"What they did was exceptionally unpleasant"

[Bugsy]

No, no, no. What they did was torture and murder a toddler, leaving his body across a railway line to be cut in two by a train.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8565619.stm

[:@][:@]

.

[Gluestick]

[quote]

Calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12 have been rejected by the government.

England's children's commissioner Maggie Atkinson had told the Times that most criminals under 12 did not fully understand their actions. [/quote]

With the current level of aberrant behavour demonstrated by kids from dysfunctional families, brainwashed by violent videos, computer games, TV and peer group pressure, their behavioural antics driven by drugs abuse and the rest, it is high time Government accepted that employing such archaic and amusing terms as the "Age of Criminal Responsibility" avoids an increasing social issue: the sociopathic behaviour of feral kids in gangs which include youngsters of 8, roaming the streets at night intent on mischief and mayhem.

As an exemplar, perhaps, they ought properly to look at cities such as Rio de Janeiro, where orphan kids of less than 8, live in the Barrio and steal, stab and mug older people just to survive.

Age is no benchmark of and for dysfunctional behaviour anymore; so sadly..............

 

 

 

[Christine Animal]

What I just can't understand is how, whatever age they are, they are realeased to start again.  They will never change, we have had so many terrible examples of it.

 

[Will]

People have short memories. Gang culture and mindless violence was a fact of life long before we had video games etc.

So by now we should know how to deal with it? Maybe, but one thing is obvious, and that is that in the majority of cases prison merely strengthens criminal and anti-social tendencies. Wasn't it Douglas Hurd, a member of a political party not normally associated with liberal views on detention, who famously said "Prison is a very expensive way of making bad people even worse"?

[Quillan]

[quote user="Gluestick"]

With the current level of aberrant behavour demonstrated by kids from dysfunctional families, brainwashed by violent videos, computer games, TV and peer group pressure, their behavioural antics driven by drugs abuse and the rest, it is high time Government accepted that employing such archaic and amusing terms as the "Age of Criminal Responsibility" avoids an increasing social issue: the sociopathic behaviour of feral kids in gangs which include youngsters of 8, roaming the streets at night intent on mischief and mayhem.

[/quote]

I am wondering how these families became dysfunctional, perhaps it was their parents that caused it. Perhaps it was the permissive 60's where it all started to go wrong. The problem with blaming parents is how did they get like that. I am afraid its societies responsibility or more to the point everybody's responsibility.

In some countries they don't punish the kids they educate the parents which I think is the way to go. I see in one European country (Norway) where a similar offence was committed the children were back in school within weeks but the whole town from which they came were treated and educated to stop it from happening again.

As Will says its been going on for ages, long before video games were even invented but then we all want something to blame rather than set about putting it right.

[Bugsy]

My reason for posting this were not really about the rights or wrongs of that, and similar cases.

It was the choice of words used by a, supposedly  eminent Doctor.

"Unpleasant" is when you open a bottle of milk and find that it has gone off.

"Exceptionally Unpleasant" would be when its fallen over in your car and has been there, undiscovered, for over a week in the middle of summer.

Hardly the appropriate choice of words one would expect to be used in the discussion of the actual crime committed in the Bulger case.

.

[Gluestick]

[quote user="Will"]People have short memories. Gang culture and mindless violence was a fact of life long before we had video games etc.[/quote]

Are you proposing, Will, that the present epidemic level of street violence, murder, stabbing, mugging has always existed in Britain?

Sorry: wholly disagree: whichever flawed statistics one uses (Allowing for skews from reporting variances and changing benchmarks form such as CPS and police authorities), the simple numerical incidence suggests otherwise.

Next you'll be saying that the feral gangs roaming sink estates always existed: and that incidents such as the following have been happening since the year dot!

See Here:

And further, what about this prize pair and their dysfunctional family?

See here:

(N.B. I didn't use the Telegraph or the Daily Mail as a reference source: since either would result in the usual denial scorn from the Liberal "Everything Is Fine!" caucus it seems. So I used instead the Guardian: the bulwark of Liberal Ivory Tower left wing mindset.)

[quote]So by now we should know how to deal with it? Maybe, but one thing is obvious, and that is that in the majority of cases prison merely strengthens criminal and anti-social tendencies. Wasn't it Douglas Hurd, a member of a political party not normally associated with liberal views on detention, who famously said "Prison is a very expensive way of making bad people even worse"?
[/quote]

The corollary to my earlier post, was simply that another mechanism other than "Age of Consent" is urgently needed to control dysfunctional children from dysfunctional families: who both present, socially, as out of control of normal social and accepted mores.

Now where I differ from the assumptive conviction that pornography, gratuitous violence screened 24/7; kids being allowed to watch horrible videos; listen to crass music (Such as Rap in its worst incarnation) etc has no influence on behaviour, is that I accept Pavlovian Conditioning as fact.

Whereas the apologists for the current level of socially destructive mindless garbage infesting Western society would have us believe otherwise.

Unfortunately for this self-interested lobby, I am old enough to remember scientific and medical "Experts" assuring society that vehicle emissions were harmless to health: and smoking didn't cause cancer and a host of other life-shortening diseases.

Indeed: it would seem that if one paid any serious creedence to this raft of experts, then the very best thing for longevity, would be to have taken up smoking and consume 80 a day: and move to a property immediately next to the M1!

Etc.

If you have sufficient cash you can buy an "Expert" who will swear black is blue: and the sun rises in the North.

Homicide Stats:

Year Homicides (Expressed as /Million Population)

1900 9.6

1910 8.1

1920 8.3

1930 7.5

1940 ..

1950 7.9

1955 6.3

1960 6.2

1965 6.8

1970 8.1

1975 10.3

1980 12.5

1985 12.5

1990 13.1

1995 14.5

1997 14.1

By 2001 it was nearly 16/million.

Glasgow now has a homicide rate of 58.7/million population.

 

[Will]

One can only go by one's own observations. Never having lived in an inner city sink estate I can't comment on what goes on there. I do know though that in the rural Sussex community where I grew up - somewhere that today is considered highly respectable and desirable - among the 3000 population 50-odd years ago there were certain roads where one did not venture, or if you did you were quite likely to witness violent feuds between certain dysfunctional families or to be threatened with knives or shotguns. My own father's employer was involved on the fringes of various South London crime rings, so cultures of fear and gang-rule are other things I recall from way back.

I'm not saying things are better now, I'd be surprised if they were not somewhat worse in certain deprived areas. But to imply that 21st-century life is the cause of unspeakable acts is a very blinkered view. Although I don't doubt that violent video games and the like don't help, it's only a small minority, who must be unhinged anyway, who get driven to emulate their on-screen heroes. After all, most of our generation were exposed to violent and pornographic films, and it didn't make us killers and rapists. Just as the vast majority of today's youth are decent people who wouldn't consider the sort of behaviour in those examples.

I totally agree about statistics. The one that stays with me is that, as a police acquaintance maintained, in 30% of serious road accidents, at least one of the people involved was under the influence of drink or drugs. Therefore in 70% of crashes everybody was sober. So you are less likely to have an accident if you get stoned. Yes, we know it's ridiculous, but the so-called logic is there.

[Quillan]

Wow that figure for children killing other children and people in Glasgow seems very high. I don't see much of it on the news, I must be watching the wrong channel. I never realised that overall there have been so many children doing so much killing in the UK. [:(]

 

[Bugsy]

OK, I'll leave you to it [:)]

.

[Quillan]

An 18 year old has been arrested following the death of the chap in Manchester, no mention of children being arrested.