Prison, death or redemption. These were the three options laid out in front of 21-year-old Graeme Armstrong when he reached a pivotal moment in his life. On Christmas Day in 2012 he had reached a point of no return. “I just wasn’t coping,” he says. “I was using drugs to self-medicate and I was traumatised from friends killing people, committing suicide, or dying from overdoses.” That day something overcame Armstrong and he prayed. “Finding faith was a catalyst for change in my life,” he says.
Growing up in Airdrie, a town about 12 miles east of Glasgow, Armstrong had been lured by the violent life of street gangs, known in Scotland as young teams, and by 16 he had 15 criminal charges under his belt. “I’ve never been more dangerous than when I was 14,” he says in Street Gangs, a new BBC documentary series that is available on iPlayer and is being shown on BBC Scotland.
Following Armstrong’s move away from criminality, he earned a master’s degree and turned his experiences of violence, drugs, death and life on the streets into bestselling, award-winning 2020 novel The Young Team. In Street Gangs – where each episode is focused on Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee – Armstrong uses his own story as a mirror for what is now going on in Scotland: a spike in violent young teams. “It’s definitely a concern,” he says. “Not just for me but for many members of the community, teachers and community leaders. We’re seeing scenes that we’ve not encountered for a long time.”
Kids as young as 14 are in the streets masked in balaclavas, sometimes carrying large knives, drinking, taking drugs and brawling – with the results frequently shared on social media. A new generation of teen gangs are also soaking up “new cultural influences such as gang symbols that we would normally associate with places like LA,” says Armstrong. “That’s feeding into difficulties already in place in Scotland: social deprivation, poverty, cost of living – it’s crisis after crisis.”
Armstrong also does extensive outreach, community and mentorship work in schools across Scotland and so has seen these changes first-hand. Some gang names that have been dormant for years are being reactivated, he says, with freshly spray painted graffiti marking the reinstated territory of young teams. “In Scotland people say gang violence is a thing of the past and that we solved it,” Armstrong says. “That’s not true. You don’t solve gang violence, you manage it. Years ago, there was a huge explosion and we were part of that – the 2005 peak of violence, with Glasgow being the murder capital of Europe. We were totally engulfed in gang violence. And then it did decline – the figures support that – but from 2014 we’ve seen a steady rising arc and the only thing that stopped that was Covid.”
Lockdown may have caused a break in gang activity but it may also have played a part in the post-Covid surge. Many kids went into lockdown as children and came out as teenagers filled with pent-up energy, frustration, lack of social interaction with peers, and a rush of hormones. “Some of these kids were catapulted straight into third year at high school,” Armstrong says. “Which is the year things really start to manifest; more serious violence, more substance abuse. Soon it’s the last chance teachers have got to engage kids, because they can leave at 16.”
The series also looks at the role of social media, musical influences such as drill, and lack of family stability, which are all issues cited within street gangs. However, the boom in young teams is not something that is easily or neatly categorisable, as Armstrong found. “I don’t think any one person or organisation can get all the answers,” he says. “It’s cyclical. These things fall and rise, but unfortunately it feels like we’re in an ascendancy at the moment.”
To hit home the strong lineage of street gangs in Scotland, Armstrong meets up with the 63-year-old award-winning actor Peter Mullan – who was in a street gang and wrote and directed the 2010 film Neds based on his experiences. “What attracts anyone to a gang is that sense of belonging,” says Mullan, who joined one after being snubbed by another friend from the posh end of town. “It’s everything. It’s like family.” He admits that it was perhaps the reputation of his older brother that allowed him such easy access. “I was in the gang but I was a tourist, a wanker,” he says with a deep gruff laugh. “I could talk a good game.”
To truly appreciate the pull of gangs, Armstrong thinks it’s important to understand the role of young teams in Scottish history. “When I go into schools, one of the first things I do is a potted social history of gangs,” he says. “Because the names that these guys created decades ago, before even my mum was born, are still active now. It has a real heritage in Scotland and you dismiss that at your peril. The fashion changes and uniforms change but the reality is there’s still a really tough social life in Scotland with deprivation and lack of opportunity. Scotland is fertile soil for gangs and it always has been.”
The lack of opportunity and hope is a focus and recurring theme in the series. “There’s a lot of misery out there for these kids,” says Armstrong. “Their trajectory for life is not very hopeful. I’d be asking young lads, who want to be rappers, about what’s next and nothing was really coming. The hopelessness is palpable.”
During one touching scene, Armstrong returns to visit his high school teacher, who had faith in him when few others didn’t. “I’d been expelled from my school before and here I was a kid full of attitude and he could see through that,” he recalls. “He had a superpower. He could see potential that was hidden. That’s something I keep close to me when I’m speaking to young people in schools.”
As a result, despite often tapping into an inescapable feeling of “palpable hopelessness” while visiting various schemes, Armstrong is not without hope himself. “We’ve got talent in abundance in these communities,” he says. “It’s just about how do we take talent and ambition and roadmap it so these young people can actually access it. Success isn’t always a metric that we can measure but continual effort and consistency for people in the community … that does change lives.”
Street Gangs is on BBC iPlayer now
