Another Day, Another Teenage Stabbing

Yet again we wake to the news of a teenager being stabbed, or rather I awoke to it being a kind of afterthought story. It appears that we are becoming grudgingly accepting of what seems a modern fact of life. The stabbing of anyone is a tragedy, but I think the stabbing of a teenager by another teenager is a monumental tragedy. That being so it is disturbing that society is just shrugging its collective shoulders as the victims mount up. I am of the quaint old fashioned notion that no crime is acceptable, however teenagers wielding deadly weapons in anger is unacceptable to a different degree of magnitude. As a society we should not be pushing this down the agenda, we should not be meekly accepting it as a fact of modern life. I think I am justified in being morally aghast at the spate of teenagers being stabbed or in some cases shot by other teenagers. What kind of society is this becoming?

We really need to start clamping down hard on this form of crime. The idea that such depraved behaviour should be tolerated is anathema. I don’t think that this sort of story should be pushed down the bulletins. We should be confronted with the full scale of the problem, if we are not we are in danger of allowing it to spiral even more out of control. We do not yet know the name or age of the latest victim, we do know that there is a family being laid out on the rack watching their child in hospital with serious injuries not knowing what the long term impact is going to be. I fell for them desperately, it must be a complete nightmare, and it is a situation that too many families are cast into these days.

I am not an expert in juvenile crime, I do not know what the solution to this is. Somehow though we must tackle the fact that far too many of our teenagers are resorting to criminal violence to solve their disputes. We must look at what is going wrong that these young people feel the need to carry such weapons. Whatever the reason we need to tackle that as simply penalising the carrying of knives more harshly isn’t going to be half as successful and will probably breed fresh issues. What I know for a fact though is that we shouldn’t simply go on watching even a part of this generation of young people destroying itself.

Iran must stop executing children

Iran has been in the news recently over its attitude to homosexuality, however this is not the only thing wrong in Iran. Clearly high up the international agenda is Iran’s attempt to gain access to nuclear weapons technology which is a deeply worrying thought. Something that is rarely mentioned publicly and deserves a higher profile is Iran’s despicable application of the death penalty to minors. Iran frequently sentences and then carries out executions on those who are either under 18 at the time of death or under 18 at the time of crime. Both of these are in contravention of international law, indeed Iran is a signatory on the Convention on Rights of the Child which expressly forbids this. However the killing of young people continues, and young girls seem to fare far worse in this.

 A couple of examples, in August 2004 Atefeh Rajabi a 16 year old girl was executed by hanging in the street. Her crime was ‘acts incompatible with chastity’, her trial was a sham allowing no legal representation for the defendant. She was subjected to a torrent of abuse at including, according to reports, from the judge. At the time of her ‘crime’ and during the trial this girl was mentally ill. None of this mattered and she was reportedly hanged in the street. Another example is Farshid Farigi who was executed at the age of 21 for crimes reputedly committed between the ages of 14-16. Reports suggested that this young man was flogged 74 times prior to his execution.

 Iran is a vile and violent regime, it has the power to cease the execution of minors. It has signed up to international protocols prohibiting the application of the death penalty in cases where the defendant is under 18 or the crime was committed under the age of 18. Since 1990 Amnesty International has been made aware of 13 cases in Iran where the death penalty has been applied to a minor or a person whose crimes were committed as a minor, 6 of these were in 2005. There are probably many cases that do not get to the attention of Amnesty. It is high time the international community started to bear down hard on the Iranian refusal to adhere to the commitments it has made in respect of children. Even now Iran continues to have children and those whose ‘crimes’ were committed as children under the threat of execution. The world needs to take a much much tougher line with Iran on this.

What sort of society are we….

When things like this happen? I just am utterly flabbergasted. I mean how on earth is it possible for a boy of 12 to be so sexualised to be capable of this. Obviously ultimately individuals are responsible for their own actions, but when the individual is a minor and they are committing crimes like this then it is right to question what is going wrong in our social framework.

Is this an era of youth?

We hear a lot of silliness about young people being more engaged and discerning now than in previous generations. Sure, young people are listened to more than probably at any time in history. Some would argue that young people are disproportionately pandered to, I will leave it to others to judge. We certainly have a lot of very talented young people succeeding in all walks of life, as musicians, politicians, entrepreneurs and the like. However I actually think that because more young people are in the mix the truly stellar characters have a harder time emerging from the cloud of mediocrity. I also think that young people succeeded more often in previous generations.

Let us think back generations, Alexander of Macedon was a young man in his twenties when he conquered most of the known world. Octavian was again in his twenties when he overturned the Roman Republic and outmaneuvered politicians and generals twice his age and with infinitely more experience. Alfred the Great, demolished the Viking army and ensured that Saxon England would survive again largely in his youth. Moving on several English Kings did more in their early twenties and teens than in their later life. Look at the arts where Mozart was composing in his teens and twenties works of infinite complexity, Schubert likewise. Pitt was Prime Minister before his 25th birthday. Look even into more modern times where people like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were fomenting revolution in their late twenties.

