Chief Constable claims that breakdown of the family is to blame for gang culture: Two reasons why she may be wrong
More uplifting news from the Western front:
Barbara Wilding, the Chief Constable of South Wales, has warned that gang culture is replacing family life among a generation of disaffected young people.[She] says family ties have been abandoned in place of “tribal loyalty” among young gang members, who have become “almost feral”. She said that social breakdown means violence and drugs have become a way of life in deprived parts of many larger English cities.
Well, I’m not the Chief Constable of South Wales – Hell, I’ve never even been to Wales – so I’m not in a position to comment on her findings and conclusions.
So, end of column…
Well, no.
Again, I don’t know enough about these deprived parts of South Wales and/or the ‘many larger cities’ that she is talking about. I follow the news like most other people but that is no substitute for real experience. Nevertheless, it’s almost inevitable that, whenever people talk about societal problems, the famous breakdown of the family will get a mention. This is interesting, and most probably wrong, for two reasons.
One, it assumes that ‘healthy’ or ‘functioning’ families are somehow crucial for the well-being of the society at large. Of course, when people talk about the breakdown of these smallest societal units, they mostly refer to the effects this has on the children, who then, like the Chief Constable claims, may run feral etcetera. This assumes that (in healthy/functioning families) parents are actually the only or at least the most important ones who raise their children to become functioning members of a well-functioning society.
It is, however, highly questionable whether that is true. Everybody knows examples of parents who proudly state that their children don’t get sweets at home or are forbidden to watch certain movies or play certain games. These parents suffer from the kind of delusion that most moral societal crusaders suffer from (and our Chief Constable in part.) Namely, that what these parents have created as ‘home rule’ makes a blind bit of difference to what their children will do the moment they close the front door of the family fort behind them.
If children are not allowed certain things (sweets, movies, games) at home, they are certain to enjoy them elsewhere, with their peers, if they so desire – and there lies the crux of the matter. Especially in the West, there is this shared illusion that the family unit is the place where children are raised, where values and moral and practical lessons are taught by the parents and absorbed by their children. While all of that is true to a certain extent, this almost never acknowledges a more important truth, namely, that children are also (and maybe even primarily, after they leave the house for the first time) educated and moulded by their peers.
In other words, children from poor and/or ‘failing’ families who turn to gangs are doing, more or less, what children always do: they turn to their peers for their instruction/education. Gangs, in this sense, are like any other club, be it a structured club like a sports, scouting or church organisation or the more informal ‘gangs’ of kids playing football, assembling in certain formations in the school grounds etcetera.
A second point of interest is that, when people talk about (the breakdown of) the family, they do so as if a time-honoured, venerable institution is under threat. This, however, is the strangest of illusions. The family unit (or nuclear family) as we know it in the West, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until (by and large) the Industrial Revolution there was no such thing as a nuclear family for most of the people. What existed were extended family & neighbourhood networks, which enabled people to survive. Within these structures, grown-ups associated with grown-ups and children lived with children of their age. Supervision of the smallest children was left to whatever older grown-ups (or older children) were at hand at any given time. For the rest people lived and were raised and educated in generational layers.
For various, mostly practical reasons the Industrial Revolution spelled the end of this former and looser ‘family’ life and introduced what we now know as the nuclear family. In other words, when people argue that the breakdown of the family is the cause for some, most or all of our ills, they forget that, in the West, society has been able to get by for centuries and centuries without the benefit of such a nuclear family.
This column has grown long enough as it stands now, so I won’t even try to go into what may be the real causes of society’s ills. Still, my instincts say that it is unlikely that the smallest societal unit (the family) can be the most, let alone the sole one responsible for them. As I already said, children are as much (and maybe more thoroughly and efficiently) raised by their peers as by their parents and the family unit an sich is also a Johnny-come-lately on the Western societal scene.
So, I suspect that, if there is something wrong with society that makes for all those big headlines in our newspapers and which causes our Chief Constables these sleepless nights, it must be something in the overall structure of our society that makes us ill. Think of it, perhaps, as a variant of the sick building syndrome.
So, maybe what we are doing, when focusing so much on the family unit, is no more than trying to rearrange the furniture inside a building that has much bigger, structural problems.
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