By MELANIE GILL, Daily Mail
09:15am 20th July 2006
Melanie Gill is a forensic child psychologist who specialises in
treating dysfunctional families in Brighton. Last week she was invited to
address the Centre for Social Justice conference on youth crime, at which
David Cameron made his plea to empathise with 'hoodies'.
Here, she explains that the true reason for such teenage delinquency is
that society has devalued parenthood...
You do not need to be the victim of a street mugging to live in fear of
so-called 'hoodies'. As a child psychologist working in Brighton, supposedly
one of the country's more affluent cities, I find it impossible not to be
disturbed at the growing incidence of teen gangs who seem seem to think
robbery and violent assault is a form of recreation.
The result has been an explosion in juvenile violence, which has
increased at a shocking rate over recent decades. Since 1991, the number of
serious violent offences has gone up from roughly 16,000 a year to almost
45,000. Overall, violent crime has increased 25-fold since the Fifties.
Young men make up the greatest proportion of dangerous offenders, and
newspapers are full of stories about teenage murderers, rapists, burglars
and vandals. It is absurd to pretend, as do some commentators and
criminologists, that rising crime is just a figment of our overworked
imaginations, exacerbated by a hysterical Press or a sense of nostalgia for
a time when bobbies patrolled the streets and a real sense of community
still existed.
The truth is that less than half-a-century ago we did have probably the
most peaceable, crime-free society the Western world has ever seen. But we
can hardly say the same today, when the shadow of fear is so prevalent and
when the fabric of our social structure seems to be deteriorating so
quickly.
In this atmosphere of fragmentation, the cry for more punitive action
against offenders is perfectly understandable. Yes, we send record numbers
(including juveniles) to prison, but that is because we have a crime rate
which would have been unthinkable in the immediate post-war era.
Those who have experienced violent mugging, rape, assault or burglary
need to feel secure and that the perpetrators will be dealt with seriously.
But I believe the cycle of crime and punishment can never be the long-term
answer to our problems.
If we are to make our society safer, we have to address the causes of so
many young people's alienation. It is this belief that lay behind the
much-derided comments last week from Tory leader David Cameron about the
need to try to understand hoodies rather than condemn them.
Some of Cameron's language may have left him open to ridicule, but as a
fellow speaker at the conference, I believe his approach was correct. Our
society demands that young offenders be taught a harsh lesson, that they be
forced to take responsibility for their own anti-social behaviour, but the
truth is that - outside Hollywood films, such as The Omen - children are not
born evil.
They are the products of their environment, and in modern Britain, we
have got that environment disastrously wrong. Dogmatic feminists may not
like me for saying this, but my role as a psychologist working with families
has shown me that the fashionable, modernist determination to ignore the
importance of motherhood has helped to create emotionally inadequate,
bewildered and angry, young people who vent their distress in violence and
abuse, or slide into depression and self-harm.
Children who have never known genuine, unconditional love, who have been
brought up in a home without boundaries or discipline, who have no
experience of nurturing relationships, who have been psychologically
abandoned by their mother since their earliest years will invariably grow
into emotionally broken adults.
From the early Victorian age until the late Sixties, rates of crime,
including everything from murder to juvenile delinquency, remained
remarkably stable.
"The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked
characteristic," wrote the great socialist author George Orwell at the
height of the war - words that today seem utterly hollow.
It is no coincidence that the phenomenal increase in crime over the past
40 years has occurred alongside the triumph of feminist ideology, which has
heralded the collapse of the traditional family, the destruction of the
concept of motherhood, the obliteration of morality and an aggressive
emphasis on careerism and consumerism rather than child-rearing.
Struggle
So-called liberation for women has left young mothers struggling
desperately to balance life and home, and under so much pressure that they
can no longer fulfil either role properly.
The focus on work has, of course, enabled many women - including myself -
to enjoy fulfilling careers. But the pendulum has surely swung too far.
What is happening now is that, thanks to a mix of political and financial
pressures, mothers are being forced into the career marketplace long before
they are ready to leave their children - and before their children are ready
to be left.
It is nothing short of grotesque that some women are going back into jobs
just six weeks after giving birth, abandoning their offspring to the care of
a stranger in a nursery or childcare centre.
A host of reputable scientific surveys show that this physical neglect of
children by their own mothers is doing untold psychological and neurological
damage. Babies are born with their brains only partially formed, and we now
know that they need the direct stimulus of their mothers' attention to
develop properly.
Bonding with a child is not just a matter of empathetic reassurance. It
is also vital for the beneficial growth of a baby's brain cells and
instinctive reflexes.
