Is it possible that the increase in vicious crime is linked to the rise of single and unskilled parents?
We know most single parents are OK, we all have them in our family, or are one ourselves. A small percentage of children suffer however through being raised by a parent without any parenting skills at all, perhaps compounded by drug and alcohol problems and ever changing de factos. These kids roam around because their homes are too violent to spend much time in. Apparently in Carnarvon kids as young as three are out on the street late at night for this reason.

http://www.healthofchildren.com/S/Singl ... ilies.html

Father Chris Riley who does lots of work with street kids and has beneficial programs for them said if babies do not connect with another human while under the age of six months of age they never connect. Its so easy for them to then turn nasty. This seems a more likely cause of violence than playing violent computer games and such.

Christine O wrote:

Is it possible that the increase in vicious crime is linked to the rise of single and unskilled parents?

Yes, and more than likely in my view. Fewer parents have no or poor role models unfortunately for their children.

I was a police officer for thirty years and worked juveniles for seven years. After seven years, I decided the "system" was doing more harm than good and asked to be reassigned.

A. Some people shouldn't have children.
B. Some parents actively teach their children to be monsters.
C. I dealt with bad kids from good families with decent siblings and I also dealt with good kids from bad families with siblings who were heading for a career in prison.
D. The system was teaching children that there would be no significant consequences for their actions.

In my opinion, "yes", especially when it comes to parenting teens. This time of their life is emotionally, physically and environmentally unstable, parents should be skilled in parenting their teens.

Nowadays, many of the things parents are trying to share with their kids are being drowned out because of the lack of parenting skills and the the influence of peers.

Since peer pressure is so powerful, why not use it to the parents and teen's advantage by finding organizations and groups that have healthy peers to influence them. For some parents with troubled teens that are out of controlled and all the strategy have been tried then maybe a teen boarding school might work for them.

In today's world not only parents should be blamed for the increase of juvenile delinquency and inhumanity. It is a complex of factors... Eduction system that is totally broken today, the changes in family values, mass media where we can see advocacy of violence all the time. Of course you shouldn't forget about some inhereted factors.
I know lots of good people who were brought up by a single parent, who became good and kind parents later. But also I saw children who had loving parents, but who were uncontrollable, without any signs of having respect to anything or anyone.

I've seen "bad" parenting and I've seen "incompetent" parenting. The difference. I dealt with a family where three pre-school children were shoplifting. Mom was shocked, shocked mind you, but the kids were stealing jewelry for mom and clothing for mom. She was training them to be thieves and support mom. That's a bad parent. Another parent, a college professor was in with his 15-year old daughter. She was arrested for shoplifting over $200 worth of cosmetics. She was dropping the items down her sweater that was large and belted at the hips. As she was being escorted to the office she loosened the belt and all the cosmetics fell out. When she came in with her father she denied everything. I gave the father the written statements from two witnesses and another statement from the manager wo was escorting her to the office when she dumped the stuff. The nitwit college professor said, "But, my daughter says none of this is true and I have to show her I trust her. She was sitting there smirking. So, instead of a lecture and leaving it up to the parents to handle, I filed charges in juvenile court. He was an incompetent parent.

I beleive that many kids today suffer from a culmination of influences. Bad or inefective parenting. Lack of positive relationships. Media and entertainment. Toxic food, being overly processed and poisoned with additives and preservatives. Limited opportunities for mentoring, what with our adults all being so busy with their own lives. A lack of accountability. An increase in depression and anxiety, for the kids themselves and their parents.

I beleive that violence has increased in our society across the board. And this may be due not only to the breakdown of the traditional family unit, but the breakdown of the traditional extended family unit. Many adults now live far from their parents and siblings. People who in the past may have had your back if life started unravelling. People who could say to you, 'Do you think little Johnny may be getting a bit out of control. Is there anything we can do to help you out?'

In the case of kids in places like Carnarvon there are issues that are so multigenerational, it would seem almost impossible to intervene. Abuse on all levels is the absolute norm for these kids. Families were displaced and abused, so the foundation of their culture was shattered. These kids will not be 'saved' by a Grandparent or realtive intervening. Their own Grandparents would be overwhelmed themselves, long since passed away, or worse still, one of their many abusers.

As for kids from supposidly 'good families'. Some kids are just more sensetive to the external factors that may build up on them. You never really know what is going on behind closed doors.

There have always been bad parents in society. It's just that kids today have so many more opportunities to express their frustrations.

I agree with the statement that rebellious and violent kids are primarily caused by bad parenting. Parents are the ones who mould their children so they are held responsible for the growth of their child.
Another factor that influences violent kids is the environment. The people they see everyday, and the people whom they go along and accompanies them.

A few points.

1. Juvenile crime is nothing new.

2. Adolescence/young adulthood is a turbulent time, characterized by immaturity, poor judgment, inexperience and raging hormones. You expect some pretty disruptive behaviour, and that includes criminal behaviour.

3. Generally under-25s juveniles commit crimes about around twice the rate of the over-25s. Under-20s commit crimes at four times the adult rate.

4. These relationships are pretty stable over time; mostly (though not always) juvenile crime rates rise when adult crime rates rise, and fall when adult crime rates fall.

5. Having a criminal in the family is distressing. But, if they make it to age 25, most of them grow out of it. A criminal record in your late teens or early twenties is damaging and worrying, but it doesn’t inevitably mean a life of crime will follow.

6. The common perception is usually that juvenile crime rates are rising. About half the time, naturally, this perception is wrong.

