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DANGEROUS: Campaigners say the Trident initiative failed to support women who come forward

A police campaign aimed at warning young African Caribbean girls to hand over guns they are keeping for gang members has been slammed by campaigners as being irresponsible.

Operation Trident’s ‘Hide His Gun’ campaign warned young women that they faced five years in prison if caught in possession of a firearm.

But Carlene Firmin, author of a recent report called the Female Voice in Violence told The Voice that the campaign, which ran between September and October 2009 was not coordinated with other agencies, had no victim helpline number and wrongly assumed that every girl in the target age group, 15 to 19, is not only storing a gun for a loved one but is doing it completely un-coerced.

“How do they come forward and hand the gun over to police safely?” she said “Who is going to be there to pick up the pieces when her boyfriend finds out that she has spoken to the police? There was nothing about that. It only said if you get caught with this, you are getting five years – probably in an institution designed to work with boys that cannot deal with anything that you have gone through in the build up to this offence.”

Firmin added that many girlfriends, sisters and mothers of gang members experience exploitation, rape, victimisation, and sexual bullying just for being related to gang members or for going against their wishes.

Dr. Theo Gavrielides, chief executive officer of think tank Race On The Agenda which published the report said he was also concerned.

“While the Trident campaign raised awareness of the issue of women and gun violence, it did so at a time when wider services in education, health and youth justice were not in a position to offer coordinated support, protection and guidance to young women at risk. ROTA’s Female Voice in Violence report recommends that any future campaign on these issues should only be conducted when relevant services are prepared to respond.”

Many of the 352 women who were interviewed for the report told ROTA researchers that there is very little support or female specific services targeted at women and girls caught up in gangs.

Firmin, whose organisation, ROTA, is establishing a FVV coalition to collect data, said the authorities need to re-think existing youth violence strategies, mainly built for boys.

But the criticisms were rebuffed by the Metropolitan Police.

In a statement, the Met said it not only worked with organisations such as the Trident Independent Advisory Group (IAG) to come up with the campaign’s poster but claimed the campaign also gave young women the choice of anonymously contacting charities such as Crimestoppers.

Claudia Webbe, IAG chair, added: “I make no apologies for our latest hard hitting campaign. It emerged from the community in response to a community concern (and) provided a community wake up call and calls on wider society to take a look at this latest trend.”

She added “This narrow criticism of the Trident campaign distracts from an otherwise clear message by ROTA that more needs to be done by agencies to support young women involved in serious crime. The work of the Trident campaign is to prevent young women from becoming involved in the first place and we made a bold decision to prioritise this as our campaign issue.”

Published: 01 March 2010
Issue: 1412

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