Imagine a housing estate with a little park next to it.
The estate has “no ballgames” and “no skateboarding” notices all over it.
The park is just an empty space.
And then imagine you are 14 years old, and you live in a flat four storeys up.
It’s the summer holidays and you don’t have any pocket money.
That’s your life.
What will you get up to today?
Take in a concert, perhaps? Go to a football game? Go to the seaside?
No — you’re talking £30 or £50 to do any of that.
You can’t kick a ball around on your own doorstep.
So what do you do?
You hang around in the streets, and you are bored, bored, bored.
And you look around you.
Who isn’t bored?
Who isn’t hanging around because they don’t have any money?
Who has the cars, the clothes, the power?
…
Of course, not everyone who grows up in a deprived neighbourhood turns to crime — just as not everyone who grows up in a rich neighbourhood stays on the straight and narrow.
Individuals are responsible for their actions — and every individual has the choice between doing right and doing wrong.
But there are connections between circumstances and behaviour.
It’s easy to feel pessimistic …
But I think that’s the wrong response.
We can’t just give up in despair.
We’ve got to believe we can do something about the terrible problems of youth crime and disorder.
We’ve got be optimistic about young people, otherwise we’ll forever be dealing with the short-term symptoms instead of the long-term causes.
— Then Conservative leader David Cameron in a speech to the Centre for Social Justice founded by Iain Duncan Smith, which later became know as his “hug a hoodie” speech
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Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
“……..But there are connections between circumstances and behaviour…….”
All very well said Crikey, the spoilt and deliberately dumb can make all the assertions they like and have a legal right to cry like babies when hit in the head by a milk bottle, protesting that they should be allowed to live their spoilt life (its a right, right? and they are right).
There is no law that says the newborn must learn English/Language within a couple of years yet they do and there is no law forbidding other connections forming in the child’s mind about the relationships between the circumstances of the lives that he sees around him with his electronic world view (once-upon-a time only equal to his eyeball world view) and differences in the endowments appropriated, but learning with a minimalist teaching input what it all means before he is legally aware or responsible. Good lessons and advice will be given to the child but if they all go nowhere another set of connections about the same issues develops before legal responsibility does.
Just have a law forbidding those thoughts and feelings (‘cause smart law knows that ‘behaviour’ could eventuate or have law take responsibility for what it knows.
I love the difference between the ‘Brit’ and the ‘Aus’ — when a skinny 15 year old gets shot to death by 3 or 4 armed Melbourne cops at close range (all of who wet and soiled their pants when he threatened them all at once – must have been the look on his face – or did he stick his tongue out at them at the same time – now that’s the death sentence right there) when he threatened them with a kitchen knife in each hand. About as dangerous a baby with an uncovered bottom pointing at you unless you think you’ll die if you get scratched, police training needs a touch of something.
No Aussie riots, not even a loud complaint. Mustn’t injure those good policemen by throwing complaints at them. Ball less, gutless police management and judiciary, pee-knuckle judges in the end.
A world of fluff and fart, analyse that.
Even the spoilt have a duty to keep up the skill to fight for ones ‘rights’ when necessary and not take them for granted on the basis of who you think you are.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
“…….shot to death by 3 or 4 armed Melbourne cops at close range (all of who wet and soiled their pants when he threatened them all at once – must have been the look on his face – or did he stick his tongue out at them at the same time – now that’s the death sentence right there) when he threatened them with a kitchen knife in each hand……”
The killer cops naturally arranged the ‘soiled’ evidence for their defence after the fact, that would have been a sight to behold.