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Sunday, February 18, 2007

Gun crime and single parent families: a challenge

(in response to this post)

Dear Shuggy,

All through Britain's liberal media over the past couple of days a rhythmic chinking of pennies dropping has been heard. It's disappointing to see as perceptive a blogger as you stuck in the ostrich position.

To take a side issue first. The point as I take it about the drug laws is not necessarily that they have a huge positive impact on the control of gun crime, but that liberalization would simply be irrelevant. If the bottom falls out of the drug market because smackheads can get their stuff from the local corner shop, the gang members are not going to magically turn into model citizens. There's always prostitution. Or protection rackets. Or whatever.

And now the main issue. I take the point that the total amount of gun crime is small in proportion to the number of single parent families. What you're overlooking is that gun crime is just the tip of an iceberg of alienation and underachievement, and yes, pretty much all of it does correlate more or less strongly with single parent families, as not even the leftie Unicef researchers can deny. You're also missing the critical mass that is reached when boys start forming peer groups in which hardly anybody has a male role model whom they see on alternate Saturdays, let alone one they live with.

It has to be possible to discuss all this without being accused of stigmatising those who are single parents more through misfortune than by choice. For clearly we're talking about 'families' being started in circumstances where there isn't even a theoretical possibility of Dad sticking around. For boys it's even worse than no role model at all - they're well aware that they are not products of parthenogenesis, so the example they have been set is that of the man as someone who buggers off because he doesn't give a toss.

I could trade anecdotes about children from hell based on my experience of living on a council estate for ten years, but actually there isn't any point. Trying to refute statistics with anecdotal evidence is the last refuge of people whose ideological comfort blankets are wearing thin. Of course nobody is saying that all boys from single parent families turn into thugs, nor that only those boys do so, nor that single parent families are the sole cause of gun crime. But we have to be prepared to look at all the causes, not just the ones that give us an ideological buzz. I realize the single parenthood issue touches a lot of raw nerves on a personal level, but the issue's too important to allow that to get in the way. We're talking about the squandering of young lives that started with as much promise as yours or mine. The liberal establishment has betrayed them with politically correct self-censorship for long enough.

Chris Dillow is an economist, apparently. He reckons the causes of gun crime are economic. Now there's a surprise. I'd say his take is at least as one-sided as an exclusive focus on single parents.

Collapse in the demand for unskilled work? Well, who says that's all these kids are good for? Plenty of them ought to be going on to university - instead, they get caught up in the gangs.

And what economic reason is there for the massive educational gap between black boys and girls? 'Awful education'? Why isn't it awful for the girls too? Racist teachers? It's still an article of faith among many in the race relations industry that white teachers practise a fiendlishly subtle form of racism which, whilst it allows black girls to thrive and Chinese and Indian kids to outperform their white peers, uniquely blights the prospects of black boys. You're a teacher: do you take this seriously?

What about 'the high aspirations encouraged by capitalism and celebrity culture'? Nicely all- embracing, that one: 'it's the system, innit, man?' Really, the only connection between capitalism and celebrity culture is that the former (unlike socialism) is rather good at giving us what we tell it we want. We get the culture we deserve - God help us. And exactly the same argument applies as Chris raises against the single parent family connection: we all, more or less, consume celebrity culture, and most of us know we're never going to be celebs, but we don't all work off our frustration by shooting people.

Finally, you quote this from Chris Dillow: 'Insofar as it focuses upon single parents, the stupid party therefore acts like a bully, attacking the vulnerable whilst cringing towards power'. I don't hold any brief for the Tories (I've never voted for them either), but this is just emotional manipulation. Vulnerable does not equal powerless. We live in a society where contraception is freely available. Those who elect to create single parent families have exercised their power to choose. It is, of course, their children who are truly powerless.

Best wishes,

Grumpy

2 comments:

Shuggy said...

Where to begin?

The point as I take it about the drug laws is not necessarily that they have a huge positive impact on the control of gun crime, but that liberalization would simply be irrelevant.

Do you have any argument or evidence to back this up? I think you'll find that many police officers involved in the front-line in the 'war against drugs' (bit of a PR blunder to be seen to wage war on inanimate objects and lose, don'tcha think?) would agree with my analysis. But this is, as you say, a side-issue - so let's move on...

What you're overlooking is that gun crime is just the tip of an iceberg of alienation and underachievement, and yes, pretty much all of it does correlate more or less strongly with single parent families, as not even the leftie Unicef researchers can deny.

I'm not overlooking anything. I probably shouldn't speak for him but my understanding of it is neither Chris Dillow nor myself deny that there are social problems associated with the rise of single-parent families but I'm not happy with this idea that one can with a declaration that gun-crime is the 'tip of an iceberg' conflate a whole load of social problems that are not necessarily related to each other. This is merely to insist that one thing is not another thing: gun-crime is gun-crime; underachievement is underachievement. While I have no doubt that these are related, they are two distinct social phenomenon and I think this is something you have overlooked.

You say, "I take the point that the total amount of gun crime is small in proportion to the number of single parent families." I'm not sure you've taken the point at all. Can I encourage you to re-read Chris's two posts on this topic? It's not just that the proportion is small - it is statistically insignificant. As he said, "So, at least 98% of men from single-mother households don't become gun criminals. It would be odd to say that x causes y when over 98% of xs don't cause y." Someone made the analogous point that while the proportion of those breaking their legs through skiing is statistically small, there can be no doubt that skiing is a cause of broken legs. But the proportion is so small it holds that skiing is still a reasonable thing to do. So it is with single-parenthood and gun-crime. There may be other reasons why it is a bad idea but that is a different matter.

Doesn't international comparison illustrate the nonsense of all this? You might take the case of the United States as reinforcing your argument as they have a much higher gun crime rate than we do - and they also have a higher rate of family breakdown. But the level of gun deaths in the US is so much higher that the UK that family structure cannot account for the difference. Then there's the case of Italy which has a higher level of gun crime than the UK but whose family structure is more stable. Or you could take Denmark which has roughly the same proportion of children living in single parent families as we do but which records lower levels of crime across the board, not just gun crime. Do we really have to factor in the Middle East before you acknowledge, at the very least, that there maybe one or two other variables you have failed to take into account?

Then there's this -

It has to be possible to discuss all this without being accused of stigmatising those who are single parents more through misfortune than by choice.

We live in a society where contraception is freely available. Those who elect to create single parent families have exercised their power to choose. It is, of course, their children who are truly powerless.

Contradictory set here, no? Let me close with this:

'Insofar as it focuses upon single parents, the stupid party therefore acts like a bully, attacking the vulnerable whilst cringing towards power'. I don't hold any brief for the Tories (I've never voted for them either), but this is just emotional manipulation.

I can only reiterate my support for what Chris wrote here. The stupid party did indeed show themselves to be a bully with their back to basics campaign - and recent evidence would suggest they haven't changed. They had, and have, nothing to say against those who hold real power in our society, preferring instead the usual targets - those who failed to get on their bikes; the mythical 'trendy teachers'; those whose unemployment was a price worth paying to reduce inflation; immigrants and 'bogus asylum seekers; those who were ruining society with their reckless breeding... I believe I hate them for this. I certainly feel emotional about this but is it really the case that I hold the power to 'manipulate' anyone? I think not.

Shuggy said...

they are two distinct social phenomenon

Or phenomena, even...