Would You Dare To Confront Some Of Today's Yobs?

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2293193/Face-grandfather-savagely-beaten-yobs-daring-confront-vandalised-local-park.html

What causes 'some' of the youth of today to be so violent, I say 'today' because no matter what some of you might say, it never happened when I was a youth?

[emmie]

i would have to ask family if they ever heard of or were victims of crime in the war. I suspect that they were too busy dodging the doodlebugs.

[emmie]

trigg point taken...

[emmie]

i only know that i wouldn't wander around this city now, not the way i used to..

[naomi24]

Krom, like it or not, the fact is violent crime towards ordinary citizens has increased enormously over recent years.

(Waits for someone to come along with half a dozen sets of wonky statistics...)

[Kromovaracun]

Fair enough, em. Naturally, I'd never claim that London (or anywhere) is a paradise of safety. I wouldn't even deny that the problems are worse - I don't feel I'm familiar enough with the relevant data to make such a judgement.

I just have a particular grudge against the "it never happened in my day" argument, is all (and, as an aside, the related and rather toxic idea that older people have some kind of innate authority on these things). Particularly when whatever issue happening in whatever day is a matter of public record.

[emmie]

i think you will find that it comes with age, and no matter when, i am pretty sure my grandmother was sometime horrified at the young peoples behaviour, in pretty much the same way my mother is now, and i am ...
it's one of the odds things about getting old, older, selective memory, however i stand by my experiences of growing up in the capital, that the type of violence one was usually witness to, was the Friday/Saturday heave to in the local, one pint too many, and it wasn't always the men...
or unwritten violence towards women, battered wives are nothing new, only they do have a bit more legal help these days... then they had none.

[emmie]

you have to scroll down a bit, if you are interested the points seem to be that overall in some areas of criminal behaviour it is going down, or flattening. i leave you to work some of the stats out..

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1011/hosb1011?view=Binary

[starone]

I agree. I remember walking through pitch black streets during the blackout because of the war (alone) and I never even thought of any danger. Just a weak battery operated flashlight to help me navigate the detritus left by the previous night's bombing and that was all. I won't even peep through the front door after dark now, so yes, it is definitely worse.

[seadogg]

And in those dark days we had no option to travelling on shank's pony in the dark, starbie.

[jim360]

@Naomi It's often been said that sometimes people living in an era are the worst to ask about it because, presumably, they can get sucked in by propaganda or biased by their own experiences and assuming that this was the general case. Having said that I don't really want to say I know the 70's or 60's better than anyone living then did. But I know enough history to know that while over a short-term period things may get worse or better, in the long-term things stay about the same, only take on a different form. In years gone by violence perpetrated by the State against ordinary citizens was far worse than it is now, and even if random acts of violence are more common these days than 40 years ago then that doesn't mean they didn't happen at all back then.

The main issue I have with AOG's post is the use of "never". That's surely nonsense. "Less frequently" perhaps, but even then other types of violence common then are less so now. There has always been about the same proportion of nasty people in the world.

[LazyGun]

@AoG - When you say such comments as "it never happened in my day" you are simply wrong.Plenty here have offered evidence as to why you are wrong.

Its true that many of the football hooligans and before that the various self-identified tribes such as mods and rockers etc formed largely to give each other a pasting or in the furtherance of illegal activities - but exactly the same can be claimed now about modern day gangs. There are plenty of documented instances of innocent bystanders being targeted by the gangs of yesteryear.

@Naomi - Slightly premature to pre-judge and reject any statistics offered as support in views antithetical to yours isn't it? By most indicators, violent crime, especially violent crime against strangers is going down in the UK.

The reason it might not seem like that can be attributed in a very large part to the 24/7 media saturation we now have.Anecdotal evidence of feeling safer in areas when younger is not an uncommon thing either, since youngsters generally tend to have less apprehension of danger than those who are older.

I know from reading studies and reports,and anecdotally from my own family and friends that many now feel unsafe or uncomfortable venturing forth into urban areas, but you get the sense that that is as much the product of "stranger in a strange land" and feeling uneasy with the cultural changes as much as anything else.......

On the more general point though - I read somewhere that an MP is proposing toughening up the penalty for even carrying a knife, which is something i could agree with. Actually I think we should be much tougher in sentencing for all cases involving violence....

[emmie]

some interesting information about the blackout, there were many driving casualties during the war.

http://www.homesweethomefront.co.uk/web_pages/hshf_blackout_pg.htm

[emmie]

trigg, sarcasm why ?

[Mick-Talbot]

But I was referring more to the 30s, the 40s, the 50s and the 60s more as 'my day' and I have witnessed a steady decline since the early 60s.



Witnessed or read about?
The late 70's and through the 80's were imo, more violent than than today.

[Sqad]

LazyGun

\\\Anecdotal evidence of feeling safer in areas when younger is not an uncommon thing either, since youngsters generally tend to have less apprehension of danger than those who are older.\\\

It is unlike you to quote "anecdotal evidence" but i do agree with the statement that you have made above.

But that is only half the story.....

Old people felt safe in the late 40's and 50's, not just the young and now in the last 30 years, those similar old age groups, now distinctly feel...unsafe.

It is one thing to say to the population that statistics show that it is mucg safer now when the answer comes become "maybe so, but it doesn't feel like it.

A doctor doing his rounds comes up to a patient who really is not feeling well, picks up the charts which show normal recordings and says "You are doing well"....not really reassuring and a dangerous concept.

[237SJ]

I regularly travel home on buses from nights out or via the tube from central London and I don`t think I have ever felt threatened (despite the fact that this area was Levi Bellfield`s hunting area and one of his victims was killed not 500m from here). There is one big difference between now and the past. Now, a lot of violent crime and even rape is commiteed by kids. I don`t care what anyone says, when I was growing up in the 1970s, you didn`t hear of 13 year olds raping women or 15 year olds stabbing each other. Anyone who denies that is blinkered and when people are blinkered, these problems are not addressed.