This could get doubly out of control (Young Offenders - What Should The Law Do With Them?)

Member Name: grandmasterflash

Product:	Young Offenders - What Should The Law Do With Them?
Date:	03/06/03 (746 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A consensus is needed, not all young kids are bad eggs

Disadvantages: rose tinted reminiscence leads to stagnation and disillusionment, things are getting worse

First thing I need to do for this piece is to establish something- there was no such thing as the "good old days". They never existed. Only forty years ago racist violence, homophobia and brutal child abuse were widespread. In some cases it still happens today but back then it was accepted, tolerated and encouraged. Human beings have always had a penchant for violence, aggression, domination, cruelty, malice and abuse. You absolutely cannot change that fact.

Now I understand the need to see the past through rose tinted spectacles, to have an idealised, utopian dream which helps you to indulge in escapism but it's not real and if we believe and preach it too much then it can become very harmful. The danger is in preaching a faux morality whereby someone's righteousness and trustworthiness is defined solely on their age and the decade they were born into. The danger being that young people who feel threatened by the violence of their generation and don't feel able to trust people in their own peer group will possibly hang on every word of those preachings and immediately trust older people, when in-fact plenty of adults are sexual predators, violent, unpleasant, aggressive, abusive and intolerant and young people in the face of such abuse that they never expected will become dissillusioned and possibly even feel coerced into guilt for the experiences, particularly if they never were instilled with the moral confidence to seek protection or some kind of redress in the incident.

For example, young children are encouraged to respect their elders and do as they are told- a paedophile can exploit that easily- he's their elder and they must do as he tells them, which gives him a ticket to order them to perform sick and depraved sex acts for his gratification.

Now there is a reason for this huge moral panic over children. What has happened in recent years is not an overall increase in crime and violent behaviour, but there
has been a tangible shift in the violent perpetrators. Nowadays the violence and racism amongst adults is actually lower than in the past, BUT children have become more violent in recent years. These are British statistics, although strangely enough, American crime statistics bear out a simmilar pattern in what appears to be an odd "parrallel universe" situation. This calls into question the simmilarities between American and Britain's media and how perhaps they are having a simmilarly negative effect on the youth. Something people may scoff at, but in recent years computer games and music has become increasingly violent and morally inept. And whilst movies today may be no more violent than films of the past, the technology of home video has made such adult violent films depicting claustrophobic scenes of killing, paranoia and anti-social behaviour more easily available to todays young. Surely even if there is no real tangible influence on people, mature or otherwise, such perpetuated negativity in so many forms of art doesn't help the situation.

But lets look at the real causes of this problem. Probably what would happen in the past is that the average citzen would- as a child- have been kept in line by the fear of the brutal belt his parents would hang over them. But later in life they could either continue to maintain their coerced good behaviour, or they'd become bitter at the abuse they suffered in the past and start to feel free to lash out and become part of the crime wave back then. Nowadays children's good behaviour is more a matter of choice rather than coercion. (except for children who still live with abusive parents or are bullied into conforming to gang peer pressure).

But now what has happened is that the streets seem much more dangerous to walk, for fear of encountering hardened, youth gangs acting on nihilistic violence, just looking to attack anyone, their violence is often unprovoked and inflicted on to
tal strangers. Whether youth violence really has gotten worse or whether people just take more notice of the problem now, the fact is that people are now very scared. They feel let down by schools which aren't teaching young children basic good spirit and civility and is letting more of these kids drop out to a life of crime, they feel let down the law who can't contain the problem or coax these delinquents basic respect. So now the elders of society are talking about discipline starting in the home. We've been too soft on the young, we should toughen our discipline, return to old fashioned methods of discipline- belt, cane, or whatever violence and pain will punish them for stepping out of line at an early age, so that they won't choose to REALLY step out of line later on in life.

I'm sorry but this is crazy talk.....

We're talking about advocating brutal violence against children who slightly act up and indoctrinate fear into them and break their independant spirit of freedom, on the pretext that they "might" later in life become a violent off
ender? I'm not against brutally treating violent youth offenders once they already have gone down that road, but that's strictly eye for eye justice. Legitimising violence against the youth is dangerous- the fact is child abuse continues to go on anyway.

Publically I've seen parents strikeing or intimidating their children just for asking repeated questions, or even for crying, and hardly anyone intercedes. Sometimes adults and older people are so intolerant that they are even abusive to young people they don't even know- i've seen and suffered some senior citzens having a go at and humiliating teenagers just for kissing in public or trying to start conversations with other people, or for flirting and trying to pick up a date- even though that type of harrassment and aggressive behaviour is illegal for adults and elderly people anyway. If i
t was generally accepted to practice the type of discipline above, then whose to say the occasional mistreatment and abuse of the innocent young won't get worse. Rather like if Anti-paedophile vigilante's got their way and arrested child molesterers would now judicially get the death penalty, we may rest assured that other vigilante groups would start springing up and unlawfully persecuting or killing petty offenders like shoplifters or adulterers or even 'alleged' stalkers.

We seriously need hearts and minds here, because ultimately this should be about protecting the young, not further endangering and disempowering them to the point of ridiculous vulnerability. To protect the innocent young from the guilty young, because don't forget they are the ones most at risk, so I find it frankly disgusting that because of one element of youth, that the whole of the young should have their humanity cut down by the moral authority. The trouble is, from a police perspective, its the other extreme of ridiculous tolerance of youth offenders.

Since this issue of youth morals is complicated by both abusive parents and decent parent's naive beliefs in unconditional respect for elders, that is a firm reason why moral teachings of young and older people's rights and responsibilities should be done universally by schools and community centres. Hearts and minds depends on teaching everyone that any deliberate violence or mistreatment they may suffer, will go seriously punished if they act positivley, but that any deliberate violence they may perpetrate will also go seriously punished. This can't and mustn't be any "one rule for us, another rule for you" bull. the law needs to be hard on these criminals, stop picking on petty thieves and actually target those who assault, threaten or harrass people (by which I don't mean people who try to start conversations with strangers- I mean people who are abusive and seriously tr
ansgressive- every crime must be defined properly to the young so they know their rights). Offenders like that should not be warned or fined, or their parents told to dish out the discipline (a lot of parents of these disturbed children do not care how their offspring behave and will not tolerate an outsider's criticism of their child, those parents are incompetent and have no business raising the child)- they are making people's lives miserable and entrapping and they belong in prison, away from the rest of us.

Furthermore the police really need to abolish these ridiculous reasonable force laws- if someone attacks you, whether through physical violence or threats or indimidating approach, then they should be the ones responsible for whatever violence you inflict on them to defend yourself and warn them against doing it again, you should not be responsible if they forced the violent situation onto you, and their age should not make a difference, whether a young or elderly attacker or bully. A victim of crime shouldn't be arrested for carrying weapons for their own personal protection- they should be advised not to further endanger themselves by carrying weapons that may be taken and used against them, but why arrest the victim?

It's a mess I'm afraid, and whatever measures we take will undoubtedly make it worse for someone else if not everyone else, but that's human society for you.

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