Simon Fanshawe Blog

I have been talking to young people. And it scared me. They were basically lovely. Four lads from North London. They are all 14 and have the innocent posturing of the almost young man plus of course the bum fluff and the creaky voice. And they fight after school. Not each other. But big set piece rucks involving fifty or so boys. They come from one estate and their opponents from another. I am not going to say where they’re from. It doesn’t actually matter, except that it may put them in, if not danger, certainly potentially some difficulty. They were Asian. That again doesn’t matter. I only say it to dispel the wrong conclusion that this violence is somehow ethnically inspired or generated. The author of the most recent report on gangs in London, Professor John Pitts, who was also there at this conference, makes it very clear that “impetus towards gang membership is determined by the social predicament of gang members rather than their race or ethnicity”. And my four youngsters are not gang members. Not yet. Might they be? I hope not. They came to me via the Leap Project’s Quarrel Shop, where young people learn “mediation, communication and conflict resolution skills”. So there’s hope.

Just a few weeks ago a middle aged, fairly well off husband and wife from California took a poor, black South African couple from Cape Town out to lunch. The young man works for their Foundation. His girlfriend works in the Standard Bank. The Americans raise several million dollars a year in the US to support community projects in The Cape. The fund is called The Amy Biehl Foundation after their daughter. The two couples see a fair amount of each other. But this weekend the Americans were giving the younger ones a treat. Lunch in Franschhoek a one of the smarter towns in the wine district. It was a bit of R&R for everybody. A day out. A nice gesture. An ordinary event. Even though the young man murdered their daughter.

Twenty years after the Brighton bomb, the IRA man responsible and the daughter of one of the victims came together in an extraordinary meeting. Simon Fanshawe took the chair

Simon Fanshawe: Jo, what compelled you to explore this path of reconciliation?
Jo Berry: It’s a choice I make every day. I mean, I woke up this morning and had to make a choice to carry on because today is a difficult challenge. Part of me just wanted to say: enough is enough. I just want to be quiet today. So it’s a choice to carry on this journey, to build bridges. But actually I have no choice. If I do not do this then I feel I choose to stay a victim.

In their first major interview, Francis and Berthe Climbié tell how they are coping with the loss of their daughter - and trying to forgive her killers

Augustin, in his pyjamas and ready for bed, squeals in delight as he and I have a low-intensity water fight in his parents’ kitchen in their rented house in west London. Augustin is nine. His little sister Joëlle is five, as she announces proudly in English. To all intents and purposes it’s a perfectly ordinary family scene. But these two are Victoria Climbié’s youngest siblings. Their sister was tortured, and died at the hands of her great aunt, Marie-Thérèse Kouao and her lover Carl Manning, three years ago on 25 February. There were seven children in the Climbié family and the eldest, Jacques, was 20 yesterday. He celebrated it with his other brothers and sisters in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast where they come from. But without his parents. They instead were here on the front of every national newspaper testifying with some considerable dignity that their daughter’s terrifying death had not been in vain.

Stephen Oake’s father prays for his son’s killer. Can the rest of us show such charity?

A policeman murdered. A family grieving. And then the shock of the remarkable as his father spoke. A former policeman, an ex-chief constable, he said as his son’s body lay barely cold, stabbed by someone described unforgivingly in the media as ‘a fugitive asylum seeker’: ‘I am praying hard for the fellow who stabbed Steve. I am trying hard to forgive him as I am sure Steve would… I don’t want any recriminations against him at all.’