Fair or Not? Family gets evicted from council home because son was a rioter

[Kev]

No, the government is getting it wrong and ignoring all the reasons behind why Britain is such a mess. Sure it might look good "Ooh, we are tough on rioters and those who raised people who would riot", but it's silly. The family are not to blame directly. Give the kid 2 years in prison and a prison without all the comforts that prisons have today. We need to be tough on crime once again and attacking extended family is not going about it in the right way.

Give police officers power, let teachers use a cane and stop giving council housing to teenage mothers. Things will start to change, these stop gap short term actions just piss off more of the vermin class riff raff. It solves nothing.

I disagreed that the family is not to be blamed for this. The mother did not raise her son right. She failed as a parent to instill any sense of morals or responsibility in that little hellraiser. She let him run the streets at any time of the day to cause mayhem and destruction on the livelihoods of innocent people. In short, she was a shitty parent that didn't instill any values in him.

Should she and her daughter be kicked out of the council home? No I wouldn't go that far, but she failed as a parent. Any sense of character, any sense of morality or responsibility is first instilled at home. That's where it starts first. The mother should not be absolved of any responsibility. And where the hell is the kid's father?

I don't agree with this ridiculous comment at all. I guess then in this case Tony Blair, when prime minister raised his son to be a drunken yob when he had his mad drunken bender as a 16 year old and famously got arrested for being drunk and incapable when passed out in the streets of London.

Or the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour must have brought his adopted son up to have no respect when he got jailed for swinging on the cenotaph and throwing a bin at Prince Charle's car?

What happened with the rioting, in the case of these youngsters is that they all got caught up in the excitement of what must have felt like a post apocalyptic, crazy once in a lifetime experience to go wild and smash things up. Was it wrong? Of course it was, but kids act with a group mentality and it's incredibly easy to get swept along in the euphoria of what was happening. Some lad got jailed for two years for nicking a bottle of water from a supermarket that was being looted. Again he shouldn't have nicked it, but people do silly things during crazy events and it wasn't like he was really rioting. Two 18 year old lads, who didn't even take part in riots got 4 years for creating a facebook page entitled ?Lets have a riot in Norwich!'. There was no riot there even. Ridiculous sentence to make a statement and targeting entirely the wrong offenders.

There is nothing more riduclous and irritating than politicians playing demagogues and pandering to irate public opinion in a time of national unrest over issues. Any actions they undertake and policies they rush through are always half baked, ill thought out and have to be dropped later at government expense.

How does throwing people out of a council house because their son rioted help society? Where will this family now live? Are they homeless on the streets or have they been shoved into other emergency housing at taxpayer expense? There have also been cries to stop rioters benefits. Again, how would that help society? Take away a potential criminals income and what is he going to do to pay for food and shelter? Hmm, probably turn to crime I'm guessing...

I generally hate liberals but on prison sentences and punishments they have got it right. Stick a load of 18/20 yr old kids in jail and all you are doing is institutionalizing them to the prison system and turning them into future criminals.

Harsh sentences for first time offenders simply doesn't work. The reoffending rates in the UK for prisoners released is appalling. By contrast Norway has much much more leniant sentences and they have the lowest reoffending rates in the whole of Europe. Ken Clarke was on the right track but once again the moronic public and the ill informed people of Britian moaned and compalined, created an absurd outcry about him condoning rape and forced the plans to be shelved.

We need a leader like Thatcher, who wasn't for turning and didn't kowtow to public clamouring.

I don't give a shit about 1 or 2 incidents of fuck ups that turn out to be great people like Blair or Gilmor. The point being is that parenting or lack of it has a major effect on how the kids turn out. So you are disputing this claim then? And stop blaming it on government policies, the perpetrator and the bad parenting is to be blamed for this. Have you read the article? It's kind of funny that the mother is saying that her kid is at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Well here's a question. What was her little angel running the streets at any time and place to be at the wrong place and wrong time? Why wasn't he at home?

I've always found it funny for people always blaming the government, the school, the bad neighborhood, never the lack of parental guidance and morals instilled inside the home. Always a way to excuse criminal behavior, whatever criminal offense it's always someone's else fault. Never the perpetrator or how they were raised.

Things like parenting and values especially culturally has a big effect on how the child turns out. Those poor ass Chinese and Korean kids and other East Asians living in shitty conditions when immigrating to America but still managed to get accepted by record numbers in America's top universities and go on to be upstanding citizens in white collar professions while moving up the socio-economic ladder. Liberals don't like to include East Asians as minorities because it shits all over their argument that bad schools and bad environment is the result why other groups have a higher rate of crime and higher drop out rates. So how did little May Ling and Lee Ming did it? Well their mom and dad heavily places education first along with their moral values in their kids. So in other words parenting.

Actually, if you read Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Outliers he will explain to you how they did it. It wasn't down to individual parenting at all but much bigger societal and cultural factors. Strangely the main reason is their agriculture being built around rice growing rather than the Westerners and their wheat fields.

It's a fascinating story actually.

The decline of Christianity and moral values and the subsequent collapse of the traditional family unit is far more responsible than any individual parent.

Remember that parents are just children too, but older, and as much the product of their social backgrounds and enviroments as anyone else.

The history of the actions of the German people during Hitler's rise to power and world war, Stanley Milgram's infamous electric shock experiments and Philip Zombardo's prison experiment all prove that any of us are capable of behaving in devlish ways, often under relatively little pressure beyond the desire for conformity.

Yes rioting is the responsibility of an individual and his or her own actions, but pack mentality and conformity, as CFH points out is a massive, massive influencer and very few people are immune to it.

A lot of these people rioted because they were kids getting a feeling of empowerment and excitment in sharing a dangerous and unique experience togwther. It might not be a popular answer, and David Cameron certainly isn't going to say it, but the truth is that were you or I a young lad in that same enviroment, running with the same crowd and living the same lifes, we might have behaved in exactly the same way.

Humans are very suseptible and weak creatures, easily led astray, all of us included.