An 11-year-old football fan Rhys Jones is gunned down at close range near his home in Croxteth, Liverpool by a hooded youth on a BMX bike. There were witnesses, including a woman and her young daughter, but they were reluctant to come forward despite an emotional appeal from the boy’s parents and had to be tracked down.
It’s understandable. This is the province of teen gangs armed with guns and knives, which boast of their deadly prowess and display their hardware on the Internet. Members are often as young as 13. Nobody wants to be next.
The tragic incident has become symbolic of society’s deeper ills and has been turned into a political hot potato by opposition parties.
Tory leader David Cameron — who famously advocated hugging a hoodie (a hooded teenager) — has accused the government of being in denial over the problem. His shadow justice secretary said, “the government seems paralyzed in the wake of this real concern in the country about the increase in violence, and, in particular, the increase in knife crime and gun crime.”
Indeed, over the last decade offenses involving guns have doubled from 60,000 to 120,000, while 18 youngsters have been murdered during the past eight months alone. On Sunday, three teenagers, including a 13-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl were shot by youths, whose faces were covered. In 1995, then Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was committed to tackling “the fracturing of society” and consequent crime. “Look at the wreckage of our broken society: Drugs, violence, and youngsters hanging around street corners with nothing to do,” he said. “We have to have the courage to build a new civil society, where everyone has a stake and everyone plays a part”.
Today his words ring hollow.
To be fair, the government has tried. There are stiff penalties for carrying weapons, while troublesome youths are often restrained by “Anti-social Behavior Orders” from associating with undesirables or loitering with intent. But laws can only go so far as young teens often do not have the capacity to understand that their actions have consequences that can affect their entire lives, are easily influenced and often feel they are invincible.
According to a Daily Mirror survey, one in 10 teenagers say they have carried a knife, while six percent of those surveyed admit to having carried a gun. Almost half of the 15-year-olds in the survey said they have been involved in a violent fight; two out of three admit to having been inebriated, while 25 percent say they smoke something at least once a week. Underage sex is also rife.
An article in the Mirror titled, “What’s it really like to be a teen in violent UK?” reads: “What the hell is happening to our children? Nearly half of you told the Mirror this week that gangs of feral teenagers have made you too scared to go out at night.” Last week the Daily Telegraph asked readers to post their views on the exodus of Britons to foreign climes — a record 385,000 emigrated during the period July 2005 to July 2006.
Reasons cited included high taxation, weather, and immigration with burgeoning crime featuring large. One respondent wrote, “Parents, teachers and policemen/women cannot even give a kid a clip around the ear for fear of ending up in the courts.” Another complained that criminals were more protected than the tax-paying public.
A third says: “Our culture seems to promote rudeness, bullying and disrespect at the expense of intelligence, politeness and gentility.” A fourth suggests: “Bring back the birch.” A fifth asks, “Do you really have to ask why when an 11-year-old boy is shot dead in broad daylight?”
Older people appear genuinely bemused. One of Sky News’ political correspondents mused that in his day it was considered daring to carry a penknife and carve one’s initials on a tree.
There is real fear, anger, and consternation. How can an advanced First World nation be so fearful of its own offspring? The problem is few bother to dig beneath the surface to investigate the root causes.
Britain’s growing divide between rich and poor is one theory and certainly there is evidence to suggest that most violent crimes perpetrated by juveniles occur in poorer areas around council estates.
There are those who believe the single-parent culture is to blame when children are brought up by working mothers too tired or too busy to be an effective disciplinarian. Others cite violent television programs or computer games as accentuating the problem. My unscientific belief is that it is all of the above but, most importantly, I lay the blame at the feet of parents, who lack basic parenting skills or who are simply too selfish to prioritize their duties as parents.
Last year alone, some 6,700 children were put on Britain’s child-protection register after suffering emotional abuse from their parents, while 5,100 were physically abused and 2,600 sexually abused.
These could represent just the tip of the iceberg. In recent weeks, we heard of babies and toddlers tortured and killed by young mothers in collusion with their live-in boyfriends.
I recently watched the British TV program “What not to wear” on satellite, and was amazed to hear a young girl of around seven— to eight-years old praising her mother for re-adjusting well to single-parenthood after her “last partner” moved out. Not “her husband”; not even her “partner” but her “last partner.” What shocked me was the nonchalant fashion in which one of the program’s hosts accepted this statement as a norm. If this is the norm, then the family as a unit has broken down and instead children are confronted with a string of temporary surrogate “fathers”.
Every baby is born as a blank slate apart from genetic predispositions. Parents, teachers and the environment in which they grow up each play a part in molding and shaping a nation’s offspring. Isn’t it time that Britons stopped lashing out at their “feral” children and began examining the reasons why these young people are angry enough to pick up a gun and senselessly murder one of their own?
