The Youth of Today
The teenage gangs in inner cities; the increasing knife culture; the angry 19-year-old who lashed out and killed the boy in a bakery; the shocking case of an 18-year-old youth who, when in foster care, raped the two-year-old in the family and abused the nine-year-old; the extensive survey earlier this year that expressed a widespread anxiety about the state of the nation's children and the fact that childhood ends too quickly; the finding that a teacher suffers a violent attack almost every school day; the growth in childhood obesity, in teenage and pre-teenage binge drinking, in under-age sex and under-age pregnancies – there is a sense of a growing crisis in childhood, certainly a crisis in the way that we think of children.
