Meet the AYJ Member: Luke Billingham
AYJ Communications Officer Millie Hall visits AYJ Associate Member Luke Billingham at Hackney Quest to find out more about his wide-reaching work within the youth justice sector.
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of heading down to Hackney Quest, an independent charity that has been supporting children and young people in the Hackney area since 1988, to chat with Luke Billingham. Alongside being an AYJ Associate Member, Luke takes on many roles including a Youth and Community Worker at Hackney Quest, a Research Associate for the Public Health, Youth & Violence Reduction project, as well as volunteering at multiple criminal justice charities including Haven Distribution (Books to Prisoners), New Bridge Befriending, and The Longford Trust. Underpinning all of this work, Luke recognises the sheer potential of every young person, while also supporting valuable research in some of youth justice’s most crucial areas. Read on for a whistle-stop tour of some of Luke’s motivations and key interests including tackling serious violence and the significance of sport cages.
Hackney Quest
Let’s start with your work at Hackney Quest. Can you tell me a bit more about your role there?
My role at Hackney Quest has two main focuses. Firstly, supporting individual young people and families through complex difficulties, especially in relation to the education system. And secondly, working with young people on projects aimed at bringing about inclusive forms of change in the local community. For example, I helped to create and lead the Hackney Wick Through Young Eyes research project, Build Up Hackney, and the Fuse Project. All of these projects were aimed at ensuring that young people are informed about, involved in and benefitting from the way that their area is changing – which I think is especially important at a time when Hackney is going through substantial gentrification.
Hackney Quest is a long-standing charity. What do you think makes it so invaluable to the local community?
Yeah, Hackney Quest is three years older than me, and I feel very old now that I’m 30! Even though I’ve worked at Quest for 6 years now, I still feel like the newbie, because many of my colleagues have worked here for over a decade (or two), so I don’t always feel like the best person to capture the essence of what we do.
When I’ve tried to articulate our approach, I think what it comes down to is that we are an institution rooted in the local community, for the local community. We work with young people aged 8 to 19, and quite often we work with young people from when they’re 8 to when they’re 19 and beyond! We often act as an extended family for our young people and parents, supporting them through multiple major life transitions and events. We work with them for as long as they need and want our help; we don’t have rigid thresholds for support, or fixed timescales for our work, we are led by those we work with. We aim to always communicate unconditional respect, care, encouragement, and love, within clear professional boundaries.
I really get hit by the difference that Hackney Quest makes when we see the altered trajectory a young person is on after years of our support and nurture, or – perhaps even more than that – when a young person comes to us for help with something that they felt they could not go anywhere else for. That trust and depth of relationship is invaluable.
Mural at Hackney Quest
Youth Justice
Your work is very wide reaching, however in terms of youth justice and based on your experience, what do you think are the biggest challenges currently facing children in and at risk of entering the youth justice system?
I think this cohort of young people often experiences a really damaging accumulation of different forms of harm through their lives – from other people, in many cases, but also from policies, institutions and systems which structurally belittle and diminish them. I think about young people I work with, and the experiences they have had in education; housing; the job market; the welfare system; in interactions with police, and so on, and it is not difficult to see why they can be gripped by incendiary emotions like rage, shame, humiliation, and a deep sense of powerlessness. For too many young people, it feels like adults, authorities and agencies are “against” them; there to trap or to constrain them rather than to help them flourish. And the broader context for this kind of marginalisation and alienation is the hideous extent of inequality in this country. Jhemar, a brilliant young man from South London interviewed recently by his youth worker Ciaran Thapar, put it really well when he said that young people’s lives in London are characterised by a toxic combination of two things: “Exposure to wealth, and lack of power.”
Motivations
Something I like to ask people in this sector, and in a world which often seems to lack compassion, is simply, why do you care? What makes you passionate about the work you do?
I grew up in Hackney, and there are very few things I love more than this community and its young people. It angers and frustrates me to see the extent of preventable harm and adversity in young people’s lives here, across London, and throughout Britain, and I want to do all I can to reduce those things. The extent of inequality in our country is ludicrous, unjust and unjustifiable – there is a profound concentration of pain, pressure, and powerlessness in too many places, whilst other communities have managed to magnetise power, privilege and prestige. So, to be honest, I’m fuelled by quite a lot of rage, but I think the rage is grounded in love, and I try to effectively channel the rage in constructive ways.
