How to Tackle the Youths Gathering Outside your House

Some teenage gangs will often congregate on parks and street corners for want of having no better place to hang out. Quite often, this will be perfectly innocent and there will be nothing sinister about it. However, it can create a problem if they are constantly congregating outside of your own house with issues such as noise and litter just two of the less serious problems this can cause.

Don’t Overreact

The chances are that any gangs of teenagers who happen to be congregating outside your house will not be there for long. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, you should simply ignore their behaviour as it’s likely that they will move on before too long. However, if you’re starting to find that this occurs regularly, there are a few things you can do.

Speak To Them Directly

Nobody wants to have their lives blighted by teenage gangs or groups of kids persistently hanging around outside of their house. Even if they’ve not got any bad intentions, it can make people who live there feel quite intimidated. In deciding to speak to them directly in an effort to get them to move on, it’s important to assess the situation first of all. If, for example, they have been drinking alcohol the situation might get out of hand and there have been so many cases where adults have been attacked when confronting youths so if you’re not 100% sure of your own safety, call the police. For incidents like this where they are just outside your house but not threatening anybody’s safety or damaging property, the best thing would be to call your local police force and ask them to send out an officer out to investigate. In most cases, a stern word from a police officer will see them move on but the police also have the power to issue a dispersal order and to take other action if necessary.

If you do decide to go out and talk to them, be very careful, keep a safe distance and ensure you can get back into your house quickly if need be and avoid any confrontation. It’s often very much a judgement call but if you’re polite and simply ask them to move on because you can’t get to sleep or your baby’s crying, for example, they’ll usually comply with your wishes but if you’re in any doubt about your own safety, don’t confront them directly and call the police instead. You should also go back inside and call the police at the first sign of any hostility or abuse. Don't make the mistake of 'rising to the bait' or being drawn into an argument which could escalate the problem.

Sitting On Walls Or Fences

If teenage gangs are congregating by sitting on your wall or fence, they are in fact trespassing and there are laws against this. Equally, there are antisocial laws relating to noise, litter and damage to property so the police have a duty to investigate these matters if you are concerned.

Community Initiatives

For many kids, the problems caused by congregating outside of people’s homes come about as a result of there being nothing to do or nowhere else to go – at least in their eyes. If these kinds of problems are occurring in your neighbourhood it can often be a good idea to get together with other residents and with local community groups and community police officers to see if there is anything that can be introduced that might help to alleviate the problem. For many teenage kids, they often feel marginalised within their local community. By getting involved in community initiatives which demonstrate that you care about teenagers’ opinions being heard, you may learn a lot. Maybe you can get involved in helping to set up some kind of youth group in your area and it often helps if you speak with the heads of local secondary schools who may also be able to shed some light on the causes of the problems. This might also enable you to jointly come up with some kind of initiative whereby the youths will have a safe place to go to socialise and to engage in some types of sporting or leisure activities.

In certain ‘no-go’ areas, any problems that arise as the result of teenage gangs ‘taking over the streets’ so to speak should be left in the hands of the police and relevant authorities to deal with. It is important, however, that as local residents of a particular community, you don’t tar all teenage kids with the same brush. Many of them are simply bored and often hang about in gangs or large groups because they feel excluded from their local community in that their hopes, dreams and even their fears are simply ignored. Therefore, in some cases, by residents collectively giving up a little of their own free time to address the concerns of the youths in conjunction with local community groups, this can often have the effect of helping teenagers to find a suitable place for them to meet up and to enjoy each other’s company and participate in stimulating activities which will help them feel a part of their own community as well as making the neighbourhood a more peaceful place to live.

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