Migrant Families Send Children Back to Somalia to Escape London's Knife Violence
Somali parents are sending their UK-born sons back to third world country for safety
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Somali parents are sending their UK-born children back to their lawless third-world homeland in Africa to escape the violent knife crime epidemic in Sadiq Khan's London, according to reports.
Knife violence, drugs, and street gang crime are spiraling out of control in the British capital, with some migrant families now seeing war-torn Somalia as a safer option for their sons.
Parents say they are sending their British teenagers to Somalia - itself a haven for ISIS, who bombards the African state with terror attacks - because of concerns that police cannot protect them from rising deadly knife crime.
Between 50 and 70 percent of the Somali community in Islington, north London, are "directly affected" by knife violence and "county lines" drugs crime.
Mothers, who arrived from the troubled African country during the 1990s, told British newspaper the Observer they felt they had “no choice” but to send their children away from an increasingly dangerous United Kingdom.
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According to Breitbart, Sadia Ali, the treasurer of the Islington Somalia Forum and a mother of seven, said she sent her 15-year-old son away to live in the country she once fled as a result of the threat of local gang violence in London, telling the newspaper that many other families in the area have done likewise for their children’s safety.
“Hundreds of youngsters have been taken to Somalia, Somaliland, and Kenya, some taken all the way to the rural areas,” she said.
"Parents feel they have no choice if they want their son to be safe."
Rakhia Ismail, Islington deputy mayor, added: “Sending them away has become the only way they can be safer.
"This issue of safety has been repeatedly raised by the community but nobody has listened.
"So many children have gone abroad.
"Two weeks ago, there was a stabbing and a child was taken back home two days later.”
Yusuf Sheikh Omar, a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, lamented last week that “knife crime in British cities has brought many young Somalis into the criminal justice system and claimed several lives.”
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Young Somali men in Western nations are growing up “alienated and at risk of violence,” warned Dr Omar in the Conversation, where he argued that the demographic was “particularly susceptible to criminality and Islamist extremism” as a result of issues such as “marginalization, poverty, unemployment, racism, identity crises [and] Islamophobia.”
Illustrating how Somalia is an increasingly safe country for migrants to return to, the government of Denmark refusing to rule out deporting illegal Somali immigrants back to their homeland in the Horn of Africa.
The Danish government asserts it is now becoming safe enough for them to return.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen raised the issue after a meeting with his Somali counterpart in Egypt recently.
In December, the country’s migration minister Inger Støjberg had urged individuals from Somalia whose “life and health are no longer at risk” in their homelands to “return home and [help] rebuild the country.”
