The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #62463   Message #1011059
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
02-Sep-03 - 05:26 AM
Thread Name: BS: Child crime.
Subject: RE: BS: Child crime.
Once again, there's Left and there's Right, and there's Authoritarian and there's Libertarian, and there's no direct relationship between those two ways of measuring opinion. Any disagreements about national service and boot camps and so forth are to do with authoritarian/libertarian, not with left/right. (As demonstrated by Cuba, for example.)

If children are brought up in a way that damages them, they get damaged, and damaged children cause serious problems for other people. All kinds of things about the way we run society seem to me likely to damage children - such things as absent and ill-equipped parents, junk food, an immersion in fantasy violence, environments which are physically and socially threatening.

It seems common sense to try to identify the social factors that have helped produce damaged children and damaged citizens. That's only half of it, because they are still damaged and that can mean dangerous, and trying to heal the damage and limit the danger is another matter entirely.

The kind of solutions that make most sense to me involve doing things that bring people directly up against the consequences of their actions, and insisting that they undo the harm and make recompense for the harm they cannot undo.