It is 2008 and eight-year-old Sosa Henkoma is standing alone in the corridor of a council block in south London. He is frozen to the spot, every nerve in his body alert to the sound of the lift grinding its way up the floors towards him.
Inside the elevator is his stepmother. He can feel blood running down his neck from a deep cut on his skull made by the pointed heel of her shoe. In just a few moments, Henkoma will be alone with her in his father’s flat and he knows that, as soon as the door shuts behind them, a storm of violence will be upon him.
At the end of the corridor is a stairwell that leads down to the street. Henkoma only has a few seconds to decide what to do. He can stay and face what’s coming or he can run. The lift clangs to a stop and before the doors open Henkoma takes off, arms pumping, his sneakers slapping the concrete as he races towards the stairwell and skids down the stairs.
As he sprints away from his stepmother and through the streets of London, Henkoma has no way of knowing that he is running away from one life of violence straight towards another.
He will never spend a night in his family home again. Instead, he will shape-shift into a child soldier for violent drug gangs. He will be trafficked up and down the country, shot at, stabbed more than 11 times and comprehensively failed by every statutory service and safety net that should have protected him.
“As a very young child, I didn’t have my parents. I was looking for a family,” Henkoma says. “I was looking for protection and safety from people who didn’t know how to be parents, who were literally murderers, drug dealers and robbers. They made a lot of money off me as a kid because I was willing to do anything they asked. Apart from them, I was totally alone.”
Every day, Henkoma expected to die. Today he puts his survival down to many things: becoming a father, therapy, sheer luck. It’s also down to him finding purpose and redemption through the work he does now, helping other young people escape or avoid the same life that brutalised and traumatised him as a child.
Meeting Henkoma, 25, today, it is hard to square his childhood of violence and criminality with the calm, focused and friendly young man he has become.
By the time Henkoma arrived in the UK from Nigeria with his father and stepmother, he had already had a tough start in life: his mother left when he was only a baby and he’d been shuttled between his grandparents and a bleak and abusive boarding school.
“When I got off the plane in the UK, I thought I’d come to Hollywood because I thought all white people were famous,” he says. “It was like arriving in heaven. I was thinking wow, I got a mum and a dad. I’m just like a normal kid.”
At first, things went well. The family lived in Kent and Henkoma went to the local primary school. Then, after a few months, his stepmother, who had been kind to him in Nigeria, began to be physically and emotionally abusive.
Henkoma was bewildered by the shift. “I really wanted this woman to be my mum, but my dad was always at work and it was just the two of us together every day, and she hated me,” he says.
By the time they moved to south London some months later, the violence had escalated. “I was just so scared of her by this point,” says Henkoma. “The belts she was hitting me with turned into metal poles. I began to detach from reality – I just hid under the duvet in my bedroom for hours every day.”
He says his stepmother gave him a schooling in violence that proved useful to the gangs that would eventually control his life. “I got used to pain at a very young age. When I was with the gangs, I wasn’t scared of torture or whatever because for me it was normal. I learned it from my own family.”
After he fled from his stepmother, Henkoma was picked up by police and taken into care. His father refused to believe what his wife had done, even when she was charged and convicted of child cruelty for her assaults on Henkoma. She was sentenced to four years in absentia after fleeing the UK before her case was concluded. Henkoma hasn’t seen her since. “I loved my dad but I lost my trust that he was going to do anything to protect me,” he says.
He was placed in foster care with a Nigerian woman in south London. The woman’s 18-year-old nephew took a shine to him, buying him trainers and introducing him to his friends. Henkoma didn’t know he was a drug dealer. “I thought of him as a big brother, so when he went to prison it was another person who’d left me,” he says.
By the time he was 12, Henkoma was allowed to go to the park opposite his house to ride his bike. It was there that he was befriended by local teenagers who asked him to take packages to different addresses. He says he had no idea he was delivering drugs. “I’m like, fresh, this little kid from Nigeria. I just wanted them to like me.”
He now sees what an easy target he was. “They knew I was in care and didn’t have parents looking out for me. They must have smelled this desperation I had to be loved.” His foster carer had no idea what was going on. “I just told her I was playing with my friends,” he says.
He was soon introduced to the older men paying the kids in the park to sell drugs. They showered him with attention, bought him food and told him he was like their little brother. Within a few weeks, Henkoma was also doing jobs for them around the neighbourhood. Before long they asked him to come with them outside London.
The first time he agreed, he found himself in a drug house in Margate with a shotgun in his face. He’d been driven to a house and left alone to hand out drugs to an addict living there when men in balaclavas had stormed through the door. “They had swords, machetes, shotguns – all of them were carrying weapons,” he says.
Henkoma found himself in the middle of a turf war between the gang he’d met in the park and a rival drug operation linked to his foster carer’s nephew. He says: “One hundred percent I’d have been shot right then” if the man pointing the gun at him hadn’t recognised him from back home.
They took him back with them and he now found himself under the protection of the gang who had stormed the house in Margate.
