From wayward son to study aid
| By Stephen Dowling BBC News Magazine |
The rise of Britain's youth gang culture is a problem that has been keeping many criminologists and academics busy.
Few, however, have the same relationship with the issue as Suzella Palmer. Much of the research she has carried out into her PhD on black youth crime has come from the experiences of her 16-year-old son Zane, and is bolstered by her own life.
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Zane has been excluded from secondary school and been stopped by the police - to feel safe on London streets he hung out with the local gang. Just last month he was intimidated by a group of youngsters who wanted to stab him. It's a pattern which could have easily led him to becoming another statistic amid Britain's sometimes violent youth culture.
Ms Palmer, in her late 30s, is a lecturer at Bedfordshire University. She is one of a handful of black female criminologists in the country. As a teenager, she too was involved in crime.
When Zane has a problem, Ms Palmer says, their relationship is more like that of a subject and a researcher than a mother and a son.
But, she says, that has turned out to be a positive thing. She has become more interested in the company he keeps - and that may have helped him make some decisions about who he hangs out with.
"I actually prefer not having that emotional attachment. We have a perfectly normal mother and son relationship, but when it turns to what's happening on the streets, that relationship changes," says Ms Palmer.
Seeking revenge
"Rather than say to him outright 'they're bad company', as an academic I understand some of the reasons why people hang round in gangs. I think it does work, he is able to talk to me."
|  As a student I was reading the work of different researchers and criminologists... I don't think they quite understood."  Suzella Palmer |
Zane has had some near scrapes. When he lived in London, he says he felt too scared to go to other areas - he would only go to internet cafes or Sainsbury's. Even going to college was a problem. Joining a gang was the only way to assure some degree of safety on the streets.
On New Year's Day Ms Palmer received a phone call at 4.30 in the morning from Zane. He told her he was safe, but that he had been threatened with a knife and had run away. Angry and humiliated, he was talking about getting revenge.
"It was good he was able to phone me after someone had tried to stab him. His ego and his pride were hurt, and I can understand he thought that might be a risk again. He almost felt that he had to stand up to and not be victimised.
"As a parent my instant reaction is 'don't retaliate, don't be stupid', but you can't react like that. We have to be in the moment.
"He felt comfortable enough to say 'I want to retaliate'. But he knew we would have that conversation were I would say 'if you do retaliate, what are the consequences?' He was able to be rational."
She says the experience has taught her that young people need to have an authority figure they can talk to without being judged - the opinions of their peers are only likely to encourage them to do something rash. "It's about their friends living this as well."
Life transformation
Ms Palmer's own life story shows she is not approaching the reasons for youth crime with the detached air of an academic.
 Forensics examine a crime scene near the estate where Suzella Palmer grew up |
She was raised on a housing estate in north-west London, but left school at 14 after her parents had died. She had no qualifications, and fell into petty crime, which then started turning into more serious offences such as assaulting a police officer and carrying a knife.
She had Zane at the age of 22 and has a daughter now aged 12. She started her degree in 1999, after finding herself in a damp one-bedroom flat in London with an abusive partner, and Zane ill with asthma. Ms Palmer packed up and moved to Luton after being accepted for a criminology course, and graduated with a first class degree and the highest marks in her year.
"I've got a unique insight," she says. "That's one of the reasons I decided to do criminology, coming from the environment I come from, and coming from crime myself. As a student I was reading the work of different researchers and criminologists writing about something I don't think they quite understood."
The risks are different compared with when she grew up, she says, and parents and guardians need to understand that.
If Zane gets into trouble with a gang, "it's not that he could end up with a beating. He could end up dead or kill someone".
Too much research, she says, was from "basing theories on assumptions" and race was playing a big part of it. "There was this misrepresentation, this assumption of what black people were like and were not like."
She says: "I'm not sure I've got all the answers, but I've found a way of working with my son that is helping us."
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