"Teenage murderers on the rampage,” screamed the headline. Well it didn’t actually; I just made that up, but it is the sort of banner we might well have got used to over the last few months as more and more young people are severely sentenced for hideous homicides they have committed.
As I looked at the photos of the four people convicted for the senseless slaughter of the Featherston supermarket worker, I couldn’t help but think that a Hollywood movie director would have considered these three men and their lady accomplice were perfectly cast for their roles.
I hope I’m not getting too soft in my old age, but I’m starting to have a good deal of sympathy for our younger generation, many of whom are victims of a society we helped shape after decades of making all the wrong choices.
They are being brought up in a vastly different world than I was.
It’s easy to say that we never really went along with the progressive policies and the liberal reforms that have insidiously crept into our way of life, and that we were cleverly persuaded that the changes were inevitable. In fact we were swept up in an unstoppable western world-wide movement, even though it was patently clear that many of our cherished traditions were being needlessly abandoned.
Marriage as an institution was thousands of years old, but in the latter part of the twentieth century modernists suddenly decreed that it was irrelevant. The feminist movement arguably led the way, and did so with some justification, but most of their leaders had the resources to cope. Lower down the socio-economic rung all it meant was an excuse for fathers to flee from the responsibilities that went with shared parenthood.
Abolishing censorship for an adult audience was ushered in despite warnings that a younger demographic would soon work out how to access pornographic images with roast busting consequences.
The potential rise of Colin Craig’s Conservative party with its focus on the restoration of the family unit may be an indication that the worm has turned, but if we really expect politicians to lead us back to the promised land we are likely to be sorely disappointed.
We haven’t been told of the backgrounds of Glen Jones’s brutal killers, but it is quite likely they had sordid childhoods which may well have included being brought up in single parent households, living on the edge of poverty.
Research in Australia, Britain and America as well as New Zealand has revealed that fatherless children are worse off in terms of health, educational attainment, work ethics, income and lifetime wealth.
They are more prone to drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, illness, truancy, suicide, poverty and depression.
New Zealand has the developed world’s second highest percentage of single parent families and a UK report shows that compared with the intact married family, serious child abuse is 33 times higher when the mother lives with her boyfriend.
At the frontline of the result of this moral decline are our teachers, battling to control classes that contain stroppy undisciplined kids, many of whom have no respect at all for their elders. Typical response is to suspend the miscreants and leave them to roam the streets with idle hands. Thirty four per cent of teaching graduates apparently leave the profession within two years.
The statistics get worse. Apart from the decline in marriages and the rise in the divorce and separation rates the incidence of youth suicide in New Zealand is seven times higher than in 1968 and we perform about the same number of abortions as we import people through immigration channels to make up the numbers.
Of course the great majority of people overcome disadvantaged upbringings and many use the handicap as a springboard for achievement. And anyway, by and large most aspects of life have improved markedly over the last fifty years. There used to be a lot more hypocrisy around, even in the marriage vows, and much of what was wrong was never disclosed or was swept under the carpet.
But there must also be dissatisfaction that the trickle-down advantages of free market economics have never eventuated. Blatantly promoted desirable in-your-face products will constantly frustrate those who cannot partake because of the inequities in society.
Throwaway consumer items are a testament of our times and some of our young people will have been similarly discarded, leaving them with a feeling of total worthlessness.
Waiting in the wings is the drug culture, with a liberal element of society prepared to experiment with legalisation and once tightly-controlled alcohol products now readily accessible. In the end an institution that provides a warm bed, three meals a day and the security of a disciplined routine, may be appealing.
But it’s a murderous path to embark upon.
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