Justin Rollins would be the first to admit that he had quite the traumatic childhood.
Born into a racially mixed family in Surrey, UK, Rollins’ father left when he was just a young boy, leaving him to be raised by his white working class family.
When he was only three years old, he was attacked by his stepdad's large Doberman dog, leaving him with 'scars going down [his] head', and after that, Rollins said that his behaviour started to change, seemingly as a result of lasting impacts from the terrifying dog attack.
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“I started to bang my head to get to sleep, which is known as rhythmic movement disorder,” he said.
Things didn't get any easier for Rollins as he got older, and at the age of four he became ill with Guillain Barre Syndrome – something that left him paralysed for weeks and in a children’s hospital for a sustained period of time.
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By the time he was five, a ‘significant’ event in Rollins' life saw him left in the care of a child minder.
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He explained: "The child minder’s son, who was probably like early teens, would strangle me with a fishing wire.”
Rollins was then sent back to the childminder; a move which left a real ‘damaging effect’ on his mental health.
“To this day, I still don't know why I got put back into that care because obviously that's child abuse,” Rollins said.
“So, the physical abuse stopped but the mental torture started, and then my behaviour took a turn, so then I started being violent towards other children.”
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Destructive behaviour became very much a problem as he grew into his teenage years, as Rollins recalled: “I would hang around the local streets and I was setting fires, smashing windows, being that destructive kid.”
This is when Rollins came across graffiti, and in particular, graffiti tagging.
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He started with tagging his name all across South London, which Rollins said helped his anxiety.
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And at the age of 14, Rollins met Joe – someone who he would go on to make a gang with known as WZ, which stood for Warriorz.
Before long, they became involved in a turf war against a fellow London gang known as WK – a very similar name indeed.
WK were from the London borough of Kingston, while Rollins’ gang was from Merton.
As he and Joe started to build WZ in late 1998, more ‘disturbed’ kids wanted to join the gang, according to Rollins.
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As the leader of WZ, other crew members looked up to Rollins and relied on him for direction and leadership. However, he admitted that he was ‘vulnerable’ due to his traumatic experiences as a younger boy.
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As WZ started to rise, WK started making threats to Rollins, which scared him.
“I would run from them when I was on my own and if I ever happened to be in their area,” he said.
When he wasn't alone, Rollins had to hide his fear of rival gangs by acting as the ‘loudmouth, yapping, Jack Russell type’ to impress his friends in WZ, and in the Shadow Krew – a gang that had come into Rollins’ area and were friendly with WZ.
So, in an effort to impress his mates, Rollins said that he was ‘going to get WK’, and that he was going to essentially fight them on the upcoming Friday.
“Friday came along, and I didn’t realise what I had said – there was up to 30 children that had heard about this big fight with WK,” Rollins added.
“I didn’t have the confidence to turn around and say, ‘oh sorry guys, I’ve made a huge mistake’.”
The fight went ahead, but it was one that Rollins regrets still to this day.
He said: “I was leading a group of 30 kids, and we’ve come to the part where WK are hanging around.”
As Rollins approached WK, he noticed a member of the rival gang that he recognised, but Shadow Krew shouted to attack.
Rollins picked up a piece of concrete and hit the familiar face round the head.
“I started to attack WK and the rest of the gang followed,” he said.
At this point, Shadow Krew pulled out their knives, and the encounter became pure mayhem and chaos.
Rollins added: “After an hour we are all back together, it was pats on the back, fist bumps, it was like we were all proud of the savage attack.
“But what stood out to me was how I was getting all the attention and this gang [Shadow Krew] now looked to me as the leader."
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That fight was a landmark moment for WZ in the gang hierarchy in South London, with Rollins saying that they became feared overnight, but that didn’t stop the then-gang leader feeling petrified with all these people looking up to him.
Rollins’ mental health was at an all-time low, and he knew he must escape from the chaos.
It got so bad for the former gang member that he entered the London Underground in a drunken state with a death wish.
He then tried to rob someone with a meat cleaver, with the unfortunate passenger cutting himself on the blade.
After an altercation with another passenger and an attempted escape, police caught up to Rollins and arrested him. As a result, he was handed a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence in 2002.
Rollins said: “I deserve to go to prison for violent robbery that I've done. But I didn't realise that I was suffering from mental health issues, complex PTSD, and OCD.”
In prison, he realised his fellow gang members were not really his friends as they never visited or wrote to him while he was behind bars.
His best mate Joe had also been found dead in New Malden, making his time behind bars even more traumatic.
“It was an uphill battle, one that many, many years of learning about myself, [trying] different sort of therapies to literally turn my life around,” he remarked.
When Rollins was released from prison, the landscape of gangs in his stretch of London was a very different one.
The gang that he started with Joe was no longer around, though this was probably for the best as Rollins admitted he would have likely slipped back into it once he was released.
But the former gang member is in a better place now as he uses his passion for graffiti art in a more positive way.
These days, Rollins is a graffiti artist and uses his talent in his own mural company – Mural Maestro.
The former gang member has even written a book – The Lost Boyz: A Dark Side of Graffiti, which released in 2011.
The Lost Boyz is studied within criminology after it was picked up by Professor David Wilson.
When he got the call to say that his book would be studied, Rollins admits that he was still in a dark place. But when The Lost Boyz was used as a set text for the criminology degree, it really helped Rollins’ general mindset.
He said: “I didn't realise all these 500 students had been studying it. So being in quite a dark place, and then I've managed to do two good lectures with Professor David Wilson. It really boosted my confidence.
“I thought, wow, are people actually learning from my experiences, and then it went on into other universities.”
That, combined with varied forms of therapy over the years, has helped Rollins turn his life around.
Now he even feels comfortable reflecting on his dark past, and how it led him to where he is today.
Callum Jones