Almost exclusive responsibility for the bad behaviour of young people lies with parents, writes David Adams
LAST WEEK, through its main columnist Squinter, the normally Sinn Féin-compliant Andersonstown News launched an all-out attack on Gerry Adams. Referring to the violent anti-social activities of gangs of drunken youths in west Belfast, Squinter lambasted Adams for not doing enough to tackle lawlessness within his constituency.
In recent times, two popular local men have been murdered. Former IRA prisoner Frank McGreevy died last week after being found savagely beaten in his flat; he had previously confronted a group of young street-drinkers who were regularly tormenting him and his neighbours. Last September, greengrocer Harry Holland was stabbed to death near his home when he challenged a gang of young people trying to steal his van.
Squinter accused Adams of not "accepting any responsibility for the fact that large parts of his constituency are no-go areas" and said it was time for him to "shoulder his share of the blame for the mess we're in and stop blaming everybody else".
Squinter's anger is understandable, but it is hard to know what precisely he thinks Gerry Adams and his party should be doing. By the same token, it is somewhat disingenuous of Adams to blame the PSNI and "other criminal justice agencies" as though he believes they can eradicate the problem.
Loutish behaviour and out-of-control drunken gangs are not something unique to west Belfast. To varying degrees, they plague local communities right across Northern Ireland. At the top end of the scale, hardly a week goes by without reports of someone somewhere in the North being viciously assaulted, stabbed or beaten to death, for no discernible reason. Attacks on police, fire fighters and ambulance crews on emergency call-out are now so common, they barely warrant a mention.
In our usual self-absorbed Northern Irish way, we keep telling ourselves that all of this has something to do with a society emerging from conflict (as though thuggish behaviour will suddenly vanish like snow off a ditch upon the devolution of "normality"), completely ignoring the fact that problems of a similar nature, and worse, exist throughout Ireland and Britain.
There's not much in the way of "emerging from conflict" to explain the violent and crime-ridden housing estates and the dangerous late-night city centres of Dublin, Limerick, London, Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow, or any other Irish or British conurbation you care to think of. All of these places have something else in common with Northern Ireland; there too, they will lay the blame for out-of-control youngsters everywhere except where it properly belongs. Floundering about lost for a solution, we steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the large elephant that sits smirking at us from the corner of the room.
Constant exposure over decades to legions of well-paid social manipulators and post-rational professional handwringers has us so frightened of causing offence we have become strangers to common sense and blind to the blatantly obvious.
The real experts are hard-pressed, lowly paid primary-school teachers - now doubling as social workers, breakfast providers, and all-round surrogate parents. Ask them and they will readily point to where rampant anti-social behaviour has its roots, and where ultimately the solution lies: with parenting.
Almost exclusive responsibility for the bad behaviour of young people lies with parents, who neither know nor care about raising children properly. Yet if we dare mention the cost to society of large numbers of boys being raised in the complete absence of a positive male role model, and increasingly girls in the absence of a positive female one, then we are immediately accused of denigrating single mothers.
So it is better to say nothing, or simply lay the blame on the usual, largely amorphous scapegoats: the politicians, the police, and state agencies, although we never do get around to explaining how those people can possibly be held responsible for our children's bad behaviour.
Should we not then, in all fairness, be giving credit to everyone but the parents for how well the large majority of our young people behave? There are of course youngsters from "disruptive" backgrounds who, to their eternal credit, turn out to be model citizens. But they are the exceptions.
Nor is there any guarantee that good parenting will produce responsible adults, but mostly it does. Because of our unwillingness to confront the problem of bad parenting, we are now into the second - and sometimes third - generation of families reared without any notion of respect for others or societal responsibility. The louts of today will be the parents of tomorrow, and soon we will be facing the fourth generation.
And so it will go on, with large sections of society slowly disintegrating before our eyes, and no solution possible until we have the courage to acknowledge the root cause, and then try to do something about it.
The single most important contribution to society we can make is to raise our children to be good citizens.
At its most basic, this means teaching them to have respect for themselves and other people - all else flows from that. When politicians, police officers and columnists have to get involved, it is far too late, for the damage has already been done." The most important contribution to society we can make is to raise our children to be good citizens