Why are UK teenage killings down?

Having been aware of the issue for some time, I was intrigued to see a report yesterday on the BBC website that the murder rate amongst teenagers has shown a sudden and dramatic drop. The report begins as follows:

The number of teenagers killed violently in the UK has fallen by 30% in one year, BBC research has found.

The BBC teen homicide database, which records murder and manslaughter cases, shows 51 10 to 19-year olds lost their lives in 2009 compared with 72 in 2008.

Most 2009 victims were male and half of all those killed were stabbed. Twelve were beaten and two were shot.

Police say anti-knife crime tactics explain the drop, but critics argue it is too early to make such conclusions.

Back in June I blogged about a possible increase in the number of teenagers committing murder. This article was the result of a hunch, based initially (as it happens) on reports from the BBC news website. Later in the year, however, I was able to obtain proper figures which showed a definite increase in the rate of teenagers convicted of murder, going back to some time in the mid 1990s. In many cases, the victims of these teenage murderers are also themselves teenagers. Hence the decline in teenage murders will probably also indicate a decline in teenage murderers.

Again based on the absence of news reports, I had begun to suspect that the number of murders involving teenagers had indeed declined this year, so this story is no great surprise. Indeed, it must be welcomed. As it indicates, however, there are a number of unanswered questions.

One is whether or not the decline will be sustained. The chart I produced from the figures supplied shows occasional dips as well as a gradual rise in the number of teenagers convicted of murder. However, it must be pointed out that murders by teenagers sometimes involve multiple perpetrators —ie they are instances of gang attacks —and so it might only take one or two fewer killings to produce a significant drop in the number of killers. Both the dips and the rises on this chart may be affected by this factor. By contrast, a large drop in the number of murders would, on the face of it, seem more significant, since single incidents rarely involve more than one victim.

The second question, posed in the BBC article itself, is what might have caused a decline. The police and Home Office point (unsurprisingly) to their own initiatives. Others suggest the informal counselling done by staff in hospital A and E departments.

For my own part, I wonder if the decline has been caused, actually, by teenagers. Young people have always had their own, informal but powerful, sub-culture, created by the things in which they take an interest —games, fashions, TV programmes, the internet and so on. People of my age well remember the seaside clashes of Mods and Rockers back in the ’60s. Then came the ‘Hippy’ movement and Flower Power. The fashions came and went, shaped by the trend-makers, but dependent, ultimately, on the young people themselves.

It would be no surprise to me if the teenage community simply decided it had had enough of violence —at least at the level sufficient to result in someone’s death. Maybe all those ‘shrines’ on Facebook and Myspace have had an effect. There is nothing quite as capable of bringing an end to a trend amongst young people as negative peer pressure. Certainly it would be worth investigating wether this might be so. I am much less easily convinced that it has been the result of anything said or done by adult ‘officialdom’!

Then there is the third, related, question, which is what caused (or, maybe, is still causing) the nevertheless high rate of these killings, for behind the apparent decrease is certainly a previous increase, as the figures show. Was this, too, a ‘fashion’, and if so, what drove it? Just as importantly, could it have been ‘nipped in the bud’ at an early stage?

Any decline in violence must be welcomed, but we should remember that there is still a subculture out there which, I suspect, would horrify most of us from more sheltered backgrounds.

John Richardson
24 December 2009

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The rise in teenage murderers?

For some time now, I’ve been trying to verify a hunch that whereas murder was once an ‘adult’ activity, it has recently become more a preserve of the young —indeed, the very young.

About three years ago, I noticed the astonishing number of news stories online about murders in which the victim or the perpetrator was in their teens.

Often, if the victim was in their teens then so, it seemed, was the perpetrator. What was even more alarming was that in the case of teenage perpetrators of all kinds of murders there were often two or more individuals involved.

Trying to get specific numbers is difficult. Curiously, I have twice tried requesting information on the numbers of teenagers convicted for murder from our own Ministry of Justice, but without success (even though the website says this is possible under the Freedom of Information Act).

Today, however, I found that the Google news archive now shows a timeline of results for a search, and this is very interesting.

If you click here, you will see the result for the search term "guilty of murder" (this should open in a new window or tab, so you will need to come back to this page afterwards). At first glance this might seem to suggest the murder conviction rate has gone up since 1860, declined in the 1940s, and then has risen again since the 1960s. But of course what we also have here is the number of filed news accounts and a dramatically increasing population. On its own, the graph is interesting, but tells us nothing about rates of increase or decline.