Sports Cages
I’m really interested in your work on sports cages. Can you tell me a bit more about the significance you believe they hold, as well as their valuable and concerning aspects you identified in your report, Sports Cages: Places of safety, places of harm, places of potential?
I grew up kicking a ball about in a local cage often, and I know from research that I’ve done that the neighbourhood cage is often young people’s favourite thing in their area. They are hyper-local, freely accessible, and places which young people often feel a really rich sense of ownership over – something which is becoming increasingly rare as more public space is privatised, or becoming places where young people are viewed with immediate suspicion. But I don’t think cages are often thought about by policy-makers as the valuable pieces of social infrastructure that they are, despite the clear role that they can play in supporting community safety, contextual safeguarding, early intervention, healthy lifestyles, child-friendly development, and so on. I’m not naïve about the fact that they can also be places of risk and harm – all the more reason to give them the attention, consideration and resource that they need.
Sports cage at Hackney Quest
Violence
You are currently working on the Public Health, Youth & Violence Reduction project, and you have previously co-authored the Youth Violence Commission final report. What do you think people are getting right with tackling serious violence? What are they getting wrong?
I think my primary concern when it comes to violence between young people is ensuring that there is enough attention paid to what Elliott Currie has called ‘the adverse social conditions that predictably breed violence’. Based on extensive international comparison, he showed that there are certain features of societies which reliably generate higher rates of violence. Unfortunately, Britain doesn’t do too well in relation to these societal factors: they include inequality; precarious and poorly-paid work; inadequate welfare support; punitive criminal justice systems; and insufficient support for families. The Youth Violence Commission report highlighted very similar problems.
I think too often there is a tendency to “zoom in” on the conduct of individual people, as if their behaviour occurs in a vacuum, rather than to consider the ways in which the policies, systems and institutions of our society can make violence more likely. This involves acknowledging that violence in our society is “ours” – it is tied in significant ways to our political economy, history, and culture – as opposed to viewing it as some pathology which belongs to demonised Others, particularly given the racist undertones of much media and political commentary on the issue.
Too often we reach for ‘convenient bounded receptables for blame’ (Joe Cottrell-Boyce’s brilliant phrase), like gangs or youth culture or Troubled Families. We need to recognise that violence is not some kind of isolable social problem, self-generated within particular groups or individuals or families or subcultures, but is closely related to structural features of our society. This is not to say that people aren’t morally responsible for harmful actions – explanation is not exoneration, and saying that something is explicable is different to saying something is acceptable. To consider structural causes of violence isn’t to excuse it, it’s to work more effectively towards its sustainable reduction and prevention. I think that, at best, a “public health approach” amounts to a proper reckoning with these points.
Lastly, I think there needs to be more consideration of the inner complexity of each individual young person. Too often young people are viewed through various kinds of determinism – they are seen as automatons following consumerist norms or “gang codes”; or as simple products of early childhood experience; or as brainwashed by the music they listen to. All of these things of course have an effect on young people, in various ways, but each individual young person has a psychological richness which is too often ignored. Whatever they have experienced and whichever cultural influences they’ve confronted, young people can neither absorb it all nor resist it all; they go through a sifting process of establishing, consciously or otherwise, what does and does not hold value to them; who they do and do not matter to; where and how they are of consequence.
Rather than looking down on young people and “youth culture”, then, as if they are inherently problematic and dangerous, I think we should spend more time looking upwards, at the powerful policy-makers, institutions and systems which profoundly affect young people’s lives, and outwards from the perspective of young people, giving due attention to the rich complexity of their individual lives.
Hackney Quest
Hope
In all the work you do, what makes you feel hopeful for the future? What makes you continue the fight for change?
All of the bloody brilliant people that I meet all the time! Young people I work with are utterly inspiring and ooze with potential, demonstrating remarkable strength, determination and good humour through all the sh*t they have to battle. Other professionals I meet inspire me all the time with their dedication, compassion, and well-channelled frustration. There is plenty which angers me and makes me deeply worried about both the present and the future state of our society – as has probably been clear! – but among all the people I encounter working towards positive change in all kinds of different ways, I see immense power.