Infants' sensitivity to their environment is phenomenal. I recently
watched with astonishment a film in which a newly-born baby could be seen
imitating the movements of her mother.
If an infant is touched with love, its head gently stroked, its eyes
gazed at adoringly, it will develop in its brain a template for reciprocal
love. But if it is treated cruelly or abandoned, it will build a template
for anger and suspicion.
When the monstrous regime of Ceausescu fell in Romania and the Western
Press gained access to the country's orphanages, there was outrage at the
appalling neglect the children had endured.
Subsequent scans revealed large neurological holes in these chil-dren's
brains, directly caused by the lack of attention they had received in their
short lives.
Yet it would be wrong to think such abuses are confined to a totalitarian
state. They are happening in Britain today, thanks to our ultra-feminised
culture.
Childcare for the under-threes has become one of the great growth
industries in modern Britain, as women return to the workplace sooner and
sooner after giving birth. But it is storing up untold damage for the future
as the bonding process lies in ruins.
Loss of confidence
The worrying demise of motherhood is reflected in other ways. At the
clinic I have set up, I meet parents who lack the most basic child-rearing
skills. Some mothers, including those from educated, middle-class
backgrounds, are so lacking in confidence that they ring up the doctor in
the most trivial circumstances, describing, say, a verruca or a splinter as
'an emergency'.
The judgment that used to be handed down the generations or imbued by
experience seems to have disappeared.
In my work, I see a great deal of maternal anger from women who cannot
cope with the modern pressures of life or the chaos of their dysfunctional
families.
This creates children who are psychologically damaged. Confronted with
their mother's rage, they either fight back or retreat. In retreat, they
never learn empathy, which fuels the rise in personality disorders.
This lack of familial stability is only compounded by the failure to
establish boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour in a child. Too many
parents are unwilling to provide nurturing discipline for their children.
This can be because they have swallowed some post-Sixties politically
correct doctrine which holds that any form of discipline or punishment is
wrong.
It can be because such parents feel guilty about being away from home and
have taken up the spurious concept of 'quality time', in which
over-indulgence becomes a substitute for genuine love and the discipline
that goes with it.
Please don't misunderstand me. This is not an attack on women, who are
these days placed in the impossible position of having to work harder than
ever to help support their families, while also juggling their role as
homemaker and principal care-giver.
It is simply a plea for us to reconsider the vital importance of
parenting in creating a stable society.
Raising a child is hard work. It takes time and cannot be shoehorned into
a few minutes at either end of the day. And ideally, it takes both a mother
and a father.
But traditional fatherhood is disappearing as rapidly as motherhood. One
of the most malign consequences of the social revolution since the late
Sixties is the belief that fathers are utterly unnecessary in the
child-rearing process.
So instead of having one loving, reliable, masculine figure in the home,
children have to get used to a succession of fleeting boyfriends, lovers and
stepfathers with whom they have no biological connection.
As a result, children have no understanding of the meaning of stable
relationships, nor do they find it easy to accept authority.
Even more disturbingly, I'm afraid that this vast army of sexual
acquaintances has led to the disturbing growth in child abuse.
We live in terror of predatory paedophiles snatching our children at
random off the streets, but in reality 95 per cent of child victims know
their assailant. This is a depressing picture, but there are changes that
can be made to reverse the decline.
For a start, we need to accept that there is a genuine problem, rather
than pretending we are living in some post-feminist paradise.
Recently, I spoke to one of the country's children's commissioners and
asked him what was being done about the increasing number of children who
are themselves guilty of sexual assaults on more vulnerable victims.
He denied there was a problem. Explaining that he preferred to use the
term 'inappropriate relationships', he maintained that offending rates had
not increased over the past ten years. Such attitudes are downright
dangerous.
We could also give more support to schools and social services to run
intervention programmes to steer potential young offenders away from crime
before they are involved in anything serious.
We could take other measures such as encouraging mothers to stay in
hospital for longer after they have given birth, so they avoid post-natal
depression and can bond better with their children.
But by far the most important change would be to reverse the pressure on
mothers to go back to work before their children have even reached the age
of three.
The entire thrust of current state policy is to provide incentives for
working mothers, through initiatives such as the New Deal, tax credits and
childcare subsidies.
We should be moving in exactly the opposite direction, using the tax and
benefits system to cherish motherhood and family life. If society is to
recover, we need loving family relationships far more than working mothers.
We are sitting on a timebomb. Society has to change fundamentally and
address its failings in order to save our future generations.
