ninme

The Times - Stabbings, not sex, are the real facts of life
A message of Gandhi-like passivity turning hordes of docile potential victims into human cash machines, by Janice Turner

When I recall my own moderately rough school - the cries of “scrap on!” outside the gates, the mean girls who’d thump hard, being shoved once down some concrete steps - I realise that the boundaries between playground argy-bargy, bullying and violence have shifted. Now you are classified a bully if you send a former mate to Coventry; a bundle on the bus is assault. Hovering above the normal rufty-tufty is the paranoid and ever-vigilant modern parent.

Now mayor Boris has succumbed to the prevailing parental mood with his statement this week that he’d tell his own four children to pass by any trouble. No doubt he is shaken by the Ben Kinsella stabbing, a half mile from his Barnsbury villa in North London. His neighbourhood shares my own’s unsettling mixture of smuggery and lurking violence.

We simply cannot endure any risk to our children. So we tell them - as the police advise - to surrender everything they have to anyone who asks for it. Take my mobile phone, my cash, my Oyster card, just don’t kill me.

A West London friend was horrified when her son repelled a bigger boy who demanded his phone on the bus with an old-fashioned “p*** off”. Fighting back is seen as madness. Kids wandering around in iPod earphones - particularly in private school uniforms - are accused of inspiring crimes of envy. (Although few kids these days appear particularly gadget-deprived.) A message of Gandhi-like passivity is preached, so, surely, the villains realise that hordes of docile potential victims can be tapped like human cash machines.

As Phib says:

And Boris is on the “right” in the UK. The irony of not understanding the connection between rising violence and the environment of impunity created by ensuring that no one will stop someone prone to it would be funny if not so tragic.