Prayers for Billy Cox

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and a commentator on religion and politics for National Public Radio.

The startled reaction to a string of youth homicides in south London suggests that Great Britain may be edging into a national debate about the deepest causes of social breakdown. That’s the good news. The debate, after all, is long overdue. The bad news is that, based on the BBC’s coverage of this story, it’s anybody’s guess which voices will shape the outcome of this moment of national soul-searching.

The facts are gruesome enough. Three teenagers were shot dead in separate spasms of violence over a two-week period:  Michael Dosunmu, 15, in Peckham; James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, in Streatham; and Billy Cox, 15, in Clapham. The last victim, shot in the chest at his home in a southwest neighborhood, was found bleeding to death by his 12-year-old sister. At a church service for Billy over the weekend, Rev. Sue Peake lamented “the hideous pressure on youngsters growing up in our inner cities.”

This is the kind of desperate brutality Britons expect to hear about in south Boston, south-central Los Angeles, or southeast Washington, D.C. Not in London. What are they to make of it?

There’s the law-and-order response: Crack down on juvenile offenders, criminalize gang membership, and put more police on the beat. It’s a view by no means confined to political conservatives. Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, used a Sunday appearance on BBC One to announce a vigorous review of gun laws and a plan to lower the age at which young people can get long prison sentences for gun possession, from 21 to 17.

There’s the social welfare response: Ratchet up government spending on education, welfare services and after-school programs. Liberal Democrats such as Sir Menzies Campbell, for example, complained about “a disenfranchised generation.” He echoes the  slippery therapeutic rhetoric that has become the stock and trade of American minister-politicians such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jim Wallis.

There’s the “abandon all hope” response: An entire generation of young people is being lost to drugs and gangs, and we’d better just get used to it. One gang member told the  BBC he was wearing a bullet-proof vest because shootings in his neighborhood had become so random. Norman Brannan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, seemed almost as fatalistic: “These youngsters will live by the gun and die by the gun,” he said. “These are walking assassins and walking assassins never care about the sentence they are going to get.”

There’s another response, however, one that seems closer to the heart of this particular darkness: Take the family seriously, especially the indispensable role of fathers to family well-being. This is the message embedded in the “Breakdown Britain” report, released by the Conservative Party’s Social Justice Policy Group two months before this latest outbreak of youth violence. “A harsh street culture acts as a magnet to disaffected boys from broken and dysfunctional homes,” writes MP Iain Duncan Smith, the report’s chief author. “In this culture, life becomes cheap and violence engenders respect. In the absence of a structured and balanced family like, the street gang becomes an alternative ‘family.’”

Mr. Smith, whose Centre for Social Justice supports research of this kind, is one of just a handful of politicians who views religious and church-based organizations as crucial actors in renewing families and neighborhoods blighted by crime. Yet he seems to speak for lots of people in the trenches. As a neighborhood leader told BBC 24: “I’d like to see greater respect for these local and faith-based groups that are doing so much with so little.”

Conservative Party leader David Cameron picked up part of this theme in his own reaction to the shootings. Mr. Cameron downplayed the importance of policing, gun control, or national solutions to a cultural problem—a problem, he said, that “lies within families and communities.” Whether Mr. Cameron has the fortitude to aggressively promote the moral and religious ideals that are central to this insight remains to be seen.

He could take a cue from American conservatives, who successfully led and shaped a similar debate in the 1990s about the importance of family and faith to social stability. Conservatives cited not only poignant and telling anecdotes, but a wealth of social science data to back them up. They drew from a deep reservoir of American common sense. And they enlisted an army of faith-based charities and religious leaders to testify to the importance of loving fathers in the lives of young men. It is no longer controversial in the United States, as it is here, to assert the distinctive importance of fathers in debates about crime or welfare reform.

All of these resources exist in Britain, of course. We saw signs of them last week, especially in the prayers offered at the church service for Billy Cox, prayers that his death would serve as a wake-up call for other young men. It’s a hope that might be applied to politicians—and a few media elites—as well. 

Comments

[lauraw]

"south Boston, south-central Los Angeles, or southeast Washington, D.C."

Massachusetts, California, and D.C., three U.S. States with the most stringent anti-gun laws, the most generous welfare entitlements, and the most forgiving courts.

It's a triple threat.

[mamapajamas]

Lauraw is right. In the US, the states with the most lenient gun laws, or, more importantly, gun laws aimed at criminals instead of honest citizens, have the lowest violent crime rates. Increased prison sentences both in general and for specific acts such as using a gun during the comission of a crime are getting a lot of dangerous people off the streets.

However, there's been an odd tilt in Gen Y. A huge chunk of them, whatever their political leanings, are going in for volunteer services in a way never seen before. Even the volunteerism so prevalent in WWII is being outdone: In WWII most of the volunteer programs were sponsored by the goverenment; Gen Y is pulling together their OWN volunteer organizations without prompting from anyone. These range from neighborhood "help" groups to nationwide campaigns like "Rock the Vote" on M-TV.

The message from Gen Y is, "why sit around waiting for 'the gub'ment' to DO something? Let's just DO it."

I heard a speaker say that many researchers think that, just as a baby duck follows the first "mother" it imprints upon, Gen Y in the US was "imprinted" upon 9/11, with volunteer groups from all over the country and the world sending in firefighters and rescue dogs and all the other help that was sent. That's how problems are SUPPOSED to be handled, in their view, so that's the way they do it. This imprint was then reinforced by the Asian Tsunami and Katrina. When some major disaster happens, one of the very first things you see is groups of young people organizing. The ne'er-do-wells are still out there, of course, but their counterparts are such balls of fire!

So here, at least, there is a ray of hope for the young people. We've got some of the BEST that I've ever encountered. The irony is that if the researchers are right, it took 9/11 to bring it about :/.

I sincerely hope that more of the young people in the world imprinted upon 9/11 the same way our own Gen Y did!