Where are we now then when the height of ambition for the average young person is to get on X Factor! Is this the age of young people, perhaps but young people of the past certainly outshone those of nowadays!

CF Elections

I am a natural sceptic about youth wings of political parties, or any organisation, it smacks to me of sticking people in a time capsule marked ‘Open when grown up’. I am even more dubious about elections to the ruling bodies of such elections, the candidates take it far too seriously in most respects and treat it as if the prize were equivalent to running the United Nations. In recent CF elections there have been manifesto’s, websites, campaign leaflets, hustings and the full works and yet no-one outside of the faithful will ever have heard or seen of most of the winners! The same is no doubt true of the other parties too. This year I am suspending my usual cynicism and will certainly be hoping for one winner to emerge from the process. Daryl Williams would make an excellent National Chairman of Conservative Future, he certainly will have my vote!

The Low Points of 2007

I think that the biggest tragedy of 2007 has been the explosion of teen killings across our inner cities. It seems that hardly a week went by this year without some teenager being stabbed or shot. In many instances the perpetrators appear to have been other teenagers, this is the most disturbing aspect of this. To me the death of any child, and let us be clear that is what they are, is an unspeakable tragedy to see a child murdered and by another child or children is verging on the obscene. There are too many families for whom Christmas 2007 is going to be the most painful they have ever had to bear, for it will be the first without a loved child. I cannot imagine how completely awful the build up to Christmas must be for these families. Last Christmas was tough enough for my family coping with the loss of my father, who passed away after a long illness. I could not begin to imagine how much worse it would have been if circumstances had been different.

The spree of child on child killings that swept the UK in the last 12 months has been described as the worst year for teen deaths on record. I desperately hope that 2008 will not break that macabre record, I fear though that it may. The fact of the matter is that the killing of teenagers by teenagers is a symptom of a deeper malaise, it highlights that in certain parts of our communities there are teenagers for whom respect is non-existent, for whom fear is the prime mover, where acceptance is absent at home and only found in the arms of gangs. These gangs offer a sub-social respectability and in many instances a career path. These gangs are a twisted society within a society. They feed off the failure of mainstream society, peddling drugs, soaking up the victims of educational failure and giving them an alternative dream to live. To my mind the problems that the spate of killings has highlighted are deep and extremely dangerous, to the communities in which they exist, to society as a whole, and palpably to the teenagers who get caught up and can end up paying the heaviest price.

Death and should visit children only in extreme circumstances, it is a part of life from which we wisely shield children. Violence likewise we seek to shield the young from, graphic representations of which are subject to film classification and are not allowed to be seen by younger people. It is a damning verdict on the whole of society that we prevent children seeing violent films but have allowed the social fabric to crumble to such an extent that they can witness and actually perpetrate crimes of appalling violence themselves. As a society we need to start drawing the boundaries and enforcing them much more stringently than we have over the last decade and more. As I write this I am almost in tears for the waste of life that has occurred in 2007, young people who could have been future footballers, artists, CEO’s, musicians, poets, businesspeople, or anything that they wished tragically cut down before their prime. We urgently need to do something to choke this social cancer.

Let us not be complacent though, 2008 may not see the number of killings that 2007 did. That would absolutely be a good thing, but we should not kid ourselves that the underlying problems would have gone away. We need a concerted effort to rebuild our shattered communities, to provide the right forms of safety, to eradicate the pervasive fear that persuades a teenager to seek a knife or gun. We need to ensure that education is a proper route to success in all our communities, we need to crack down on the scourge of drugs. We need to work out why there are so many gangs now in existence and to cut off the resentments that fuel their growth. We need to do this because no family should have to go through what in 2007 too many families are still going through.

What the hell is going wrong with the UK?

Today has seen the shocking and senseless murder of an 11 year old boy in Liverpool. It is not often that a news story shakes me rigid but this is only about the second time in my lifetime that a story has. The other time was when the full horror of the Jamie Bulger murder became apparent. The murder of Rhys Jones is a horrific and brutal crime, it is the most unbelievable tragedy for his family and they must be inconsolable at this awful time.

When I heard the story, my first reaction was simply ‘oh God, no’. It is almost beyond the bounds of credence to believe what appear to be the facts in this case; that one child approached another child and took his life in an instant in what appears to be the coldest methods possible. I would struggle to believe it possible in a country like Zimbabwe on the verge of collapse but to have to believe it possible of Great Britain is staggering. This vile crime is the latest in a long line of youth on youth killings, it is a monumental tragedy when any child dies, but that so many have died at the hands of their peers is almost inhuman.

