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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What a surprise. Probably one of many negative effects of the panic that occurred in 2020.
I saw very little panic
Just evil lies and moronic sheeplike compliance
Still, our 2-tier government and 2-tier police will solve this problem by … er … um … ooh … er … er … instructing us all to watch what we say. So there!
I’ll probably get banned for writing this but as my fairly normie friend said the other day “everyone seems to be monged out”.
The negative effects of the scamdemic will continue to be felt in many areas for a long time
A not so off topic TCW article.https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/greens/
“Experts” guess and talk out of their arses quite a lot as the “pandemic” clearlt revealed.
Who knows what the exact (as opposed to vague bs) reason for this is.
Maybe covid exposed to children how authority – the government, teachers, school administrators, local education authorities, doctors, etc.. – didn’t really care too much about kids and cared about themselves and getting long extended holidays (work from home) for their own personal benefit at the expense of kids.
Good luck trying to put that genie back in the bottle.
As far is I’m concerned it’s one of the silver linings of covid. A whole generation of kids for whom it will be hard to educate away their natural bullshit detector.
The knife crime of course is a shame.
These children saw how many of the people around them in positions authority were utterly undeserving of their respect. Enforcing stupid rules, wearing silly plastic visors, etc.
Children show their contempt in very obvious ways.
I hear no mention of the lack of individual discipline which has been eroded by the lack of parental responsibility in the corrections of a child actions by admonishment or the dreaded slap. ( in my younger days the slap came out of nowhere, beware of the mum from the sun) Also the lack of role models and mentors. Can anyone honestly say they never saw this coming.
All symptoms of the Liberal Progressive Virus that thinks punishment and discipline are dirty words. This folly of trying to socially engineer all crime away is turning youth into something like what happened in “Lord of the Flies”.
Yep. Yet another failed social experiment using the hypothesises and suppositions of some spurious psychology ideology in order to control the people to make a perfect future. We have these ideologies in every facet of our lives and the effects of which are becoming ever more apparent, with the results of which will be laid at the feet of future generations who will be the least capable of dealing with there consequences.
The Establishment has reaped what it has sown.
The unstated acceptance of a ruling class by the masses is based on the premise that they all benefit from this arrangement in an advanced civilized society. But when the ruling class loses this acceptance due to corruption and outright criminality and when they themselves outright ignore and abuse the rules, there is no longer this unstated acceptance. It follows that a breakdown in society will follow. Why should any young person follow the rules when the ruling classes so obviously do not themselves? They are the perfect example for this behaviour. The police show an almost daily example to youth of how rules can be selectively chosen and how there is no punishment for serious crimes.
Telegraph publishes establishment propaganda junk would be a better title for this. If there’s any violence in being arrested while carrying a knife, it can only be police violence and that’s the same police which refrains from ‘approaching’ armed muslim vigilantes because this could lead to escalation of violence. This symbolic policing by confiscation of private property for no particular reason helps no one and ought to be ended.
“During lockdown, the evil internet criminalized other people’s kids!” is similarly idiotic. It was lockdown what caused it and not “evil internet.” and “more online censorship”, especially after lockdown, it not going to solve this problem. “Never again treat young people’s lives as disposable because of a manufactured virus hysteria” would be better idea.