Youth Crimes

If you look at the amount of child violence and crime that is occurring today, in comparison to just 10 years ago, it is staggering. I think just blaming the parents is a total cop out. Don’t get me wrong though – they do play a part in this.

We have kids beating-up adults, killing adults, killing each other, robbing people, robing stores and businesses, and vandalizing property. The thing to notice about many of these cases is that they aren’t usually individuals. They are groups of kids out giving peer pressure a worse name than it has ever gotten. When I was a kid the worst thing that peer pressure could lead to was smoking and perhaps some recreational drug usage – today it’s building the best pipe bomb or eight easy lessons in firearms and edged weapons. Kids are becoming wild, losing respect for the people that brought them into the world, and taking advantage of our lax youth loving judicial system. Aww he’s so cute – he couldn’t have killed those three old ladies in the nursing home for only $15 to play arcade games. Well, it IS true, and we need to start creating punishments for these crimes that actually reflect the severity of the crime. The current laws reflect backward thinking , slacked, high brow money-laden corporate execs that could afford to provide everything for his child except a proper upbringing (cause money just can’t buy that!) So, he needed some lenient laws passed to keep his kid out of trouble for the second time that he was stupid enough to get caught. Lots of money, yet not too bright.

When you actually read about the details of their crimes, you’d rather be the victim in Deliverance. Just last week a friends minivan was stolen from in front of his house. Turns out it was a 14yr girl from Ajax (outside of Toronto) that the police were already looking for. So her and four other girls in the 14-15yr age range break into the van using a screwdriver. The punctured a holes in the passenger side door until they could get to the lock. Obviously too cold to just break a window. Once in the van, the tore down the steering column enough that the steering wheel drops onto the driver’s seat which means that you have hold the steering wheel up the whole time you are driving it. I guess they actually managed to get it started, and then headed for Campbellford outside of Ottawa where the fugitive youth’s father owned a cottage. On the way into the cottage, the minivan slides into a snow bank and they get stuck. A neighboring cottager decided to call the police after witnessing the five girls ripping a street sign out of the ground and using it to try and pry the van out of the snow bank. Let’s just say that it didn’t work, and they all got caught.

This is the fault of poor parenting, bad television role models and themes, too much pressure to be adult, and a collapsing school system which can barely control the class never mind teach them anything due to the sheer size. Now, my parents busted their nads to put me through a private school for academics where the class sizes were never more than 15 students. I will thank them for that for the rest of their living days. I learned, I achieved, and I grew into society. Now I’m not going to say I was perfect when I was 14yrs old, but the behavior of those 5 girls is inexcusable, and it’s certainly deserving of more than just a slap on the wrist – oh yeah, we outlawed that too.

The activism that brought us children’s aid was founded on the solid grounds that parents shouldn’t beat their children. I agree with that, but it has gone too far. When children use it as a threat to parents after doing something stupid to get out of punishment, and fake injuries that they could blame on the parent – then that is just wrong. There are abusive parents – I know that – I have seen real cases of it that were too obvious to ignore. But taking a child away or threatening to take a child when the child is truly getting punished for smashing a ball through a window after already being told not to play baseball in the backyard, is stupid, pretentious and way out of line for the people enforcing this stuff. When you can get charged for abuse from spanking your child in a parking lot after he had just slammed the door on his little sisters hand (which I might add is wrong) then you have to ask yourself “what the fuck have we done to deserve this bullshit?”

We need to wake up and realize that there is a purpose to punishment – it deters people from doing the wrong again unless they are just totally stupid or psychotic. I was told not to throw a ball around in the house when I was young. I really didn’t see a good reason at the time not to, so I through the ball around the house. It happened to break a lamp – I got my ass kicked – and I can promise that I asked if I could go outside to throw my ball around every time after that. For the record, I was not an abused child – every time I knew when it was coming and why.

Which brings me to a good point – I knew. The laws in this country assume that these kids have no goddamn idea what the hell they are doing and that is just pure bullshit. They know it and they know that they can get away with it. Now you might be able to convince me that they don’t understand at less than 10yrs, but certainly not a group of 5 girls that spend an hour stealing a van and then 4 hours driving the thing to land it in a snow bank. I am as sure that they knew what they were doing as I am that they knew why they were doing it. And to have that kind of crime handled with baby care in the juvi system is crap. Having the crime wiped from their record at the age of 18 is also – total crap.

We need to start fueling the educational system. I am sick of hearing the struggle to survive and find work in the teaching world on a teacher’s salary. These people have committed to selflessly mold our future generations, and all we do is pay them a lousy wage, provide unmitigated amounts of overhead and bureaucracy, and poor working conditions with lackluster tools and supplies. If we put crud into these kids today, we will be living in crud in the future – I can promise you that. We need to turn this boat around soon before the young fall into total anarchy and the schools are their war zones – of course, they practically are today with the amount of weapons they carry.

In growing up with a multitude of people, I have seen the effect – if you love your children, they will love the world and all that are in it. If you piss on your kids then they will piss on everyone they meet. It is a fact – any psychologist that denies it is a total fucking quack and should be striped of his degrees. The unbelievable amount of psychobabble that we have to put up with these days is horrendous to explain away these little childhood incidents.

“Oh, it’s just a phase.”

I’m sorry but stealing a van and driving for five hours only to rip up a street sign has much more commitment and depth than just a fucking phase. Beating a school janitor to death because he caught you breaking into a store room is pretty good proof that these kids know what they are doing and shouldn’t be. Sure, it might be like playing McGiver – getting into a storeroom with a piece of duct tape and a toothpick, but it is still stupid and wrong - and the only reason that you would kill afterwards is because you knew it was wrong. Now, if you only knew how to dispose of the body...