Trust : a true story of women & gangs / Pip Desmond.

Imagine being a middle-class, university-educated young Pakeha woman from Wellington's leafy suburbs and turning your back on all that to live in a house with Black Power gang connections in the rundown inner-city. This memoir lifts the lid on the lives of women who love gang members, and the price they pay. Imagine being a middle-class, university-educated young Pakeha woman from Wellington's leafy suburbs and turning your back on all that to live in a house with Black Power gang connections in the rundown inner-city. Imagine organising the young women who come to live in that house, most of whom are from a background of dysfunction, alienation, abuse and poverty, and trying to weld them into an effective workforce. Imagine being trapped in your bedroom while a would-be rapist is trying to break down the door. Imagine fronting up to the national president of Black Power demanding that the gang rape of women - or blocking - comes to an end? Imagine fleeing the house in panic one day, knowing that a group of Nomads gang members is on its way to rip it to pieces? Pip Desmond can not only imagine it, she also did all this. Trust is a remarkable memoir, the story of the years she spent with the Aroha Trust in the late 1970s, the back stories of the women she came to stand alongside and count as friends, and the stories of the lives of a key group of those women up to the present day. Back in the late 1970s their futures looked at the very least uncertain, at the very worst bleak. Thirty years on, the path for some has been redemptive and they have moved on to better things. Others have been trapped by their pasts. Told with passion, anger, tenderness, humour and force, this remarkable book reflects on a period of social experimentation and lifts the lid on the lives of women who love gang members, and the price they pay.