Long-Term Mentoring Can Save Lives
Earlier this week, me and Jhemar Jonas were featured on BBC Radio 4 Analysis talking about our experience with long-term mentoring — and why it can be a solution to youth violence
By the end of 2017 I’d been mentoring a teenager called Jhemar Jonas from Brixton, south London, for three years. When we first met, he was 12 and I was 23. In our fortnightly sessions I would print off pages of rap and grime lyrics, or extracts of poetry and journalism, to read out and dissect together. It allowed me to teach him English literature skills and for us to have philosophical conversations about life, society and London. When he turned 14, Jhemar became old enough for us to go on trips together. I took him to the Black Cultural Archives on Windrush Square and on the tube down to Tooting to eat Punjabi food.
But suddenly, in November of that year, the focus of our sessions would have to change when Jhemar’s older brother, Michael, was stabbed to death in a park in Penge, south east London. His young life was forced to adapt to this tragedy, and so was my role as a mentor to him. Our meetings and phone call check-ins became more regular. We’d established a bond of trust and honest dialogue over the years of our sessions that now crucially meant he was able to speak his mind without fear of judgment and I could offer him an ear to listen to his anger and hope. We both took it upon ourselves to start advocating for solutions to serious youth violence.
Cut Short was later published in July 2021, after two years and countless hours of conversations, interviews and editing sessions, many of which involved Jhemar critiquing, shaping and reshaping his part of the story as a paid researcher and co-author. His journey in its pages, alongside the other two main characters, Demetri and Carl, shows, while identifying the structural reasons for social breakdown in the inner-city, how mentoring and youth work might play a vital role as a solution to exclusion and violence among young people growing up in the poorest pockets of London.
As more time passes, we are afforded more and more distance from the events of 2017 and the publication of Cut Short. Jhemar has increasingly begun talking more openly about his decision not to take revenge for Michael’s murder at the time. It would have been easy for him to do so — to sustain the back-and-forth cycle that many young men fall prey to — but instead he turned his attention towards making change in his community. He is now a mentor to many boys himself and one of the busiest youth activists in London, whose message of hope is spread through his workshops in schools as well as his music, under the moniker Rippa.
Earlier this week, Jhemar and I were invited to talk to Jon Yates, Executive Director of the Youth Endowment Fund, for an episode of BBC Radio 4 Analysis titled: ‘We know how to stop knife crime, why don't we do it?’
As I argue in Cut Short, ‘knife crime’ is a lazy and prejudicial term that pulls our focus in a wrongheaded direction — towards the weapon and its user’s criminality, rather than the circumstances of their life. Research has proven that, for many years, it has been used almost exclusively to refer to incidents involving young Black men in tabloid media reportage.
What’s more, 30 minutes is not enough time to solve such a complex issue.
But by interweaving a wide range of voices from across different cities and specialisms, from politics to frontline youth work, academic research to the charity sector, and by being self-critical, the episode is an impressive, bitesize introduction to thinking about responding to serious youth violence.
More than anything, it was just refreshing to be given a new platform alongside Jhemar to talk about our experiences of, and belief in, long-term mentoring as a powerful yet undervalued resource.
I hope you enjoy listening…
Ciaran Thapar
All City aims to document or inspire social impact through storytelling.
I teach a monthly course, ‘Writing for Social Impact’, at City, University of London.
The next course is Friday 9th & Saturday 10th June or Friday 7th July & Saturday 8th July.