Gang Busters
Hawaii’s gang problem is in crisis mode, and Sid and Judie Rosen of Adult Friends for Youth are dedicated to helping teens get their lives together
By Alice Keesing
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |
Del.icio.us
Adult Friends for Youth founders Sid and Judie Rosen and
staff members (standing, from left) Cynthia Emoto, McKay
Schwenke, Udella Myers, Deborah Spencer, Jane Tampon,
Kathleen Dela Cruz, Elizabeth Yonamine and Terry Fisher
Sid and Judie Rosen are in the gang business. Over the last two decades, the 60-something pair have become Hawaii’s preeminent gang busters. As the driving force behind Adult Friends for Youth, the Rosens help teens escape the dead-end life of the streets.
The Rosens operate in a world that most people in Hawaii don’t even know exists. Street fights over gang turf may be the stuff of television drama, but here in our own back yard?
Indeed, says Sid Rosen. And after a brief hiatus, Hawaii’s gang problems are reaching boiling point again, he warns.
In recent months, state school and public safety officials have been in a huddle over the upsurge in gang-related violence. One of the latest signs of the troubled times came in September when an after-hours brawl on the Farrington High School campus left one teen with a pellet gun shot to the eye.
Rosen is palpably frustrated that the money isn’t being spent to fix the problem when he knows that AFY has a way to break the cycle of violence and retaliation.
For 17 years the non-profit agency has focused solely on gangs - its roots trace back to a time when Hawaii was experiencing some of its worst gang wars.
“In the early ‘90s, gang activity, particularly in the Kalihi area, was very, very powerful,” Rosen says. “There were the Samoan gangs, there were the Filipino gangs and the violence was pervasive in the community. There were killings - it was bad.”
AFY was in the thick of it with a novel method of gang psychotherapy that it has pioneered.
Unlike traditional approaches, AFY works with the entire gang, not just individuals. And it takes a psychotherapeutic approach. If that calls up images of gang members being analyzed while reclining on couches, then stop right there.
AFY’s five clinical staff get out on kids’ own turf. They get to know them. They might share pizza or hot dogs. They become staunch advocates, even if it means butting heads with the police when the kids get in trouble. Basically, it means treating the kids like important people - something they often haven’t experienced much of.
“What we find is that the kids are responsive,” says Rosen, who taught at the University of Hawaii School of Social Work for 27 years. “Oftentimes the kids know that their lives aren’t going anywhere and they’re frustrated, they’re angry.”
AFY calls its approach the redirectional method - they’ve even written a book about it. The whole idea is to get gang members to see their own potential and to begin to dream of a different future for themselves. What happens over time, Rosen says, is that the individual’s identity begins to outweigh the gang’s group identity and the gang loses its cohesiveness and falls apart.
And that’s largely what ended
the hostilities of the ‘90s, Rosen says. In 1995, when two Sons of Samoa gang members were killed by a rival gang, everyone braced for a big retaliation.
“It never came,” Rosen says. AFY had been working with the gang for two years, and “when we confronted them with the consequences of retaliation, they knew that it would be a bad mistake because they’d already started to move on with their lives, and the idea that they might get hurt or killed in the conflict or go to jail - they no longer felt the need to maintain the image of (the gang).”
There are no scientific studies to prove that AFY’s method works - there’s not enough money to conduct one - but the agency has years’worth of anecdotal evidence. They’ve seen gangs dissolve thanks to their work. They’ve seen kids making something of their lives. In a five year period, the graduation rate among the kids the non-profit
worked with increased from 20 percent to around 70 or 80 percent.
But perhaps the most poignant signs of AFY’s success can be seen walking around its own offices: Three of the 11 employees are former clients. Two of them even come from rival gangs. One of them, Malakai Maumalanga, has become something of a poster boy for the business. A former leader of the Cross Sun gang, Maumalanga now works with troubled kids and is on his way to earning a master’s degree in social work.
In the face of those successes, Rosen is frustrated that the gang problem is often left to fester until it reaches crisis mode. And it’s crisis mode that we’re in now, he says.
“We had that hiatus from ‘96, then about 2002 we began to see more activity,” Rosen says.
Kids are getting involved in gangs as young as elementary school, and their lives begin to revolve around violence, drugs and
crime. They divide their neighborhoods and school campuses into strict turfs that can become dangerous ground.
Rosen recalls an incident back in March, when there was a highly flammable confrontation between a gang from Campbell and a gang from Farrington, which had started to travel over
Page 1 of 2 pages for this story 1 2 >
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS
Most Recent Comment(s):
