This isn’t Aretha McCarthy’s first panel discussion.
The constant stream of government meetings to discuss gun violence but, in her view, fail to act has left the Toronto youth worker and her colleagues fed up.
“Why can’t they hear us?” she says. “You say we are the voices, yet you still don’t listen to us.”
When the Star was approached by the Toronto Youth Cabinet, the council’s official youth advisory body, to talk about gun violence, it was decided that high school students, youth workers and young entrepreneurs would instead meet a reporter to discuss the most pressing issues affecting their lives amid ongoing gun violence.
Far from politicians who have neglected to provide sustainable funding for their organizations’ frontline work with the city’s most vulnerable young people, they have detailed mental health challenges, violence in schools and issues of sustaining order and housing. These are often not the top priorities of government, where debate and funding have focused on gun control and increasing police resources.
Here’s what experts from their own experiences and communities had to say:
Mental Health
While the fight against gun violence has focused on access to guns, border laws and other regulations, those the Star spoke to said more emphasis needs to be put on child and adolescent mental health.
“We deal with mental health because we know how serious it is when it comes to our young people,” said McCarthy, who founded DevelopME Youth, a nonprofit organization to empower black youth. . Visits by politicians to the community, without follow-up funding for councils and programs, often seem meaningless.
“You coming for the photo shoot is not going to help me see a friend of mine pass.”
Gloria “Glowz” O’koye, a youth and crisis support worker, said the pandemic has also complicated the ability of young people who have lost someone to violence to get proper closure, often attending virtually at memorial services.
It’s people like O’koye that young people go to in the middle of the night.
While there’s a push to make crisis teams more readily available around the city, those resources aren’t available around the clock, she noted.
“Around 3 or 4 a.m., we call it demon hour,” she said of young people who have mental health issues in the middle of the night and need someone to talk to. a. “We see the consequences.”
The continued effect of a shooting on a community without proper intervention can create a cycle of negative outcomes, the workers said.
“A lot of young people are hopeless,” said Ibrahim Yusuf, co-founder of Hidaayah House, an organization that offers crisis support, mental health resources, events and more. “They feel like they’re not going anywhere, which is one of the main reasons for the violence you see.”
The Review of the Roots of Youth Violence commissioned by the Ontario government in 2008 noted that mental health was one of the direct roots of immediate risk factors for violence, “particularly alienation and lack of sense of belonging”.
school violence
Nasra Falahy recalls that after a shooting at his high school earlier this year, outside agencies offered only notebooks and pens to students in the cafeteria as part of the immediate response. After a few days, it seemed there wasn’t much else to support David and Mary Thomson CI.
“They never really talked about it in the announcements,” said friend and classmate Kristian Tofilovski.
“I think they just think that if we forget that, focus on our missions and move on, then that’ll be it,” he said. “We have a memorial, but. . . I think by early next year they could take it out. . . they kind of piled all the flowers and posters in one corner.
The students have talked about wanting to create a more permanent memorial, perhaps producing a documentary with their school’s film class that would feature stories from the life of 18-year-old Jahiem Robinson.
Although the school runs a unique summer program aimed at bringing the wider community together, it is aimed at incoming students.
And while school shootings are incredibly rare, they affect the entire school community.
Logging into the virtual classroom after the shooting, Falahy said a teacher who had been close to Robinson was sobbing onscreen.
Another teacher was a hall monitor during the incident and had given Robinson first aid, Falahy said. Afterwards, the two students noticed that he had not returned to school. They don’t know what happened to him.
“I feel like especially teenagers, we’ve become very desensitized to the violence in our community because we’ve seen it on the news for so long,” Tofilovski said.
He and Falahy discussed gun violence on an episode of his podcast, Z-Key, where they talk about American politics, gun control and the shooting at their own school.
Tofilovski was in the school entrance hall when he heard a gunshot. He saw people running towards him and said he kept dreaming of gun violence. Loud noises at school freak him out.
Yet they know that others have suffered more – people injured or having seen a friend killed in front of them. And they are aware that not enough is being done.
“Our generation in general, we’re either not heard or we don’t show up enough because clearly the government, they don’t really care,” Falahy said. on the podcast. “I’ve seen more people our age, like Gen Z people, coming out and speaking out about gun violence like on social media, protesting about it. . . that I saw people from the government intervene and do something.
Police
Abdifatah Hussein, co-founder of Hidaayah House, compared the relationship with the police to a parent who only shows up for weddings and funerals.
“Like, you showed face. “Hey, I’ll make sure I’m there so I can call myself part of the family.” But how come you don’t contact me regularly? »
He said there is a “lack of trust” when the community doesn’t know anything about the officers working in their neighborhood.
“I know they won’t be there until the crime happens,” he said of the role of the police in relation to the prevention work he and others do.
“This proactive method that we all talk about has never been a bigger part of the puzzle.”
He said that even when police and other government groups ask for their advice on combating gun violence, it feels like their experience and opinions are ignored.
“I almost feel like our voicemails are being deleted.”
Lodging
Lesley Oduro, founder of the Central Etobicoke Youth Agency, said living in public housing or low-income neighborhoods is often stigmatized, especially when young people apply for jobs.
Several workers spoke of young people changing or omitting their address on their CV in the hope of not being forgotten.
A limited amount of assistance like TCHC’s YouthWorx program provides jobs, but only during the summer.
Yusuf said neighborhoods with low-income housing also seem to be treated unfairly when it comes to other resources.
“Public schools in our area seem to have lower funding,” and less engaging teachers and curriculum, he said, noting that his family sent him to an academy for a special program two buses away.
These problems only get worse when the member of a household paying rent-geared-to-income is no longer a student, said Nafisa Mohamed, co-founder of NOOR.
“It becomes more difficult for parents to be able to pay rent because they now have to integrate the income of the 18-year-old into the household.
And without access to better-paying jobs and professional mentorship, young people struggle to contribute meaningfully to their homes or improve their own futures.
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