Over the last few years and especially in the last few months, I have been reading a lot of stories about youth crime, with some of it petty and some of it serious and incredibly violent. I have also read many stories where because the children are under X-age (depending on location), they have all the charges dropped and just walk away. Because of this, children are even being hired to commit crimes for a few dollars.
Today I was reading one from Australia where a small group of "blurred out" youths went through a supermarket destroying property, pulling things of shelves on to the floor and harassing customers. On top of the experience of the people they harassed, they must have done a few thousand dollars of damage at least. But who pays?
Probably taxpayers through insurance premiums and higher prices.
What I wonder is, if a child isn't responsible for their actions no matter what they do, who is responsible for the child's actions? By my calculation, it should be the parents, which means that any damage or crime that a child does, the parent has to pay the price for the behaviour. If a child breaks items in a store intentionally, the parents have to cover the cost. If a child assaults someone, the parent is put up on charges. If the child kills, the parent goes to jail for murder.
Sound fair?
Not really, since there are some messed up children despite having parents that have tried their best. However, there are a lot of messed up children who are that way because their parents are messed up too. If a parent is criminally responsible for the behaviours of their child, will that create more attentive parents?
Maybe, maybe not.
But at the very least, someone is responsible for the behaviours, rather than it falling through the gaps so that victims have no legal closure. At some point, we have to take responsibility for our behavioural outcomes, and this includes our parenting behaviours also. An absent parent used to be one that abandoned their children, now many are abandoning their children by running away to a screen instead, or using a screen as a babysitter.
Of course, this doesn't explain all of the youth crime, which I think is in large part to a rapidly collapsing society that has encouraged mental health problems, financial problems, identity class problems, environmental problems, education problems, emotional management problems entitlement problems....
And a lot more problems.
We have built a society that encourages the worst behaviours in us, not our best. We have made the easy option, the worst option. And we have taught people that they are what they say they are, even if their behaviours do not align with their beliefs.
We are in the last throes of humanity, and unless we change course drastically and quickly, the collapse is going to speed up and we will come to a violent and painful end.
And the kids know it.
But they do not have the skills to change it for the better. So they have become nihilistic, uncaring, disillusioned and violent. There is no better future for them that they can see, just continuing and increasingly intense suffering.
Speak of the devil....
Taraz
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