How the Left have driven up the knife crime epidemic
by David Kurten, The Conservative Woman:
It is reported that children are buying stab vests to protect themselves as knife crime reaches its highest-ever level, particularly in London.
About 69,000 under-16s were severely wounded in England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2018, either in a knife attack or another violent incident. In the search for explanations for this unprecedented breakdown in law and order in the once-safe United Kingdom, the all-party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime has suggested that the reason is that more pupils are being excluded from school and are vulnerable to being groomed into violent crime by gangs.
There is no question that pupil exclusions have risen dramatically. The number of permanent exclusions from secondary schools in England rose from 3,905 to 6,385 in the four years to 2017, an increase of 64 per cent. Temporary exclusions rose from 215,560 to 302,890.
Pupils who are permanently excluded because of bad behaviour are meant to go to a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU), but successive governments, both national and local, have failed to provide enough PRU places. In many parts of England, there are simply not enough of them, and in some areas they do not do a good job.
This is partly a consequence of the ideological drive to pathologise bad behaviour. Until recently, badly-behaved children were described as badly-behaved, but that is now politically incorrect. Badly-behaved children are now referred to as having ‘mental health problems’. Guidance from the Department for Education categorises ‘conduct disorders’ (e.g. defiance, aggression, anti-social behaviour, stealing and fire-setting) and ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ as mental health issues alongside depression and self-harm.
As bad behaviour is turned into a mental health problem, corrective discipline is disappearing. Traditional morality acknowledges the existence of good and evil and personal responsibility for our actions. Families have a crucial role in disciplining their children so that they know what is good and bad, and choose to do good. But the Christian moral framework and family structure which was once taken for granted has been systematically dismantled and replaced with the post-modern moral framework. Here everything is relative and there is no absolute right and wrong; bad behaviour is caused not by sinful choices but because society is institutionally racist/sexist/classist/etc. Children who are badly behaved are seen as needing help rather than discipline. The result is that they are often kept in mainstream schools for ideological reasons, when it would be far better to open more PRUs which can deal effectively with extreme disruptive behaviour. This would also be better for the majority of pupils whose education suffers and teachers who are losing the means to discipline children with bad behaviour as education has moved from being teacher-centred to child-centred to snowflake-centred.
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