No doubt we will have a parade of analysis over what is causing this horrific epidemic of violence amongst our young people. Everything from video games to junk food will be blamed, most of it will be well wide of the mark. However one thing is absolutely clear, as a society we can no longer sit back and hope that things will improve with time. They are not improving. We owe it to all the victims, all the families who have been so cruelly bereaved to truly get to the bottom of this. To get the illegal guns off our streets and out of the hands of criminal thugs who are clearly letting them pass into the hands of children. To tackle the underlying fear that means that too many young people feel compelled to carry a weapon. To find out the reasons why some young people are so desensitized to violence and death that they kill in often brutal fashion, and start to tackle it.

This violence and mayhem amongst our young people is a festering sore in our society, it is destroying too many families and damaging too many communities. We can not allow it to continue unchecked or unchallenged. We have failed too many young people, too many families, already through a lack of proper concerted action. Please, lets not fail anymore in this way.

Thoughts on the recent shootings

Over the last couple of weeks 3 children have been shot in south London. This is a very disturbing development; it is a tragedy for the families of the victims and is worrying for the rest of civil society. We used to believe that crime was committed by and against adults, we were aware of the odd youngster who got involved in a petty criminal activity. By and large however the serious crimes were largely an adult domain. I think the first point at which this illusion was comprehensively shattered in my memory was the awful murder of Jamie Bulger all the way back in 1993. I think that that was the first point at which many people really started to see the cracks appearing in our society. The brutality of the crime and the youth of the perpetrators caused an international sensation at the time.

Over the ensuing decade or so we have witnessed an escalation of the types of crimes that young people are willing to involve themselves in. We have seen more and more types of crime being perpetrated by what appears to be younger and younger criminals. Drugs, rape, assault, affray, motoring offences and murder now seem to be crimes that are perpetrated by those as young as 12 or 13. This has been accompanied by a massive increase in the perception of low-level disorder amongst teenagers. We know the stories from friends and relatives of how town centres are virtual no-go areas on Friday and Saturday nights due to gangs of young adults drunk and aggressive. Many of these youngsters are under 18. The police in many areas seem powerless or at a complete loss as to how to deal with this escalating phenomenon.

We have now witnessed in the last few days the catastrophe of 3 young men being gunned down in South London. This is the latest in a long list of horrific crimes that seem to point to a virtual collapse of civil society in our cities. That children as young as 14 and 15 can get sucked into a world of gun-toting, drug-dealing gangs roaming the streets like some proto-mafia is a symbol of a deep malaise in our country. It presents the most depressing and deeply awesome challenge for a generation. How do we even attempt to rebuild a society that is so shattered in some of our cities? What is the cause of the breakdown of society in these areas? These are questions that need urgently to be answered, and we must not turn this into a partisan opportunity to score points. If politicians can not recognise that this wave of violence is as threatening to our way of life as any al-Qaeda terrorist then they ought to be in another profession.

So what do we do? Firstly we recognise that this is as much a social as well as a law and order problem. We have created a limitless society over the last few decades where the maxim is “I will do exactly as I please”. This is bad enough, but when there appears to be little sanction when the application of that maximum causes real harm to others you have a recipe for the kind of chaos being visited on our city streets. So we need to urgently re-impose limits in our society, to sketch out once more the boundaries of a decent society. We then need to ensure that the sanctions for breaching those boundaries are both fair and commanding of public support, and applied equally to one and all. Then we need to look at the roots of this criminality, the systematic destruction of community, the breakdown of family life and the persistent failure by schools to deal with discipline issues.

We are all guilty of looking at issues in society and blaming society, forgetting that we all make up society and so are equally responsible for the problem and equally part of the solution. We are currently being encouraged to go green to save the planet; we also need to go responsible to save our society. That means taking responsibility for the state of our neighbourhoods, taking responsibility for our children and taking responsibility for ensuring a community spirit. Over decades there has been a tendency to pass the buck on our responsibilities, its anyone else’s problem but our own. This needs to be stopped. We need to promote family life; this is as much a personal responsibility as a government responsibility. Too often in families there is a lack of basic communication, a lack of time for each other that will foster respect for each other and is the basis of fitting into a wider community. Schools need to recognise that most of them have issues with discipline and bullying, no school likes to admit to an issue of bullying but every school will have bullies. It doesn’t have to be a problem.

Why does school bullying figure in the recent shootings? Well a school should be a mirror for society, a microcosm if you like. Bullying is a breach of the school compact, it is also deeply damaging to the esteem of the victim. If a school is seen to not recognise and deal with the problem it magnifies the effect on the victim, the victim of bullying will then seek ways of improving their self-esteem, and the esteem in which they are held. It creates a pernicious cycle that can spill into acts of criminality in wider society, so it needs to be nipped in the bud. We can not build a better society if parts of that society are not tackling their issues.

So in order to start rebuilding our society that appears on the brink of collapse, certainly in parts of our inner cities, will take a massive effort on the part of all of us. It will involve direction from government certainly, but it is down to all of us to do our bit. If we don’t we will be looking back in another few years as more and more teenagers become the perpetrators and tragic victims of crimes like the ones we have witnessed recently. I think we owe it to those who have been snatched from this world so tragically early to at least try to make it a better world for those they left behind.