Insights Into Gang Culture in Belize Launches

Today, well-known activist and youth mentor Nuri Mohammed launched his book entitled “Insights Into Gang Culture in Belize” at the Leo Bradley Library. It’s a compilation of essays by Mohammed which span twenty-five years – two and a half decades in which Mohammed has played a very frontline and intimate role in youth, crime and violence issues. Today, the author spoke to us about his insights into a topic he knows only too well.

Nuri Mohammed, Author

Nuri Mohammed

“If we look at crime and violence simply as various incidents then it remains just a front page story or a nightly story on the news. But if we look at it as a culture then it requires us to look at the depth of what is creating that nightly news. There is depth to it when we take the cultural approach which is what we did in the book. It looks at youth, it looks at youth who are not necessarily involved in crime but it has a special focus on those youths who are involved with crime because our subject is in fact the crime culture. It also looks at violence and how violence has transformed itself from youths shooting each other because they belong to different groups to youths now shooting each other and they are friends and they grew up together. So clearly the whole evolution of violence in Belize has become even more problematic than simply incidents. We also look at crime itself and how that has evolved over the past twenty-five years from petty crime to more sophisticated crime. So that is the essence of the book itself.”

Mohammed says that the hope is that the book will encourage a research based approach to youth crime and violence issues, since it appears that pertinent parties have not learned from the lessons of the past.