Teen Knife Crime

[WU LYF 4 LYF]

You can't go a week these days without reading a story of a 'teen knife slaying', usually in London, where young boys are shanking others and being shanked, usually over really petty things.

 

Has anyone got any ideas as to the cause of this? There is the whole suggestions of a gang culture (but then, again, where did this come from?), video games and movies, youth poverty and depravation driving them into crime...there seem to be a myriad of issues coming together, but despite all of the campaigns to bring an end to the violence, it still seems to be occuring.

 

And how would you go about stopping it?

 

I really think more emphasis (and money) should be placed by the government on an issue like this. Not only does it waste so many young lives (the victims and the perpetrators), who really are not old enough to be thinking completely straight about such things, but it's also going to be a cycle if it keeps going, and turn into a culture and an alternative way of life (if it hasn't already).

[Chest Rockwell]

teenagers with knives.

 

 

Next question!

[Your Fight Site]

I'm sick of video games being linked to violence. Why video games? No one went around bashing people's skulls in with candle sticks in libraries after a four-hour game of Cluedo. I don't play GTA IV and think, "You know what? That was riveting. I want to nick a car and blow people away with a rocket launcher myself now!"

[Dead Mike]

Same thing that's always caused it. Teenage violence is hardly a new thing, be it 'Teddy Boys' in the 50's slashing each other up with razors. The 'mods & rockers' pasting fuck out of one another on a mass scale or organised football violence in the 80's. The only difference is the public reaction to the crimes. Back then people didn't have instant access to view crimes through CCTV & street crime wasn't evening television viewing (Booze Britain, Street Crime UK etc). Everyone knew it was just young people acting like dicks & also knew they'd grow out of it. People tend to look back at these events with nostalgic, rose tinted glasses, can you imagine the reaction if hundred (if not thousands) of Chavs & Goths turned up at Britain's seaside resorts now for a massive scrap? There'd be marshall law.

[Dead Mike]

edit: double post

[Halitosis Romantic]

Same thing that's always caused it. Teenage violence is hardly a new thing, be it 'Teddy Boys' in the 50's slashing each other up with razors. The 'mods & rockers' pasting fuck out of one another on a mass scale or organised football violence in the 80's. The only difference is the public reaction to the crimes. Back then people didn't have instant access to view crimes through CCTV & street crime wasn't evening television viewing (Booze Britain, Street Crime UK etc). Everyone knew it was just young people acting like dicks & also knew they'd grow out of it. People tend to look back at these events with nostalgic, rose tinted glasses, can you imagine the reaction if hundred (if not thousands) of Chavs & Goths turned up at Britain's seaside resorts now for a massive scrap? There'd be marshall law.

 

To some extent - it's true that the media blows it out of all proportion (when don't they?), but I doubt that there was people pinching the cheeks of those mods and rockers and talking about how they'll grow out of it - my dad's tales demonstrate that his generation has good memories of those times, and that's why they're painted that was in the media.

 

My uncle, who was a teen in the 50s, tells tales of having his girlfriend sew fishhooks into his lapels, so if someone grabbed him for a headbutt, they'd get a nasty surprise, yet he just as easily talks about the appalling violence of today. It's all nostalgia scented bullshit, and if anything is a false consciousness, it's nostalgia.