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Youth gangsters have grown to become a common sight and a festering issue in
the Western province o f Sri Lanka, especially in the Colombo district. This issue is excessively
prevalent among the poverty stricken and ill-educated communities in the city. Deprived o f the
jovs o f a normal and secured childhood and adolescence, many o f these children get involved
in abrasive street gang activities and face adverse life threatening experiences that even include
death through criminal activities unleashed by themselves or other rival groups. Those who
survive roam the streets or waste away in despair, relieving their suffering by escaping into the
often self-destructive lifestyles and income generation mechanisms. Purely for survival
purposes, they lead a gloomily ignorant and dangerous existence on the streets. For them,
every day is a cycle o f torment: hunger, thirst, risky and poorly paid jobs, disease, loneliness,
lack o f affection, police harassment, legal red tape, institutions, sordid prisons, drugs, slavery'
disguised as housework or even bare-faced slavery, prostitution, sexual abuse and terminal
diseases such as AIDS that come as a result. Merely to understand or combat this apparently
incontrollable, growing and unbearable phenomenon, authorities and academics must ask:
What are the root causes0 Who invites them to the streets? What sustains them on the
streets?ln addressing the above, this paper has been developed to understand the factors that
attract youth onto the streets and the factors that play a pivotal part in sustaining them on the
streets, giving specific emphasis to youth gangs operating in Colombo and suburbs. In
supplementing, the research focused on areas to ascertain the negative impact youth gangs
have on the lives o f general public in the specified area. The Research focused on 493
identified youth gang members belonging to 75 gangs within 14 GN divisions in Colombo city,
within the age group o f 18 - 32 years. A ll the said gangs and the gang members were identified
within the study area through a snowball technique using available contacts and via the data
gathered using formal research methods
