THE PROLIFERATION of television series glamorising “Godfather-type” criminals, a culture of fear leading us to live in gated apartment “ghettos” and the absence of a secure family environment are among concerns raised in a new Catholic Church document on violence in Irish society launched yesterday.
It also criticises the habit among “some newspaper headline writers” to refer to well-known criminals by their “pet” names, and says the extensive marketing of violent video games contributes to a culture of violence.
According to Violence in Irish Society: Towards an Ecology of Peace, by the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs (ICJSA), the family is one of the key protections against the fragmentation of society in which violence thrives.
But the report highlights as a “rather worrying statistic” the fact that upwards of 12 per cent of all children in the Republic are living in one-parent families.
Similarly, it notes that both parents increasingly work outside the home, and face long commutes to work.
As a result, it emphasises the importance of promoting good parenting skills where the alternative is an environment in which “children are being educated by television and exposed to the media’s glamorisation of violence without being taught the values that would help protect them from its negative influence”.
“While not all criminality is linked to the absence of a secure family environment, there are few who deny that such circumstances often create the conditions within which alcohol and drug abuse thrive and criminality breeds,” it says.
“We can generate fear by continually telling ourselves fearsome stories of violence which causes us to seek to live in gated apartment blocks, ghettos that serve to fragment our society,” it adds. “We can seek to corral violence at the margins of our experience . . . or we can face the realities of our modern world and seek to confront issues such as violence through those very values that affirm our shared membership of society and the rights and responsibilities that flow from that membership.”
Elsewhere, it underlines the need to recognise the “class bias that often characterises our response to violence, something which, for example, tolerates gangland violence.”
It also reiterates calls by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, for a “summit of community leaders” on the issue of violence in society. Some progress has been made in this regard, reporters were told.
In his speech, Dr Martin said the document challenges us all to address the problem of violence in contemporary Irish society in a more organic way than is often the case.
“Fortunately, levels of violence in Ireland are lower than in most other parts of Europe. But there is nothing to be complacent about,” he said. Violence among young people was linked with a “curious culture of knives”, and our “dubious Irish culture of drink.” Similarly, there can be “no tolerance” of the drug trade.
“Drugs are at the heart of gangland violence,” he said.
