Drugs, poverty, murder - the estates society forgot

In this story: Children without hope Dealing with symptoms, not causes RELATED SITES

By Paul Sussman, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- As housing estates go Villeneuve, 10 minutes drive from the centre of the picturesque French town of Grenoble, isn't too bad a place to live.

True, unemployment is high, and there is a burgeoning drugs culture, but at the same time it has good transport infrastructure, numerous social, cultural and sporting clubs, and a 20 hectare park for the use of its 16,000 inhabitants.

Sadly, however, none of this has made any difference to 15-year-old Algerian immigrant Soufiane Allouche, who was this week stabbed to death. Police say his assailants are two teens, both age 17 and both fellow Villeneuve residents.

Soufiane's death, the third killing involving adolescents in the space of a fortnight, has sent shockwaves through France.

In other incidents a 12-year-old boy was murdered by a classmate in a suburb of Lille, while a 14-year-old boy was shot dead at Evry, on the outskirts of Paris. A 13-year-old and a 17-year-old have since been arrested for his murder.

The killings have highlighted what Maud Cottave, a spokeswoman for Grenoble Town Council, describes as a "moral crisis" among young people in the country's poorer urban housing estates.

"It is not a problem that is unique to one town," she says. "It is everywhere. The terrifying thing is that it seems to be younger and younger children who are involved in these sort of incidents."

Nor is France the only country experiencing such problems. Elsewhere in Europe there has been a dramatic upsurge in youth violence in deprived inner-city areas.

In Britain, a memorial service is being held on Saturday for 10-year-old Nigerian immigrant Damilola Taylor, who was recently stabbed to death in the stairwell of a run-down estate in Peckham, South London. Witnesses claim his attackers were children not much older than himself.

In Germany there has also been an alarming increase in juvenile violence, especially in towns in the former East.

"There are no clear Europe-wide statistics for this sort of thing," says Leonello Gabrici, a European Union Justice and Home Affairs spokesman. "What I can tell you is that at an informal meeting in Marseille in July ministers from all EU member countries agreed that they were all having similar problems."

Almost every major town in Europe has what in the UK are referred to as "sink estates," in France as "HLMs" (habitations a loyer moyenne, or low-rent housing) and in the Netherlands as "volksburts," or "peoples' quarters."

Built for the most part between 1945 and 1975 they are, in the words of British social housing expert Anne Power, "large estates, usually on the edge of existing towns and cities, often in concrete, often in high-rise blocks above five storeys, invariably utilitarian, monochrome, imposing in style and monofunctional in purpose."

The intention of the estates' planners and builders was to provide quick, convenient, low-cost accommodation.

A variety of social and economic factors, however, including rising unemployment, increased immigration and neighbourhood neglect, have conspired to turn them into virtual slums.

Despite numerous improvement initiatives, places like Villeneuve and the North Peckham Estate where Damilola Taylor was killed remain on the outer fringes of society, home to criminals, drug dealers, the poor and the socially excluded.

"Young people in these places feel they have very few opportunities to improve their lives," says Irena Guidikova of the Strasbourg, France-based Centre Europeen de la Jeunesse, or Center for European Youths. "Their prospects of employment are minimal, crime is omnipresent and there is no longer any sense of a cohesive value system."

The result, she believes, is that young people are increasingly venting their frustration and hopelessness in nihilistic acts of violence.

In 1998, the last year for which government figures are available in France, 43 juveniles were convicted of murder, while cases of juvenile wounding rose from 1,379 in 1994 to 3,825 in 1998.

In Britain, Home Office statistics show that between 1992 and 1999 there was a 6.1 percent increase in violent crime among 14- to 17-year-olds, and a 14 percent increase in overall criminal activity by the same age group.

"Surveys consistently show higher crime rates in inner-city areas and poor council estates," says a Home Office report.

Politicians and social groups across Europe acknowledge the corrosive effects on young people of growing up in such an environment and are taking steps to try to tackle the problem.

Moves are being made to tear down some of the worst estates and replace them with more attractive housing, while a whole raft of urban regeneration measures has been introduced over the last 15 years.

Ten years ago, for instance, the Bijlmer Estate in Amsterdam was an area of high crime and extreme poverty. Since 1992, however, 7,000 out of 13,000 high-rise apartments have been pulled down and their residents moved into family houses.

"We have done a lot of regeneration work there," says Ton Bosch of the local district council. "It is now a far better place to live than it was a decade ago."

Similar work is being done on London's North Peckham estate, where £260 million ($375 million) of government money has enabled the Peckham Partnership to make dramatic improvements to what was one of the city's most deprived areas, building new houses, parks, libraries and social centres.

"No one would pretend that Peckham is perfect," says a spokeswoman for the local council, "But a great deal of work has been done to regenerate the area. We still have a long way to go, but North Peckham is not forgotten."

Despite such initiatives, the violent crime rate on poor estates continues to creep upwards.

"The problem is that more often than not politicians are dealing with the symptoms rather than the root causes," says Guidikova.

"It's not just a matter of making housing estates look prettier. You need fundamental reforms of the education and welfare systems. Until you get those we can expect things to become even worse."

There are gradual signs of change. On the European mainland, for instance, 90 percent of urban regeneration programmes have, according to Power, "had some positive impact."

Sadly, however, such signs are coming too late for the likes of Soufiane Allouche and Damilola Taylor, whose deaths serve as a stark reminder of what one French newspaper described as "Europe's dark urban underbelly."

Anne Power
Grenoble Council
European Union
The Peckham Partnership
UK Home Office

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