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Increased spending and initiatives designed to reduce teenage
offending aren’t working. A study by the Centre for Crime and Justice
Studies at King’s College London claims to show that despite spending
of nearly £3 billion (yes, that’s £3000,000,000) by government and
police agencies, there has been an INCREASE in the level of youth
crime.
In effect, the various initiatives have and are failing. For example:
· new laws haven’t worked. In London, there were 100 stabbings this year
and 39 teenage murders in London alone since January last year.
·
the Youth Justice Board reports that cases of violence by young people,
ranging from common assault to murder, are up 39% over three years. Some
56,000 violent incidents involving teenagers were recorded in 2006-2007,
up from 40,000 in 2003-2004.
·
sending youngsters to young offenders’ institutions isn’t working.
·
anti-social behaviour orders aren’t working with fewer being issued and
about 60% of teenages breaking them.
· whatever number we see for youth crime should be increased because
children under 16 years old are not included in the British Crime
Survey.
It’s not lack of understanding that’s the problem. Most people,
including politicians know (and have known for years) what the causes
are. We know that when children are:
·
brutalised at home (through physical, sexual or verbal abuse) the chance
of growing up angry and violent is increased
·
exposed to the worst examples of behaviour by their parents and other
adults, and indeed, taught that theft, drunkenness and violence are
acpetable ways to behave, that’s what they’ll likely do
· desensitised to human pain and suffering by some television programes
and video games, they can’t understand the pain they are causing others
· not punished severely and taught there are serious painful consequences
for them, there is nothing to prevent them behaving as they have been
conditioned.
With all this knowledge, we know what steps
to take – but they will be unpopular and remain unpopular until more and
more children die and sufficient rages builds up in society as a whole.
So, we need a longer term apporach. What politicians and society in
general are struggling with, is how to get teenagers to NOT WANT to
physically hurt others. We want people to want to behave well. We can
use punishment in the short term but we don’t want to have to keep doing
it. Values education is a readily available and powerful answer.
Values education, which has been used successfully in sex education and
drugs education, with it’s non-lecturing, non-accusing method of getting
people to reflect on their behaviours, will over time, penetrate to the
humanity that has been covered up (calcified) in so called “thugs”.
Unfortunately, with teenages who have been so conditioned, it will take
considerable time.
We still have to give more thought to this, but values education with
teenagers who have been desensitised to violence will have to involve an
element of:
·
meetings with victims and seeing and feeling the pain caused
·
hypnotherapy to penetrate to, and erase, the subconsious pain stored in
their minds and body from seeing and hearing the terrible things.
In addition, let’s stop using that stupid phrase “war on teenage crime”.
You cannot make war on an abstract thing called crime. You can only make
war on people. Surely, we don’t want to make war – with it’s
connotations of extreme violence – on our children. Also, stop those
surveys which ask young people if they have taken part in crime and how
many crimes they have committed. There is no way of checking the truth
of the claims and the numbers are likely to be inaccurate and therefore
give a worse picture than reality.
Read some of the articles in the Crime Education section on the CAVE
website, which go into more detail on values education as an approach
to alleviating specific crimes. Dr Bill would be delighted to talk at
your next conference or event and give more details on how values
education can improve the effectiveness of crime education. Contact him
on bill.robb@valueseducation.co.uk
Copyright © 2008 Values Education Ltd
Note to editors. Feel free to use this article as long as the following
details are retained. “A values education article from CAVE
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