asst_dep_to_dep_asst said:
On the whole, the most important relationship in anybody's development is with their parents and it would appear that very few parents actually have a meaningful, supportive and mentoring relationship with their children any more.
There has always been a perception of declining standards and rising crime, but these perceptions are historically problematic. For those of you interested in this line of argument who doubt what I am saying I suggest you read Geoff Pearson's lucid book
Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears.
I think there are three significant contributory factors at work here. The
first is the increased propensity of the popular press to sensationalise crime. Although they certainly did this in the 18th & 19th centuries, since few read the papers, the information they imparted was less widely disseminated than is the case today. The
second reason I attribute is the unwillingness of parents to perform their historic role of taking
responsibility for raising their children: teaching them the social norms of the society in which they live and punishing transgression. The
third, which is linked in part to the second, is a reluctance in general by the wider community to take
their individual & collective responsibilities seriously, instead expecting the police to do it for them. This manifests itself in a number of ways, from failing to support individual initiatives by community minded individuals like forces personnel who intervene to parents themselves who contest third party intervention. I have frequently been taken to task by selfish parents who seems to believe that their children are entitled to vandalise private or public property in say furniture shops, National Trust property or in other people's homes (!) without censure. I intervene because I know that failure to do so will result in these children growing up as delinquents, no matter how middle-class their people are. These are the real problems society faces.
The minor problems society faces are the ones that seem to engender the most panic yet statistically are the least problematic: child abuse is mostly carried out in the home by fathers or close family members/friends upon children, typically most likely daughters and by families that may have lived in an area for years. The media give the impression that the main problem is lone strangers moving into the area - it is not. Paedophiles who are monitored by being on their local sex offender's register are the least likely to reoffend. Those who through experiencing vigilante action go underground (as happened after the News of the World "expose") pose a much greater danger.
The decline in points 2 and 3 noticably set in following Thatcher's assertion that collective duties were to be regarded as subordinate to, and indeed quite possibly subversive of, the notion of individual freedom central to the libitarian Thatcherite philisophy. It is most problematic in the generation colloqually known as Thatcher's children - more so that in the offspring of parents of the 1960s or even the post-WW2 generation, and is very striking. Sadly no political consensus yet exists which seeks to challenge and reverse this ideological subordination of responsibilities
to rights, instead of balancing them in order to create a social (and legal) equity in human inter-relations. This is what really needs addressing, not headline grabbing, so-called initiatives, which gain nothing but short-term relief.
