Councillor Claudia Webbe: ‘The most vulnerable people are the easiest targets, and there are not many who are more vulnerable than young women who have been abused’

AN Islington mother says she used to carry drugs in her school bag during a childhood that was plagued by gang life, sexual exploitation and drugs – as a Town Hall chief warns that vulnerable female gang members are being overlooked by the authorities.

Jade Allen was groomed into a gang in Hackney while she was at school in Islington and remained involved in it until her early 20s.

But when she gave birth to her daughter she started to distance herself from an abusive boyfriend and a life where drugs and violence were normal.

She said: “When I was 12 I was moving stuff. They would give me a package I would put in my school bag.

“I’d then go and drop it off at the end of school.”

Bunhill councillor Claudia Webbe, who co-founded and chaired Operation Trident advising the police on gun crime in the capital, told the Tribune that young girls are often targeted by violent criminals to smuggle drugs and weapons.

She said: “The most vulnerable people are the easiest targets, and there are not many who are more vulnerable than young women who have been abused.

“Violent criminals will employ them as mules – to swallow drugs or hide them anywhere they can.

“Young girls are often overlooked by the police and that’s why criminals use them.”

Cllr Webbe is calling for more investment in early intervention that is targeted at vulnerable young people.

She added: “There is very little provision for young girls caught up in crime.”

Ms Allen told how she regularly witnessed drug taking and sexual abuse in her mother’s house as she grew up.

“I was f***ed up by my childhood,” she said.

“I never felt loved in my mum’s house, unless my dad was there. And then it was used as a trap house with friends selling and smoking up the place.”

Ms Allen’s mother would beat her with belts and once kicked her in the face, as a form of discipline. She said: “I don’t blame her. It’s what she experienced where she grew up in Nigeria. It’s like a knock-on effect and somewhere the chain has to be broken. My daughter cannot go through what I went through.”

Ms Allen was picked up at the age of 16 and became the girlfriend of a dealer who was higher up in the gang hierarchy.

She spent years in a Hackney tower block either broke and struggling to eat, or sorting hundreds of pounds and dealing drugs.

She said: “It’s not easy to get out. In a gang, once you have a child with someone you become their property, even if you break up.”]

She had to get a restraining order on her boyfriend after her daughter was born. But she says it is always tempting to go back to a life where money came easier than it does in her current zero-hours contract work.

Ms Allen added: “It takes everything in your spirit not to go back. It would be nothing for me to make some money right now with drugs.

“I could pick up the phone and call someone and be like, ‘Yo, bring me something’.

“My daughter is the reason why I can’t go back, no matter how much I want to. I don’t want you to think that having a baby is going to save everyone though. I know loads of girls who have had kids and they’re still crackheads. They’ve just had social services take their babies away.”

There are a handful of outreach groups available for young people in the borough who are trying to escape gang life.

Social enterprise Abianda, based in Finsbury Park, offers help for young women. It coaches them on how they themselves can train professionals working for the police service or the council on how to help women affected by gang life.

• Ms Allen’s name has been changed to protect her identity.