Shaddywood Crime Reduction Programme

Shaddywood is a unique crime reduction project that has had huge impact in reducing crime in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and has become very popular and reputable through its success in youth engagement and reformation. The Shaddywood project gave a platform for those hard to reach group of youths to freely and openly voice their views, concerns, complaints and issues.

Fighting Youth Crime is one of the top agenda of the central and local government, and other national and local agencies such as the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service). It is however surprising to see little representation of the young people in local and national issues. The representation that we do have of young people is often not of the more hard-to-reach difficult youths who are the ones actually involved in or influenced by crime. Therefore one of the most important requirements of youth crime reduction is the crucial and desperate need to engage with the hard-to-reach youths to discover and understand why these young people get involved in gangs, anti-social behavior and other petty crimes? Only through effective engagement can we extract information we need to develop effective means of tackling and resolving crime on a long term and sustainable basis.

After the tragic shootings and knife attacks in London in 2007, that took the lives of so many young people, Da'watul Islam UK & Eire a national voluntary organisation was extremely concerned and alarmed by the high rate of fatalities. Da'watul Islam UK & Eire has since given more focus and attention in its work to reduce gun crime and in particular gang culture. Engaging with Young People is the heart of resolving youth crime. We must hear from the young people themselves why they get involved into crime why they carry knives, why they get involved in anti-social behavior and so on. Unless we do this, we will not able to fully understand and tackle the root causes of youth crime and violence. Glamorisation of violence in the mainstream film and music industries has been a great concern. Thou film industries deny that there is direct link between violence in their movies and the actual act of violence and try to justify in that way. The reality is however quite different and opposite as what they deny. Numerous researches have been done that relates violence directly and indirectly with violent movies and music videos.


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Shaddywood Crime Reduction Project is a major crime reduction project of Da'watul Islam UK & Eire Charity Registration No: 289202