However, if you click here, you will see the results for the same search term, only this time just for the period 1950-2009, and this is where it starts to get interesting.

Now click here, and see the results for the search term 'teenager + "guilty of murder"', again for 1950-2009. This time, we have factored out the increase in news media and population. The difference is, I'm sure you'll agree, striking. Click between the two pages or tabs to compare the two. Whilst the rate per head of population may not have changed, the rate of reports has increased dramatically. Indeed, between 1975 and 1995 it increased exponentially. If you scroll down the page, you will also see that the stories are, indeed, generally about teenagers who have carried out, and been convicted of, murders.

However, there may still be other factors involved, so as a kind of control try comparing 'wife+"guilty of murder"' and 'husband+"guilty of murder"' over the same period as before. This time it can be seen that both rates of reporting have increased - and the 'husband' rate slightly more than the 'wife' - but that the rates are not markedly different (and, thankfully, both seem recently to have fallen).

It is, I agree, not absolute proof. But it is surely an indication of a trend.

John Richardson
4 June 2009

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Ray Lewis: 'this brave man'

From Melanie Phillips about my friend, Ray Lewis. She could have worded this bit better, but I know what she means: "Whatever his personal failings turn out to be, it would be social suicide if his approach to delinquent youths was also discredited. Even if Ray Lewis is to be taken out of the picture, we need more people like him to continue what he started."

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The resignation of Ray Lewis as the Mayor of London' s crime adviser is quite simply a tragedy, with profound implications far beyond the insular world of the capital's party politics.

Here is a man who has literally saved lives. Among the boys whose behaviour he has transformed through his Eastside Young Leaders' Academy in East London are those who, without any doubt, would otherwise have gone on to kill or be killed.

Yet Mr Lewis has suddenly been accused of a slew of torrid offences including financial irregularities, physical abuse and sexually inappropriate behaviour.

At present, we don't know the truth about these murky allegations. Mr Lewis has already robustly denied the more lurid claims, but perhaps some of them are true.

Maybe all those who have supported him in the past - ranging from the Tories' social justice guru Iain Duncan Smith to Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone's (now disgraced) race adviser who described his approach as 'brilliant' - are thus shown up to be naive and credulous dupes.

If so, then I am one of them. I visited the Eastside Academy in July 2005, months before David Cameron used it for his first official photo-op as the new Tory leader. I saw for myself the impressive work Ray Lewis was doing.

He took black boys from shattered family backgrounds who were on the way to criminal careers and turned them into high-achieving model citizens. These were the toughest boys in the neighbourhood.

They had fought, bullied, smashed up their schools and set fire to them, barricaded teachers into the classrooms and been in accelerating trouble with the law. Yet when they left Eastside virtually all of them went to college and lived law-abiding lives.

Ray Lewis achieved this by plugging the crucial gap in their lives that virtually no teacher or social worker or probation officer can fill.

He was simply the father figure they so desperately needed but who was missing from their own fractured families. He was a tough, stern, authoritative, totally uncompromising black man - all factors crucial to gaining their respect.

All he achieved was through the force of his personality. The boys did what he told them to do, not because he hit them but because his disapproval was shattering to them.

He loved and believed in those boys, he gave them a sense of unlimited aspiration and he drove them very hard. And because they both feared his tongue and admired him, they responded by transforming themselves.

He made them conform to strict rules of discipline; there were military-style roll calls, they were instructed to make eye contact with their tutors and to walk in straight lines with no deviations and no talking.

The importance of such 'tough love' to boys who possessed not even the most elementary social skills, let alone self-discipline or respect for authority, cannot be exaggerated.

He had no time at all for sloppy teaching practices, nor the usual excuses for bad behaviour such as 'poor self-esteem'. His work was the most graphic rebuke possible to all those involved in making excuses for juvenile criminality.

As a result, he made serious enemies on the Left, who regarded him as some kind of fascist. On the local Newham council various councillors and officials badmouthed Eastside as a 'boot camp' and gave him only minimal funding.

This was simply because just about everything he stood for was a monumental rebuke to everything they stood for, and to the personal and social damage over which they so complacently presided. Read more

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The Dead Teenagers Society, 2008

Nine months ago, I posted an item titled 'The Dead Teenagers Society', about the appalling numbers of teenagers murdered in London to that point in the year (nine, by July 2007).

Today's newspapers are rightly lamenting the fact that the total of teenagers murdered in the capital so far this year is eleven (in the thirteenth week).

However, London is only one part of the UK. The total nationally is actually twenty.

