There are an estimated 250 criminal street gangs in London alone.
It's a very violent world.
When it comes to gangs, we rarely think about girls.
But new studies have shown that
up to 6,000 young women in the UK are embroiled in gang life,
with actual numbers predicted to be in the tens of thousands.
INDISTINCT SHOUTING
I want to get inside this secretive world
to find out what it's really like.
So, I'm just on my way now.
I've had a call about a place in south London
that is almost like a safe house for the community,
including gang members.
And there I'm hoping to meet some girls who are willing to chat to me,
but they're so at risk, and even some of the mentors are at risk,
I'm going to have to go on my own.
The girls are letting me film them under strict anonymity.
No production crew are allowed, and these are not their real names.
You've got two phones?
Why?
BECKY LAUGHS
Becky is one of London's most prolific girl gang members
and has been caught up in gang life for over a decade.
So, what sort of things do you guys do?
Drugs. Sell drugs, bag it up.
Pick-ups, drop-off.
Robberies. Fighting, violence. Everything.
Do you think girls get exploited by gangs?
Yeah.
It's mainly sexual things when it comes to girls,
and every girl wants to be in with somebody,
so they're willing to do certain things.
It's normal, do you know what I mean?
Even though you know it's wrong, when you're living it, it's normal.
What is the toughest elements of being in a gang?
When I lost 12 friends in the space of six months.
The majority of them were murders.
It was all gang rival situations,
so shootings, mainly stabbings.
'I'm horrified at how much loss Becky has experienced so young.
'With knife crime in London at a four-year high,
'these are the people behind the statistics.'
Becky is just one of a number of gang girls
who use the community centre as a safe house.
I head to meet the woman who runs it,
herself a former girl gang senior.
I've come from a criminal lifestyle from the age of 16.
I was used as a sexual object a lot
and was basically told that's all my worth was,
was to be used for sex.
I mean, could you walk away from it?
No. No, and I'm 32 years old now.
The effects are still so apparent. I fight my own demons every day.
Only now, as an adult,
because I'm hearing the stories of the girls that I work with,
that they've gone through something similar,
and I feel that they should speak out.
Loneliness is a major problem for a lot of these girls as well.
The circumstances of some of their lives are more dire
than I think anyone could ever realise.
Sometimes it's just survival.
They don't have any other choice.
Sasha takes me into the community centre,
where evidence of gang life is apparent.
Whereabouts is the actual gunshot?
This one was targeted. This one was for somebody.
Oh, my God, is that a bullet hole?
Wow.
Retaliation, it's all retaliation.
'I'm shocked that even the safe house
'has been the scene of such violence.
'Sasha takes me to meet Cally, a girl she's been mentoring.
'She was sucked into gang life at a very early age.'
I came over here, then I went into care. I was just 12.
I was getting told every day by elders,
"Come, you can come stay with me, I'll look after you.
"You don't need social services.
"They're just going to fuck up your life."
'Cally fell for a local gang boy,
'who quickly recruited her into a gang.'
Before I could join that gang,
I had a list of things that I had to do.
Can I ask you a bit about what was on that list?
I was a drug mule.
I used to take drugs from London
to Birmingham, Yorkshire, Cardiff, Wales.
I'm not going to get stopped cos I'm 12 years old.
They had no idea what was going on.
And you were stashing drugs internally?
What else were you forced to do?
..kidnapping people.
They said that I had a choice of who I got to kidnap.
So...I kidnapped my friend.
I made her do sexual things for money.
On command of these guys?
And then I got sentenced to three years, 18 months
at the age of 13 for kidnap and rape.
CALLY SIGHS
that was so mad.
I can see it's hard to talk about...
'It's tough to see Cally so clearly traumatised by her experiences.'
I've done horrible, horrible things.
Horrible things. Never had a choice.
Why didn't you have a choice?
Being in a gang, yeah, it's like they're a family.
That's all I wanted, at the end of the day, was to be a part of them.
No-one's got you in life. You've got yourself.
That's how I look at it.
She was looking for love,
and that's what groomed her into
then committing a horrendous crime.
Because you are blurring the line between victim and perpetrator,
suddenly you lose that victim status, and you are part of a gang,
you are part of a criminal enterprise,
and so there is, then, no way out.
I get a call from the first girl I met, Becky.
She's heading out to some gang hot spots
to visit the memorials of friends she's lost,
and she's asked me to come along.
How many people do you think you've lost in total?
Oh, um...
More than 30, probably.
Wow.
And did you ever have any violence towards you?
Many times, yeah.
I've been stabbed once in my arm.
What was that over?
That was just through affiliation.
I just affiliated with a person
who they would, you know, consider their rival.
