Our Youth and Knife Crime: what’s to blame?

These days, the scourge of knife crime and the devastation it leaves in its wake is never out of the news.

As I write, about 20 people have been fatal victims of knife-inflicted wounds in London so far this year, with the perpetrators in the majority of cases being male teenagers. Needless to say, many more people have lost their lives across the United Kingdom, with Glasgow and Manchester also being trouble hotspots.

The government’s response has been weak and disappointing. As with most issues opportunities to come up with solutions are overwhelmed by a nonsensical requirement to be politically correct, and are therefore rendered impotent.

So, the rise in knife crime has been attributed to the following factors in no particular order: absent fathers and the consequent lack of male role models in homes, boredom, lack of adequate facilities for sports and extracurricular activities, lack of engagement in schools, poverty, and single parent households.

While I do not deny the potential for any combination of these factors to negatively impact individual characters in their formative years, it does infuriate me that the government and, by extension the rest of us, are now at the stage where we find it easier to point the finger of blame than to take a good hard look at ourselves and admit that we have a duty to our youth and the rest of society, one which we have shirked and failed.

And that duty is thus: we must raise our children properly, and teach them to take responsibility for their actions. Simple as that.

I consider the upward trend in knife crime to be one of the manifestations of our “anything goes” culture. We are paying the price for being far too liberal with our children. I’ll explain what I mean.

A lot of parents are guilty of giving excessive consideration to their children’s “human rights”. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not an advocate of any form of child abuse, neither do I support whipping children until they are within an inch of their lives. But when children’s “rights” take priority over giving them the moral and ethical grounding the need to go through life, there is a fundamental problem.

For example, it is not uncommon to see children who are no older than fifteen hanging around street corners late at night with their friends, long after they should be in bed getting the rest they will need to be attentive and productive in school the next day. And this is where the “anything goes” philosophy takes hold: children are allowed to do as they wish, are indirectly encouraged to engage in sexual activity from an early age as long as they use protection, dabble in alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs, and are not taught to value their education.

Simple things – like teaching children to respect their elders, to be kind and considerate, to share and be generous, to always help those in need, to empathise with the less fortunate, to display honesty and integrity at all times regardless of the circumstances, to be humble yet confident, that actions have consequences, that an honest day’s work begets an honest day’s pay, that violence is never an option to be explored - are missed out from child rearing for fear of appearing old-fashioned and draconian. So simple, but what a difference these concepts make! Instead, parents increasingly seem to be aiming to be their children’s best friends.

Then you move on to the educational system. It used to be the case that if a child, for whatever reason, missed out on getting much-needed instruction and discipline at home, one could be sure they would get it at school. This is no longer the case, as teachers’ authority has been eroded over the years.

It is sad to see that definitive statements are no longer made about the differences between right and wrong, and students, seeing that there are no more authority figures, take advantage. Hence, cases where students hit, bite, and in some cases, even sexually assault their teachers are often reported.

The worst part of it all is that when we hear about these things we all sigh, shake our heads and carry on with our lives. The subliminal message sent to our youth is that they can do what they like when they like, without having to face the consequences. So the chaos continues.

Then of course, our criminal justice system is so ridiculously lenient that the concept of incarceration is no longer a deterrent to criminal behaviour. Court sentences show what our priorities as a society are: a former HSBC employee was recently jailed for nine years for attempting to defruad the bank of £72m, but murderers easily get a four year sentence, and can secure release in half that time, for “good behaviour”. Unfortunately, such judicial gaffes imply that we value material wealth much more than we do human life, and so the scourge continues.

I know there is no easy answer, and that discipline is only one part of the puzzle. But I put it to you that it is a significant factor. When I look at the lives of successful people, be they famous ones or people I know personally, I can’t honestly say that any of them has always had it all. Yet, the obstacles in their way did not deter them from persevering towards achieving greatness.

Richard Branson was dyslexic, but had started two business ventures by the time he was fifteen and is now estimated to be worth $7.9bn. Barack Obama is the product of a broken home, but went on to study at Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He went on to get elected to the United States Senate, and is now the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States. And the list goes on.

Who has not faced one form of diversity of another in their lives? Many people have had the misfortune of being raised in broken homes, being dirt poor and being disadvantaged in school, but they have not used it as an excuse for mediocrity and a career in crime. No, it has spurred them on to greater things, with a firm desire not to repeat the mistakes of their not-so-distant past. As they say, what does not kill you makes you stronger.

So I think we all need to toughen up: parents, society, the government, the courts. There are not many in this generation of teenagers who face anything that compares to the Herculean barriers to success that many other have in times past; yet they prevailed.

We cannot seriously tackle knife crime until we acknowledge that we need to go back to the basics, and that instilling discipline alongside love does not constitute a contravention of human rights. I always say that the only rights a child has are to be fed, clothed, housed, educated and equipped for the future.

And as things stand it is clear that, in many respects, we are failing our children woefully.