Most of these teenagers have been killed in what might be termed 'altercations', usually with other teenagers. The majority of killings thus actually involved more than one killer, often in the same age group. Hence the number of teenage murderers so far this year is perhaps more like twenty-five to thirty. That's about two a week, or a hundred for the year.

The names and ages of these teenagers are as follows (not in exact date order):

Amro Elbadawy, 14
Devoe Roach, 17
Ross Davidson 19
Ryan Hyden, 19
Joshua Mitchell, 17
Nicholas Clarke, 19
Samantha Bennett, 19
Michael Jones, 18
Ahmed Ibrahim, 17
Ofiyke Nmezu, 16
Tung Le, 17
Sunday Essiet, 15
Joe Dinsdale, 17
Fuad Buraleh, 19
Christopher Johnston, 17
Boduka Mudianga, 18
Bradley Whitfield, 16
Faridon Alizada, 18
Alexander Thomas Holdroyd, 19
Henry Bolombi, 17


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How we are literally breeding youth crime

Is aspirin the answer to youth crime? Back in the early 1960s, the saying went that aspirin was the best contraceptive: “Held between the knees, it never fails.” But what has contraception got to do with the problem of youth crime? Potentially, much indeed.

Many years ago, Tony Blair said that the government of the United Kingdom was to be, “Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime.” Since then, statistics for crimes in the United Kingdom show a mixed picture open to various interpretations. It is clear, however, that violent crimes involving knives and guns have increased massively, as have violent crimes committed by teenagers, frequently directed at those of their own age.

In the November 2004 edition of Cross-Cultural Research, Dr Nigel Barber, a researcher in ‘evolutionary psychology’, published a paper titled, ‘Single Parenthood As a Predictor of Cross-National Variation in Violent Crime’. In the introduction, he noted this:

One factor operating at the level of families that has received surprisingly little attention in cross-national comparisons is single parenthood. (p344)

This, he felt, was particularly noteworthy given that,

Cross-nationally, in research on developed countries, single parenthood is predictive of homicides committed against children (Gartner, 1991). (ibid)

Barber’s explanation of this, as might be expected from his specialization, was almost ‘Darwinian’: “violent crimes can often be considered a form of mating competition.” In support of this, he quoted sources depicting a depressingly familiar scenario from the United States:

Thus, Daly and Wilson (1988) concluded that many of the homicides in the Detroit area that were officially categorized as “trivial altercation” homicides, in which two young men who knew each other fought to the death over a seemingly trivial dispute ... were really conflicts over social status, which is an important ingredient in sexual attractiveness and reproductive success for men (Barber, 2002). (p346)

Of course, Barber may be wrong. A correlation does not prove a cause, but the scientific method demands that any such correlation may reasonably claim to be a candidate for causality, even if the mechanism is not yet identified.

This was the case with smoking and lung-cancer in the 1950s. The correlation was relatively easy to identify, though the causes were not precisely clear. Nevertheless, the public were soon being warned of the danger and encouraged to give up smoking for the sake of their health.

Surely, natural caution would suggest the same approach with regard to what Rebecca O’Neill in a 2002 paper calls ‘The Fatherless Family’? She cites over a hundred sources to support her conclusion that,

For many mothers, fathers and children, the ‘fatherless family’ has meant poverty, emotional heartache, ill health, lost opportunities, and a lack of stability. (p14)

Amongst the findings she notes are that children living without their biological fathers “are more likely to show hostility to adults and other children, and be destructive of belongings,” (p7). They are also more likely to offend, to take drugs and to play truant. Depressingly, she observes that,

In focus group discussions, young people in prisons spoke frequently about disruption in their family lives and about their fathers’ absence. One discussion went as follows:

Interviewer: I’ve just realised we’ve spent the whole time and nobody’s talked about dads.

Teenager 1: That’s because there’s no dads to talk about! (p8)

In the case of teen crime, however, it is possible not merely to establish a correlation with this absence of fathers but to propose a causal connection.

Before artificial contraception became widely available, sexual activity, whether casual or committed, was inclined to work ‘as nature intended’ and result in children. At the same time, children born out of wedlock were stigmatized as illegitimate and their mothers as immoral. (Nor did the fathers, if known, escape public disapproval.) Taken together, therefore, these factors were, until quite recently, a major disincentive to sex outside marriage.

Correspondingly, knowing that the only socially-approved context for sexual expression was marriage, young men were encouraged to marry, not only for the comforts it would provide but — crucially — for the sexual activity it would allow.