7. Are they rising or falling now? Well, that depends on the period you look at. Juvenile crime rates today (in Australia) are higher than they were five years ago. So they’re rising. On the other hand, they’re lower than they were fifteen years ago. So they’re falling.

8. Interestingly, young people are not just disproportionately represented among offenders, but also disproportionately represented among victims. Your stereotype of the victim of a street assault, say, may be of a middle-aged or older woman who is mugged for her handbag. In fact it is males aged between 15 and 24 who are most likely to be the victims of street assaults. The risk-taking behaviour and poor judgment typically displayed by adolescents doesn’t just lead them into crime, but into situations where they are at greater risk of being the victims of crime.

8. Is single parenthood/poor parenting responsible? Well, possibly. Most of the research is into factors like homelessness, drug use, mental health issues, etc as risk factors, and undoubtedly they are. But that just raises the question, how do people become homeless, or get into drugs, or express poor mental health? And it seems reasonable to think that a disruptive or stressed family life can contribute to that.

But shooting in Sydney streets is up.
According to the news this evening there were nine shooting incidents in the last eight days.

The Lord Mayor of Melbourne is said to be worried that Sydney is now outstripping his town as the Wild South-East of Australia.

Samantha Lee, the Gun Control Guru has been on TV saying that Gun Control Australia demands more penalties and harsher restrictions on all Law Abiding Firearms Owners (LAFOs), however when asked about criminals she is reported to have said that they don't obey the law and there is no political mileage to be made out of attacking criminals.

Meanwhile Premier Barry O' Fumble has said that police need more powers which is what he said last time they couldn't get the job done.

The Opposition is calling for Parliament to be recalled so that biker gangs can be outlawed. Wonder why they didn't do that when they were in power.
Oh! To hard. . . . .

But would it be ethical to outlaw Biker Gangs and is it ethical for a man as educated and erudite as our Premier to lump all members of bike clubs in the same category , as outlaws?

Are all 'Biker Gangs' the same?

Samuel,

Why not just ban motorcycles. Without motorcycles there can't be any bike gangs.

Steady on there Kookaburra, steady on!

Might work though, punish all the law-abiding to get at the criminals; sounds familiar

"I'll keep the whole class in, unless the one who put oil on the white board eraser owns up".

Very well said, i guess were on the same path.
I think it is immaturity, not age, that leads to bad parenting. A lot of people think that just because someone is young, they have no sense of responsibility because half the time it is true (how many idiots do you know at your age?) A lot of people think that but it's really not true.Age doesn't make you a better parent,just maybe more financially stable.

I think yes.

My justification is that when child comes to this world he is just like a blank book, every page and sentence in this blank book has to be written by those parents who have brought that book in this world. So, if the parents will give good learning to his child then he will be good with others and no social crime will happen.

This was Christine's original question and it would seem that there is evidence linking single/divorced mothers and male juvenile crime. (http://www.criminologyresearchcouncil.g ... 7-95-6.pdf). Other posters have talked of 'bad' parents. A key word in Christine's original post is 'skilled'. Would investment in providing parenting skills education for all parents be worthwhile?

More to the point, why do we need a subsidised education scheme to control violent youths now, when I assume this wasn't necessary in the past? Perhaps we have been a bit too hasty in our discarding of older social practices.

To be honest, I personally think it's a host of factors. Personal responsibility is not expected of young people today as much as it was in the past. It's not just bad parents, it bad discipline in schools, it's courts and the justice system giving never ending chances to offenders that results in a blase attitude. I'm in my 20's, from a lower class background, and have seen first hand people who have racked up dozens of convictions and not had any serious consequences - despite those convictions people still had access to the dole, still had public housing, were generally not jailed and didn't even have to take responsibility for paying their own paltry fines because it was simply docked from their welfare in tiny amounts. One fellow I knew had multiple drug use/dealing convictions, multiple break and enter/theft convictions, lost his car licence multiple times and only ended up in jail after being caught under the influence of drugs whilst driving an unregistered car without a licence (again). And even then it was a couple of months. Up until that point he would go to court, plead how sorry he was and it was the drugs fault and he wanted help, then when he got off would laugh about it whilst using more drugs.

I don't believe parenting classes are going to make a dent in the problem as we probably need to look at the system in a wider scale.

I would like to pose an ethical question. Is it fair or reasonable to keep linking "bad parenting" with single parents? If we continually said that for example, a particular ethnic group was synonomous with bad parenting, would we get away with it?

People become single parents for so many reasons, but rarely simply because they are fundamentally flawed human beings. I never planned on being a single parent, but five years after my son was born, that is what I became. He's now 20, and makes jokes about the fact that according to popular journalism he should have by now found his spot in the gutter and his drug of addiction. Instead he is at university, has a very good part time job, and volunteers with a youth organisation. He finds it offensive that every reference to his upbringing in the media is negative. So do I.

I grew up in an in tact family. My parents just "celebrated" 50 years of marriage. My father is a bully who routinely beat my mother. Then my mother stood by and watched him do the same to me when I was in my teens. Yet, the popular press would hold them up as sensational examples of good old fashion values.

It is not the marriage status of a person that determines their parenting skills. Can we please just stop discriminating against single parents and their children?

No one ever seems to put widows and widowers in the same category as those that were not married.

Are they not also single parents or did a marriage ceremony somehow make them different as parents?

You can see the effects of bad parenting or poor parenting in the classroom every single day. It's one of the MAIN reasons schools fair so poorly.

there are several things which effects on the behavior of the kids. only the parents can not do all for there kids there are several sources from the kids learns like their friends , friends family, area in which they live , atmosphere .
it is not true that the kids of good families are always good ,there can be good kids from bad families and bad kids form the good families .