Loveless and lonely — why girls really get into gangs

A violent father pushed Isha Nembhard to find solace in a life of drugs and crime. She tells Jasmine Gardner how she became trapped — and what helped her escape

Portrait of former girl gang member Chyna Pic: Matt Writtle

Jasmine Gardner

14 May 2012

Quitting a girl gang aged 16 might sound like the best thing Isha Nembhard — aka Chyna — ever did, but it didn’t solve her problems. In fact, the breakdown of her “fam”, the group of girls she had robbed, thieved and fought with since the age of 11, was only the beginning.

“All of the things that I was doing then might sound really bad to other people, but they’re all minor things,” says 24-year-old Nembhard. “If I had stopped then, I would have been all right.”

Nembhard is sitting in the offices of her publishers. Last year her story became a book, How I Escaped a Girl Gang, which was written under her street name Chyna, as an amalgamation of events from her own life and other girls’ stories.

Today she’s telling just her story for the first time, under her real name, in a powerful voice that reverberates around the tiny room, her menacing single silver tooth a symbol of her past life.

“Young girls can easily, without knowing, pick up with the wrong crowd, get the wrong boyfriend and end up how I ended up,” she says of her decision to go public. “I want everyone to open their eyes and know that maybe people do the wrong things, but there’s always a reason behind it.”

For Nembhard, everything began with her father.

Born in 1987, she grew up in and around estates in Croydon. Her mother worked as an immigration officer at the Home Office and her father was a painter and decorator. Both are second-generation Jamaican. “There were a lot of arguments. Fist fighting as well,” she says. “My dad used to drink a lot … never did my mum or my dad hit me,” Nembhard explains, but her father would beat her mother on a regular basis. “They think you might forget about it or you’re not witnessing it or not feeling the emotional effects of it. But actually it sticks with you more.”

One day, after her mother had taken a particularly bad beating, her two uncles on her mother’s side turned up with “weapons” to threaten Nembhard’s father. To stop the confrontation, Nembhard clung to her father’s leg, but the police were called and that was the last she saw of her father for several years.

By the age of 11 Nembhard “felt it was me alone and that no one understood me,” she says. Her father gone, her mother found a new partner, whom Nembhard hated, and had a baby, a half-sister whom Nembhard resented. Her only role models were her two uncles — both criminals, importing “crates of drugs into the country”.

So she found a new family — her gang (or “fam”, as she called them), a core group of some 10 girls who lived in her area and went to the same secondary school.

“The only affection I was getting was through the gang,” says Nembhard. “But they weren’t my teachers or my mother. Approval and a push was what I needed — and someone to believe in me.”

Spread across three school years, most of the girls had difficult home lives, some with drug-addicted parents, and were united by their disruptive behaviour, weed-smoking habits and a rivalry with another girl gang.

“I remember we had a party and 35 girls waited outside for us with baseball bats, hammers and metal chains. When we came out of the party they had it in for us.”

Nembhard used to carry a snooker ball wrapped in a sock as a weapon. “No one thinks about the damage that you could really be doing. We was just thinking embarrassment, status … when you’re young, you don’t care.”

By the time she was 16, the gang had broken up. “Some girls wanted to go to college and didn’t want to get into trouble any more,” says Nembhard. She finished school without a single qualification. Nembhard’s mother then kicked her out of home and, with both her uncles in prison, she took up with a series of dangerous and criminal men.

“Living by myself was very hard — I was finding it difficult to survive. Then I met a boy.” Her first boyfriend, at age 16, was “a drug dealer” eight years older than her. “He broke my virginity. It’s a power thing. They think, ‘I’ve got you now’,” she says.

Another “was so sweet but he was also dangerous,” says Nembhard. “He was big time dealing drugs. He was robbing people, and people were phoning saying they were going to kidnap me. When you’ve got a boyfriend out on the roads [dealing drugs], the target is his girlfriend.”

But the most significant was a man whom she calls Rashid in the book. “Rashid was my prince,” she says. Although “he was well known to the police” and “was in a lot deeper in every way — with guns, armed robbery”, Nembhard fell for him.

“He was Muslim and he believed in keeping me at home. He would come home with loads of money and he didn’t tell me where it was coming from, but I knew it was from criminal acts. It didn’t bother me because I was with him,” she says.

On licence from prison for a previous offence, Rashid was wanted for questioning for attempted murder. Failing to report to the police under the conditions of his licence, he was re-jailed for a year. He left Nembhard £12,000, but in three months she had spent it on “Raving, clothes, living...I lived a fast lifestyle.” So, to earn money she took up “shotting” — dealing heroin and crack cocaine.

“I would hold the drugs under my tongue. I had to swallow it a couple of times because if I didn’t I would get arrested and go to prison. I wasn’t thinking this could kill me.

“Young boys especially think it’s glamorous to sell drugs. It’s not. It’s boring. You stay in the dirtiest places and it’s dangerous. The same people you’re selling to will cut your throat for it. That’s how much they want it.”

Then one day her best friend was shot in the head.

“If it didn’t happen so brutally I would have been all right. I saw him bleeding on the floor. I became very depressed, drinking a bottle of brandy a day.”

Her friend had, of course, been heavily involved in criminal activity. “No one is going to prey on you and kill you for no reason. I love my friend and he’s gone now, but he done badness like what happened to him.”

It was the last straw for Nembhard, who decided to change — helped by one of her uncles who had left prison and set up an organisation called Foundation 4 Life to turn young offenders’ lives around. Now she is a behavioural consultant, earning £20 an hour helping children with problems in school and working with a Metropolitan Police-funded project called HEART, which aims to steer young women away from gang violence.

“I know I’m the perfect person for this job because of what I’ve been through. I didn’t want to be going through what I did, but I just didn’t know a way out — that led me to go deeper and deeper into it. If I could just change one person’s mind I could make a difference.”

But for her, she feels that there was never any other option. “If I did see [another way] I would have tried. I didn’t see none. The public can say there’s no excuse for that, but until you’re standing in that situation you haven’t got a clue what that person is going through. Everyone has different struggles and that is what this book is about. There’s always a reason for everything.”

foundation4life.co.uk . How I escaped a Girl Gang by Chyna (Coronet,£6.99).

Loveless and lonely — why girls really get into gangs

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