Feral children and their feckless parents are leaving the rest of us living in fear
The start of the new term inevitably flooded social media feeds with charming pictures of the children of the UK in their brand new school uniforms and shiny shoes. In a typical parenting fail, I completely forgot to photograph my youngest on her first day of “big school” – preoccupied with the prospect of traffic on the school run and the need to make it to work on time.
But the beginning of the school year is an important reminder that the majority of kids in this country want to learn, make friends and get on in life. And the majority of parents are there to support them in becoming well-rounded adults, able to make a valuable contribution to society.
But an undeniable rot has set in since lockdown that we must address. We’ve always had to put up with our fair share of feckless parents, letting their feral children run amok while the rest of our offspring mind their Ps and Qs. You know the types I’m talking about here; they’re loud, they’re objectionable and they’re prone to ruining your pub lunch. (It isn’t a class thing, by the way. “Posh” children are invariably the most irritating on account of their unself-aware and entitled, Boden-clad Mamas and Papas).
But 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 per cent in a year – up 16 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Children now account for nearly four in 10 (39.1 per cent) 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 per cent 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 nine and 10 students were some of the worst behaved on record, with “over 50 per cent more suspensions”.
Since these were the lockdown guinea pigs who missed the crucial transition from primary to secondary school while the UK 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. So lockdown is definitely a huge factor.
But these figures appear to reflect a broader collapse in authority, as well as an increase in terrible parenting. The signs of this are everywhere – from the mother who went to Ibiza while her son was supposed to be sentenced for his role in the August riots (the father’s whereabouts are anyone’s guess), to the parents who think nothing of taking a two-week family break in term time.
Remember the days when parents would support teachers in disciplining their wayward children? We have now entered a parallel universe where parents will openly criticise a school for exercising authority over its pupils, seemingly oblivious to how damaging it is to let a child get their own way all the time. And if parents can’t even follow basic rules like uniform – why should the children?
Extend that abrogation of responsibility to the rule of law, and we’ve got serious problems. In recent months, we have read countless headlines about teenagers caught up in serious crimes, including murder. There are now so many examples that they are in danger of losing their capacity to shock.
Consider the case of the 16-year-old boy who fatally stabbed schoolgirl Holly Newton in an alleyway in Hexham, Northumberland. The boy, who is now 17, knifed her 36 times and was found guilty last month.
That a young person can commit such a savage act – having approached his victim at a bus stop in the early evening, with traffic driving past – also speaks to a total lack of respect for the police.
In general, confidence in the police has worsened in recent years, but the most recent polling shows that perceptions among Gen-Z (those born since 1996) in particular are reaching new lows. The World Values Survey found that just 67 per of British adults have confidence in the police compared to 87 per cent in 1981. But among those aged 28 and below, the figure falls to 44 per cent. This is much lower than Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) and Millennials (1981 to 1996).
One of the reasons for this might be a growing awareness among the “good” kids that the “bad” kids” often get away with their crimes. If adults find feral, anti-social and indeed, criminal children horrifying – imagine what it is like for other children. They feel just as forced out of communal spaces like playgrounds, parks and shopping malls as the average, intimidated Boomer.
Ironically, it is the law-abiding, school-attending Gen Zs – for whom the woke pendulum has well and truly swung too far – who have become particularly intolerant of the bad behaviour of their unruly peers. Unlike their “I know my rights” Millennial elders, still obsessing over pronouns and puberty blockers, your average Gen-Zer is a bit like their children of Thatcher, Gen-X parents in believing in personal accountability. Many of them found lockdown so difficult precisely because there were no boundaries and the decision-making was so nonsensical. Like the rest of us, they prefer a rules-based order, provided it’s fairly enforced. Some went off the rails – but most didn’t.
As ever, the onus is on the grown-ups to restore authority – and not let a small minority run riot.