Recreational gang warfare is a daily part of growing up for a lot of kids here.
Fascinating. I often took the bus through that area last year. Did you run into a lot of that when you were younger? How much pressure is there for kids who don't want to get into it?
I never lived in any areas where that kind of ritualised gang violence took place. From what I remember, it was more one-on-one violence in the places I grew up in, where kids would pick fights with each other and the seriousness of the violence was proportional to the age of the participants. The first place I lived was a fairly rough old industrial town south of Glasgow which had really vile people in it, but I never saw any organised gang violence there. I got kneed in the balls and punched in the stomach by older boys for no reason while I was growing up there, was challenged to a fight which I narrowly avoided and saw some 16 year old boy get whacked on the head with a bottle during a fight at school, but that was about it. There could have been more that I wasn't aware of, since I never walked around there at night, and after I moved to a nearby village at the age of 8, I was only in the town during the day to attend secondary school.
