Streets of shame

Listener — September 22–28 2007

Young New Zealanders have a right to have the violence committed against them treated as a serious issue. When 17-year-old schoolboy Augustine Borrell was stabbed through the heart outside an Auckland party earlier this month, he became the 11th person in two years to die on Auckland’s streets in incidents that, on the face of it, share similar characteristics. Not that there is a serial killer at work. There is a series of killers at work.

Shockingly, they are often young. New Zealand has a problem with violence and young people are often the perpetrators – and not just in Auckland, but nationally. Crime statistics show that in the 10 years from 1997 to 2006, the apprehension of people aged 14-20 for violent crimes rose more than 40 percent. There were 8738 apprehensions in 1997 and 12, 572 last year. The population of young people has certainly increased over that decade, but nowhere near 44 percent.

The problems begin before offenders are teenagers. There might, in some cases, be good cause for requiring parents to stand alongside their offspring in the dock. The parents, if they can be found, might not be the people who took a knife or a baseball bat down the street and used it on someone on a particular night, but they might well be the people who gave up parenting in any effective manner before their child got anywhere near their teens.

A prosecutor might ask a defendant about the night a particular murder was committed. And if he is convicted, a judge might then feel entitled to ask the offender’s parents where they were and what they were doing in the years before their son, aged 16, 17 or 18, stood facing a sentence of life imprisonment.

In Britain, the murder of young Rhys Jones has led commentators to note a reversal in the direction of moral authority. No longer is it always the adults who are in charge. Here, too, for the first time in history, we have a generation of children who are often deemed beyond reproach. Many parents will automatically take their side in disciplinary disputes at school. And at home it is the children who determine what they eat, what they watch on television and how long they spend playing highly addictive computer games.

Modern life, says one recent report, is robbing children of a very precious thing: “outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play”. That is true. But sadly, too, their own parents are also robbing them of the opportunity to learn about limits and consequences.

One of the most frustrating aspects of youth crime is that those who will become offenders can often be picked out at primary school. There is every reason to support greater intervention in households where children are heading in the wrong direction. The risk factors are well known. Backgrounds of social deprivation, parental negligence or incompetence, the absence of fathers, poor achievement at school, involvement in gangs – we know it, yet in too many cases we remain unwilling or unable to deal with it.

The reality now is that some types of random assaults and robberies appear to be increasing. Young people know this better than anyone. Many of them, before dressing to go out on a Friday or Saturday night, calculate not just the aesthetics of their clothes, but also the desirability of the outfit to someone who might be willing to assault them in order to steal their jacket or shoes. As adults, we can be complacent about that – after all, most of us are statistically unlikely to be attacked. But we cannot simply shrug off the knowledge that it places an intolerable burden on those least able to defend themselves: the poor and the young.

The Borrell family have suffered a heartbreaking tragedy. To lose a 17-year-old child under any circumstances is an enormous weight to bear. To know that the cause was violence must make it even heavier. And to know that he won’t be the last is something to be heeded by us all. Nice one, Don. As noted by the New Zealand Herald, Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon commented the other day that two of his fellow Kiwis were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge: Ernest Rutherford had split the atom at Cambridge and reformist Vice-Chancellor John Hood has split the Oxford academic community …

So, why isn’t McKinnon on our Power List? He’s a pretty powerful New Zealander after all. So are Hood, Kevin Roberts and others we could name. But to qualify, your power and influence must be felt mostly within New Zealand.