Stopping gang violence well before it starts

Combatting gun violence should be part of holistic crime prevention and start well before “gun control.” This is the view of the Faculty of Education representative who participated in the multi-stakeholder discussion ahead of the Federal Government announcement about the national freeze on the sale, purchase, and transfer of handguns. The announcement was made in Surrey on 21 October 2022, during a multi-stakeholder discussion, with participation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino. 

One of the participants in this conversation was Richard Tatomir, a Faculty of Education Practitioner Instructor, who also serves as the Clinical Professor, Counselling Psychology at the Surrey Anti-Gang Family Empowerment (SAFE) Program. Launched in January 2019 with funding from Public Safety Canada, the five-year, $7.5 million program takes a coordinated approach to addressing youth gang violence. 

“We are part of a multi-sectoral initiative highlighting the critical needs for mental health services coordinated with care from other partners that can determine whether a youth joins a gang or whether they build a future that their parents have dreamed for them,” notes Tatomir.

Led by the City of Surrey, SAFE is working to keep children and youth out of gangs while building positive life skills and increasing connections with family, school and community. With a large population of children and youth living in Surrey, SAFE involves 10 partner agencies delivering 11 individual programs that are disrupting negative pathways to gang violence.

Along with SFU Distinguished Professor Alanaise Ferguson, and current Faculty of Education Dean Pro Tem Kris Magnusson, Tatomir has been responsible for initiating, maintaining and expanding SFU’s partnership with SAFE. They are champions of its collaborative approach to care and believe that keeping communities and kids safe should start much earlier. 

They note that at the root of most crimes are health issues – the social determinants of health. While initiatives to increase policing and decrease guns may be helpful, they are at the enforcement and suppression stage of the continuum. 

SFU’s SAFE counselling program supports the complex mental health needs of over 1,000 youth and their families. These are individuals identified most at risk in the Surrey area for a host of complex problems, including criminalization/gang activity, suicide, violence to self and others, divorce, and physical and mental illnesses.

The counselling program does not only provide free, high quality counselling services, with a state-of-the-art facility and training curriculum in the heart of Surrey, but also fills a critical gap in student learning by giving trainees an innovative experiential component through its multi-disciplinary treatment team collaborative care approach.  Under experienced professional therapists and Faculty such as Tatomir, students from SFU and several other universities, serve clients for free in exchange for gaining the necessary client and supervision hours needed to become certified as professional counsellors.

A critical bottleneck however, is the low number of Faculty and support staff, as in order to maintain the highest quality of service delivery and meet counselling-therapy body requirements during this intensive component of their education, each Clinical Supervisor can typically only take on four to six supervisees at a time. However, the need is much greater. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association,  an estimated 84,000 children and youth in BC have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. 

“For example, in the South Fraser Region (where Surrey is located) the current wait time for children and youth to receive counselling services is over three months,” notes Tatomir. "The municipal, provincial and federal governments should all renew and expand their commitments to the Canada-leading SAFE initiative and its partnership with SFU, by ear-marking funds such as the $250-million Building Safer Communities announced with Bill C-21 to allow SAFE to continue beyond its current end-date of December 2023.”

“There is an urgent need for additional counselling faculty and staff, as well as increased funding to help address this complex problem well upstream, to prevent the factors leading to our youth feeling they need to carry a gun in the first place,” he concludes.