does not mean you have to come from a two parent home where Mom gets to stay home. It just has to be an environment where the child feels loved and accepted for who he or she is, encouraged to follow his or her dreams, and dinner time? It needs to a shared experience, not dinner on the run in separate rooms. Stopping gang affiliations and drug use truly does begin at home. Have a family night, have game night, have a clue. Your kids need you just as much when they are teens as they did as toddlers.