The awful thing is, Marie Bokassa was not surprised by what happened to her boy. Kelyan, 14, was knifed to death on the 493 bus in Woolwich in front of appalled fellow passengers at 2.30pm in the afternoon this week. She had, she said, been expecting the visit from the police and dreading it.
He was a troubled boy. Had he lived, he would have been in court next week charged with carrying a machete. They had had Christmas together, he had returned to school in his uniform after a long absence and was on his way to meet his social worker. Things seemed to be looking up for him. And then it happened: two young men set upon him on the bus with a machete and butchered him.
“My son and others were taken advantage of by gangs”, she said. “They were groomed”. And in the case of poor Kelyan, the grooming started early: he was taken over by gangs at the age of six; they forced him to take a knife into school. He was taken into care and his four years in care were a disaster; she says that during one of those years he went missing and fended for himself on the streets. When he was first taken into care she had no notion that he would be away for so long. When she saw him after his years in care, he was undernourished, tattooed and hard; he would never tell her who his friends were or what was happening to him.
It gives you pause in the context of Kelyan’s short life, that word “care”. It implies safety, discipline and kindness; instead this child, for he was a child, was left exposed in the care system to predatory gangs who did their best to turn him into one of themselves. At the time he was murdered, he was already a drill rapper called Grippa. About an hour before he died he asked his Instagram followers if anyone had a “mindy” — a Somali word for a knife. What kind of society is this where a 14 year old can pose in this way and expect respect? His mother talked about his kindness, his care for his friends, his love of football, but it was not that boy who strutted on social media with a pretend knife. The rapper culture that gives young boys standing when they talk about violence found another victim.
The care system, under its private equity managers, has failed to protect the children in its charge
In other words, this is not one of those cases where most parents think to themselves, it could have been my boy. This was a particularly vulnerable teenager who had been taken up into the gang culture that dominates life for young black boys in parts of London from a terrifyingly early age. This was a tragedy with a context.
We need also to talk about other aspects of the gangs. One is that they prey on vulnerable young people. We’ve almost given up on talking about fatherless families as an aspect of urban alienation and familial dysfunction but perhaps we should be talking about it. Police know all too much about the problem. It is simply too big to handle, too big to solve.
Another of the hundred or so questions about the case that spring to mind, one that absolutely must be tackled, is the failings of the care system in which this child spent four years.
The Spectator, now under the editorship of Michael Gove, has published an editorial in this week’s magazine calling on the Government” to tackle the terrible conditions which prevail in all too many children’s homes – often under the control of private equity firms who are making considerable profits from the taxpayer while the children nominally in their care live in squalid surroundings without adequate supervision. David Johnston [former minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing] began the process of holding these companies to account under the last government. This administration should pick up where he left off.”
Gove’s magazine did not have Kelyan Bokassa’s case in mind here so much as that of the rape gang victims in other parts of England, but they could have written exactly the same about him. The care system, under its private equity managers, has failed to protect the children in its charge. It’s time, I would suggest, that the care system and prisons are taken from private providers and returned to state control; that way we can hold ministers to account for what happens in them.
Poor Kelyan’s death was a London tragedy. How long do you reckon it will it be before the next?
On Wednesday there was a service at St Mary Magdalene’s church in Woolwich for poor Kelyan. The vicar, the Rev Jesse van der Valk, said it was a time for “reflection” as they commended this young teenager’s soul to God. But it’s also a time, I would say, for action after reflection. And for righteous anger.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist