As the new school year begins, the Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey looks at the alarming rise in criminality amongst children since 2020. They’ve been turned feral by lockdown, she says, and are leaving the rest of us living in fear. Here’s an excerpt.
An undeniable rot has set in since lockdown that we must address. … The pandemic appears to have unleashed a new subgroup of brats whose bad behaviour extends well beyond the mere annoying.
There’s a new element of fear in Britain today; a feeling that things aren’t as safe as they used to be; that the social fabric is fraying. We used to attribute those feelings to men behaving badly – but part of it is now undoubtedly down to the way that some children are carrying on.
It was revealed this week that there has been a serious rise in the number of crimes being committed by children – some of them very violent. The number of under 18s arrested for all offences has risen 9% in a year – up 16% since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Children now account for nearly four in 10 (39.1%) of all robbery arrests, where they use force to steal from a person or a place, while the number of young people arrested for carrying a knife is on the rise.
The number of children arrested for violence against the person, which ranges from assault to murder, has increased by 22% since the pandemic, to 18,220 in the year to March 2023. In total, child arrests reached 58,507 in the year to last March.
The rise in youth crime since lockdown mirrors a decline in behaviour within schools, with suspensions and exclusions expected to have increased by a fifth in the last academic year. It comes after Department for Education figures revealed that last year’s cohort of year 9 and 10 students were some of the worst behaved on record, with “over 50% more suspensions”.
Since these were the lockdown guinea pigs who missed the crucial transition from primary to secondary school while the U.K. was in enforced social isolation, it is no wonder that experts have linked the surge in absenteeism to the various Covid measures. That’s certainly right.
It wasn’t just a problem that children spent months isolated at home without the support of teachers and their peers. Lockdown also abandoned a generation to their own devices – literally – and what children have been exposed to online since the advent of the smartphone may well have contributed to the problem of unsocialised and lawless youngsters turning to criminality.
Worth reading in full.
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