Mark Daniels: When good kids go bad
It disturbed me greatly this weekend to read, on one day, in the same newspaper, of two separate stories of mindless violence, both of which were perpetrated by children no older than the age of seven.
One boy chose to break in to a zoo, steal ten animals from their habitats and then feed them to an eleven foot long crocodile. The other boy decided it might be fun to take a wooden stake and ram it in to the eye of another boy of the same age.
As the father of an eight year old boy who still secretly likes Thomas the Tank Engine, I would have given the first boy the opportunity to either chance his arm in the Reptile House or be fed directly to the crocodile to see how he liked it; the second boy I would have sent to the Pacific Northwest where he could join timber cutters and find out just where his wooden stake had originated from. If he was lucky, he might return with one of his arms intact.
Sadly, though, both boys are too young to be dealt with by the law and, apparently, when the mother of the boy who has potentially been blinded for life went to see the mother of the boy who had tried to poke his eye out and get her son to apologise, the culprit's mother simply slammed the door in her face.
Even more worrying, had both boys been just ten years older the chances are these loutish acts would have been blamed on alcohol and the government would have had yet another excuse to hike the price up further.
This isn't the case, however. I'm not that old, but when I was a lad I knew full well that if I did something wrong I was going to be made to pay for it. When I was that age, my dad gave me a ten minute hiding for wiping bogies on the wall behind my bed and when I smashed my Etch-a-Sketch over my brother's head in temper the repercussions were unbearable. At school, if we were troublesome we had chalk thrown at us and if we didn't shut up we were made to go and wait for the Deputy Head. (He was much scarier than the Head.) And when I once found a JCB digger in a building plot with the keys still in the ignition, the vehicle's driver thought nothing of dragging me all the way home to my dad by pulling my ear.
Today, of course, nobody's allowed to do that and in this world of Reality TV and violent video games, the children aren't scared of anybody anymore. Teachers live in fear of their precious charges because, it seems, a child can beat their tutor up without risk of repercussion but the adult daren't touch the child in case they get put on the Sex Offender's Register.
I recently had a run in with a group of young teenagers from a neighbouring village who had taken to using my pub's toilet as a public convenience and who had also taken a shine to the nearby bus shelter and the content of its dustbins. These are children with no concept of the naughty step and whose parents, should the police bring them home by holding their arm, will sue the authorities for GBH.
Our present government is made up of people who remember something horrendous called The Cane yet have got it in to their heads that alcohol is the root of all evil, but it won't be long before somebody is voted in to power who will have a trendy, wacky name like Voltage Jones and who won't actually understand what punishment is. And then we'll really be in trouble.
I'm not blind: alcohol can, indeed, be the cause behind a Saturday night pub brawl but for me, and so many that I know, all alcohol does is make me incapable of figuring out which toe to punch somebody with and - in copious quantities - make me be unfathomably sick.
In our broken, global society I can't help but wonder if many of these offenders - inebriated, young or otherwise - would be a little bit better behaved if they'd had a blackboard rubber thrown at them from time-to-time.
