Immigrant parents remove teenage sons from UK over stabbing fears

LONDON: Immigrant parents in the UK, fearful of gang knife violence, are sending teenage sons back to their countries of origin, a community worker said on Friday, after a boy sued his family for putting him in a Ghana boarding school.

The comments come a day after a judge ruled in favour of the parents of the boy who “tricked” him into going to Ghana to be educated because they did not want him to become “yet another black teenager stabbed to death in the streets of London”, their lawyer said.

Junior Smart, of the St Giles Trust whose work includes helping young people leave gangs, said far from being an isolated case, the parents´ actions were actually “very common” because “no-one wants their child to be killed”. “I wouldn´t want to say they´ve kidnapped their children -- they haven´t -- (but) they have exercised parental authority,” he said.

He said parents, who began to see their once-polite and well-behaved sons carrying or getting interested in knives, appearing in grime music videos and rowing with other gang members, were taking matters “into their own hands”.

Countries to which parents have been returning their children included Ghana, Romania, Jamaica and Sierra Leone, Smart told AFP. He said parents were resorting to such extreme measures reasoning that “you (gang members) got to my son here, you´re not going to be able to get to him in Africa, Ghana, Romania or wherever”.