But marriage required certain practical provisions. It was prudent to have finished one’s education (and of course marriage was not legally possible for those of school age). Knowing that children would likely arrive within the first few years, it was also necessary to have a reasonable income and somewhere to live — preferably not with the wife’s parents!

Thus Jane Austen was only half right when she said, “a man in possession of a large fortune must be in search of a wife.” It was also true that a man in search of a wife had to be in possession of at least some fortune of his own. ‘Settling down’ was not just the nature of, but the prerequisite for, marriage.

All this encouraged maturing boys to think of work, saving and, most importantly, personal commitment to a partner and to eventual fatherhood, as the social ‘norm’. Most importantly, the sexual drive itself, instead of being given license to run free, was actually harnessed to creating the conditions conducive to a stable social fabric.

Since the 1960s, however, this incentive has steadily declined. In particular, the notion that sexual activity properly belonged within marriage has almost evaporated. And this is not merely the accidental result of the advent of the contraceptive pill. On the contrary, successive government-sponsored policies and educational movements since the 1970s have not only taught the young in detail how to engage in sexual activity, but have encouraged them to believe that the deciding factor as to when and whether this should take place is their own feelings.

When it comes to the right time to have sex, children are not taught to ask, “When do you think you would be ready to marry and raise a family?”, but “When do you feel sex would be right for you?” The result has been a predictable, and predicted, disaster. As E S Williams has shown in Lessons in Depravity: The history of Sex Education in the UK, 1918-2002, despite many warnings, ‘sex education’ programmes and the accompanying availability of contraception have correlated with increasing rates of abortion, teenage pregnancy and under-age sex.

Now we are confronted with evidence that single-parenthood in general, and absent fathers in particular, cause social disadvantage, linked not only with material deprivation but criminality and violence — evidence so compelling that even politicians are beginning to acknowledge the link. Given these facts, the prevailing sexual morality, together with the behaviours it produces and the outcomes which result, ought surely to be under consideration as one of the “causes of crime”. Yet, on the contrary, amongst policy makers there seems to be an aversion to confronting this issue. As Steven Malanga writes in the online City Journal:

The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns [...].

Why, then, do governments and social agencies not act? It is interesting to compare the inertia in this area with subsequent public policy in the UK on smoking. Not only has the present government now passed legislation making smoking in any ‘covered public space’ illegal, it has made the owners of those ‘spaces’ responsible for its enforcement. At a stroke, it has criminalized a once widely-accepted social behaviour and has turned the public into an unpaid police force.

What this shows, however, is that where a supposedly ‘liberal’ government has the will, it can be decisive to the point of draconian. Choice, in this matter, is not an option. And the justification is clear: smoking is now, finally, acknowledged to be bad for the individual and detrimental to society.

Yet the same could already be argued regarding single parenthood and fatherless families. And if we believe at all in government — which it must be presumed that at least MPs and their cohorts do — then it is surely incumbent on those in power to pursue vigorously those policies which are conducive to the common good. That this is not happening cannot be explained by ignorance or stupidity. Rather, it suggests a dogmatic commitment to an inchoate libertarian sexual ethic, just as invidious as the tobacco companies’ ability to go on selling a product they know kills (and the Exchequer’s willingness to take the taxes it produces).

The class from which policy makers are drawn value their own freedom to indulge, and the results impact on public policy. In the troubled parts of our towns and cities, however, the consequences play out very differently than in the circles of the educated and wealthy. On the street and in the housing estates, sexual liberation goes hand in hand with social chaos. Parenting, arduous enough in normal circumstances, is made vastly more difficult when fathers and husbands are alien concepts and peer pressure amongst teenagers is all. In such circumstances, what motivation is there for a youth to become a ‘responsible adult’, when social and educational policy, and public example, all tell him that the most basic of needs and drives essential to family formation can be satisfied at a whim without long-term consequences?

What is needed, bluntly, is a return to modesty, to lower the emotional pressure on young people, and chastity, to channel their natural desires constructively. But those virtues must be shown as well as taught, and that is not going to come from our present policy makers (nor, sadly, from the Church). Our leaders enjoy the freedom won for them by the Bloomsbury Group and its successors. They are not going to abandon it lightly. But then they do not live as Martin Dinnegan, Danielle Johnson, Abu Shahin, Ben Hitchcock and Sian Simpson once did. Never heard of them? They were all murdered in the UK in June of this year. Their average age was sixteen-and-a-half.

Revd John P Richardson

27 August 2007

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