What would it take to stop Black boys from disappearing into drug trafficking networks across northern Ontario? Not more policing, argues prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but more safe housing, funded schools and community spaces where youth can gather safely.

That is what a growing body of Black community leaders is arguing in response to a crisis that The Fifth Estate documentary Missing Black Boys brought into national view in January: Black boys as young as 14 are lured into gangs and sent to remote parts of the province to sell drugs.

Youth gang recruitment is not a matter of individual choice or criminality, but one shaped by inequality, institutional neglect and racialized perceptions. And punishment alone cannot solve it.

Indigenous youth from northern reserves, where some communities have declared a state of emergency, are also part of this troubling reality. The same conditions that leave Black boys vulnerable to recruitment into exploitative and violent economies leave Indigenous youth vulnerable too.

Anishinaabe journalist and author Tanya Talaga has described this as an insidious web of drug-related violence in which Indigenous and Black youth are disproportionately impacted.

Black leaders respond

In recent months, community leaders, educators and public workers have come together to ask what makes Black youth vulnerable to recruitment, and what kinds of structural interventions can prevent it?

Black boys are not just going missing. They are being drawn into exploitative economies and transnational and intercity webs of violence. Recruitment........

© The Conversation