Children Pulled to Gangs : Parent Network Struggles to Save ‘Lost Generation’

Officials estimate there are 40,000 children in Los Angeles County who are members of a lost generation--children lost to their parents through the pull of youth gangs.

With 425 gangs claiming those 40,000 children as members, the county has been split into turfs delineated by gunfire and simmering warfare.

More than 200 people were killed by gang violence in 1984--40% of them innocent victims.

“There’s a lot of pieces you have to have to this gang violence problem,” said Steve Valdevia, executive director of the Community Youth Gang Services Project that sponsors a survival group for parents aimed at giving them support and tools to regain their children and retake control of their families.

“The Parents Survival Network is a critical part of the solution, not only for the current situation but for kids who aren’t born yet. Everything starts at home.”

Partial Answer

It is a partial answer to the growing number of gangs and their increasing mobility.

“We know for a fact that Sharkey’s 12th Street (gang) knows the Venice 13 (gang) intimately,” Tom Garrison, assistant director of the gang project, told a meeting of parents.

He said it was time that parents from the “turfs” also talk to each other.

“Once you get hip to the games they be playing, (the kids) can’t run the game,” gang worker Larry Norman told parents.

“They’re going to stop and have to start trying something else,” Norman said.

That’s precisely the aim of the survival network--to teach parents the signs of gang membership and to give them ways of maintaining discipline in the home.

“You probably see a lot more than you think,” gang worker and ex-gang member Mary Ann Diaz told an introductory group of parents.

Son Killed in Shooting

One woman listening to the group was in tears. Her son had been killed three weeks before in a gang shooting, even though she said he was not a gang member. The grieving mother was at the meeting to do something constructive about the gang problem, so her son’s death would not be meaningless, she said.

Many of the parents involved in the network, including Rita Figueroa, have had children killed in gang wars.

Figueroa lost two sons, both gang members, to East Los Angeles street violence in the early 1970s. She founded Concerned Parents of East Los Angeles in her grief and kept two other sons from joining gangs. She also is active in the Parents Survival Network.

“We got together because we couldn’t take it any more,” she said.

“We’re all from different areas, and the boys are from different gangs,” she said. “The fact that some of the parents live only blocks apart, yet have children belonging to rival gangs, made the gang members uncomfortable,” she said.

Telephone Call Can Help

One parent will overhear a child say something and, because of the education process provided by the network and like groups, can place the comment into a context that makes sense. A telephone call can make a difference, let a gang worker know that something might happen in time for authorities to prevent it.

Parents can play a part in preventing violence by restricting the teen-ager’s activities or literally by pulling the son or daughter off the street, Figueroa said.

“The kids might not like it, but it’s too bad,” Figueroa said. “We’re going to save their lives whether they like it or not.”

The woman who is president of Concerned Parents of East Los Angeles is the mother of a gang member, Figueroa said. And that woman has, among other things, threatened to turn her son over to his probation officer in an effort to keep him away from gang activities.

“I know it has had an impact,” Valdevia said.

One woman who came to a network meeting broke down in the middle of the session, Valdevia recalled. She confessed that she was planning to commit suicide that day because she had just lost a child to a gang shooting.

Suicide Averted

One of the speakers at that particular meeting was a psychologist who worked with the woman to avert the suicide. She is now an active member of the network, in contact with other parents who have lost children or who are trying to keep their sons and daughters from gang activity.

Yet despite its successes, the network finds itself struggling for its own survival in the wake of budget cuts that left the gang project with 20% less money in 1985.

The survival network, begun in 1984, lost most of its workers in June when the county Board of Supervisors approved a budget of $1.2 million for its sponsor, the Community Youth Gang Services Project. That meant 82 gang workers instead of 107.