A few weeks later, aged only 12, he was given his first gun. Even now, more than 10 years later, he remembers the weight of it, how the cold metal burned against his skin. “It wasn’t that big but my hands were too small to hold it properly,” he says. “I didn’t know what they wanted me to do with it.”
That soon became clear. As Henkoma sank deeper and deeper into the gang’s world of drug dealing and criminality, he was put to work as a mini-enforcer, helping transport drugs and firearms from London to Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham. “I was their little protege,” he says.
The gang loved having a little kid working for them. “It was good for their reputation. It scared people that they had this kid that would do anything they said.”
As time went on, he was drawn so far into this world that he didn’t know how to leave. He tried to tell his social workers that he was being threatened and was involved with gangs, but, he says, they didn’t believe him. “It was before anyone knew about child exploitation or county lines,” he says. “I was only in year 7 so they said I was fantasising.”
He lost his foster placement and stopped going to school. He was shuttled around different care placements but the gang always came and took him back. “Social services didn’t know what to do with me.” Recently he watched a film about child soldiers and recognised that he went through the same brainwashing and brutalisation.
By the age of 14 Henkoma had become mentally dissociated from the world in which he was existing, robotically following orders and committing acts of violence with no ability to distinguish between right and wrong. “I saw so many bad things happen; I did things that I still can’t speak about. I look back and think: how did I do that? But it was like I was dead inside.”
Before long, he was arrested and he and an older gang member were charged with possession of firearms and GBH. He was told by the gang elders to go on the run and says he was then betrayed after the older gang member pinned the crimes on him in court. When police found him he was convicted of possession of a firearm and sent to a young offenders institution. When he got out four months later, Henkoma was bent on revenge.
His life between the ages of 15 and 19 was “pure chaos”. He waged war on his former gang family. He was stabbed multiple times, escaping death by an inch time after time, and saw people around him die. He remembers these years in jagged, disjointed flashbacks. Everything he once was had been obliterated. “I had this street name, The Devil That Walks on Earth. I didn’t care about anything. I had nothing to live for; I just wanted to die, for it all to be over.”
What brought himself back from the brink was the birth of his daughter when he was 18. “After my daughter was born, something happened. I held her in the hospital and I thought, ‘I’ve got to go right.’”
Extracting himself from the grip of gang life didn’t happen quickly, but, he says, from that moment something shifted: “Becoming a father gave me a reason to try to save myself.”
A year after his daughter was born, he was sent to adult prison for possession of a firearm and served almost three years, during which time his younger daughter was born. He says that, in many ways, prison was a blessing. Because of his fearsome reputation, he was left alone. “I became calm, quiet, back to being who I really was. I was a model prisoner: I learned how the system worked, I did all the courses I could do.”
In prison, he was told that he’d been served deportation orders by the Home Office, which wanted to send him back to Nigeria. He got access to a solicitor who, when he heard his story, immediately asked if he would speak to a psychiatrist.
“I told the psychiatrist what had happened to me and then my solicitor told me that I’d been groomed and that I was a victim of child exploitation.”
Henkoma was shocked to be told he had been a victim, as well as a perpetrator. “I thought: ‘Well, if that’s true then this whole prison block is, too.’ Most people in there had the same story as me.”
He says his solicitor was the first person for years who didn’t just see him as dangerous and violent. “She said, ‘You were just a little kid – how did you get here?’”
After he came out of prison in February 2020, Henkoma was identified as a victim of child trafficking and exploitation, and the government cancelled the removal orders. He was given leave to remain until August 2024 and will have to reapply for the right to stay in the UK early next year, something that hangs over him every day.
Henkoma describes the years since he left prison as a rebirth. He has been in intensive PTSD and trauma therapy through a charity called Dignifi. Without them, he says, he would not be here today. In their first session, his therapist apologised for his being failed so badly by the system. “It was like this weight suddenly lifted, because before I just thought it was all my fault.”
And yet in many ways, recovery has been harder than the life he lived on the streets. “When violence has been your normality, it’s hard not to resort back to violence,” he says. “The only emotion I used to be able to deal with was anger. Now I have to do sadness, I have to do grief, shame, a whole lot of guilt for what I’ve done. I’m just trying to put it right.”
He is now studying for a degree in criminology and sociology, alongside working with the anti-trafficking charity Causeway, trying to increase the participation of young people like him with real experience of gang violence into policy and prevention programmes. He still travels up and down the country but now trains the NHS, police and social workers on how to work with victims and young people at risk from child criminal exploitation.
He mentors young people at risk from gang violence and has also started his own community interest company called 1Hunna, working with disadvantaged kids to try to give them educational and work opportunities. This year he was named crime fighter of the year at the True Crime awards and took his award back to his old neighbourhood.
“I wanted to say, ‘If I can do this, think what you lot can do!’ Most of the kids I work with have been through a lot of trauma. I want to help them believe that there is a world in which they can be whatever they want to be,” Henkoma says. “Kids who think they can’t get out of a situation of violence they find themselves in, who are falling through the cracks, I want to say, this is not the end. Look at me: I survived, I’m thriving and so can you.”
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