How easy is it for a girl to escape this sort of gang life?
It's not easy at all. It's really not.
It's so easy for any guy to come along and be like...
and, basically, reel them back into it.
You know, you have that connection
where you feel like you're in a family.
'It seems a lot of these girls are just desperate to belong.
'We arrive at the memorial of one of those that was killed,
'Becky's friend, Billy.'
This is it?
Oh, wow.
'Billy was just 15 when he was shot dead on Valentine's Day.'
We had mutual friends.
Same schools, so, yeah.
'Losing so many friends has visibly affected Becky,
'but hers is a violent world.'
Did you ever carry weapons?
I have a big one about that big.
But where would you hide a knife on you?
Down my trousers by my waist. In the back. Or in my bag.
You don't want to die.
You know, you want to survive,
so if it was a situation where you felt like
you were really going to be that person,
then you would kill rather than be killed.
We're not in Gaza, we're not in Mexico, we're in London,
and has lost 30 people to the streets.
You can't be normal after that.
Your understanding of life and death is going to become distorted.
Sasha, Cally and Becky have all been trapped
in an extreme cycle of violence for years.
It makes me question if it's ever possible to break out of gang life.
I've heard of a pioneering new project
at one of London's busiest A&E departments -
King's College Hospital, who are trying to get to girls early.
I meet Dr Emer Sutherland,
who deals with the fallout of gang violence every day.
In some ways, it's easy for us to pick up someone who's been stabbed,
cos they've got a hole in them.
But trying to pick up the people who are having their lives controlled,
who are being sexually exploited or sexually abused through gangs,
that's harder because we have to try and gain their trust.
What do you think it is about what you guys do
that opens these girls up?
Young people are much more open to having the conversation
at that time that they're maybe forced to
face the potential of their own mortality.
And we found that they were twice as likely to say yes
to talking to us while they were still in
compared to when they'd gone home.
'The project here is based around this vital moment
'when a young person is confronted with the reality
'and more likely to reveal the truth.'
We've got a case going recently of a girl who came in,
and she'd taken two overdoses,
and when she came to us on her second one,
when we actually started talking to her
and we actually got the youth workers in to talk to her,
her whole story started to come out about sexual exploitation.
Doctors get training to spot the vulnerable gang girls,
but it's specialist social workers who get them to open up.
Emer takes me to meet one of them, Lucy.
We are dealing with young women who have these multiple areas of trauma.
Extreme violence, so weapon-related violence,
beatings, sexual violence.
But also, often, young women being involved in
the commissioning of sexual violence.
So kind of setting people up.
How do you engage with these girls?
What is different here to
what other people try and do with these girls?
When they come in to us, we get this opportunity
to kind of reach you when you are most aware of your vulnerability,
when you are perhaps most ready to think about,
"I don't want it to be like this any more. I want to change."
Young people are groomed into gangs,
young people are groomed into explosive situations,
and what that involves is actively perpetuating this idea
that nobody else is going to want to be friends with you...
Protecting them in a way.
And what we are trying to do is interrupt that
and say, "That's not normal. It doesn't have to be like this."
It's somewhere that isn't the police, that isn't probation,
it isn't social services,
and they can talk to somebody who they can trust
if they're spoken to in the right way,
which is exactly what this team is trying to do.
But the hospital can only do so much,
and the youth workers can only do so much.
It needs to be much wider than that.
Placing youth workers in A&E departments is one way
the government is tackling girls' involvement with gangs.
But King's College Hospital is one of the only places in the UK
where this is happening.
It feels like it's not enough.
I've had a worrying call from Sasha who runs the safe house.
The girl she is mentoring, Cally, has gone missing.
I'm going to join her to see what's going on.
We're in one of the most notorious estates in south London.
It's not the place I really want any young girl
to be kind of out here on their own.
Sasha, why are you so worried about Cally?
She's very, very vulnerable.
Maybe she is staying somewhere inappropriate,
maybe she's being used by men,
sex for money.
There's no-one here family-wise that's going to pick up the phone
and call the police to say that she's missing.
Kind of all she has is us.
But then, when we lost contact with her,
we don't know where to turn.
We just have to come out on the streets
and literally knock on doors and ask people if they've seen her.
That's all we can do at this point.
'There's no sign of Cally tonight, but Sasha will keep up the search.
'Despite joining a gang to belong,
'it seems these girls can end up very alone.'
I think it's incredibly easy to fall into this world,
so... It's too easy.
And I think it's virtually impossible to fully escape it.
The most surprising thing, for me, was the normalisation of it,
and the fact that these girls don't see themselves as victims.
They, if anything, see themselves more as perpetrators than I do.
I see them as victims, completely and utterly victims.