Order is breaking down in parts of Britain, and is failing where it is most needed. The urban poor are already the least healthy and prosperous of our society. It is they who now also bear the brunt of an explosion in violent crime as a generation of young men raised without fathers reaches a brutal maturity.
Last week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that knife crime rose by 22 per cent in England and Wales in 2017. At the time of writing 62 people have been murdered in London since the start of the calendar year. Of these 36 have been stabbed to death.
The police are overstretched. They are also badly used, as a result of political failure. The neglect of hard questions about immigration and integration means that vast numbers of officers are tied up with counter-terrorism duties. The obsession with policing thought has come at the cost of preventing the vicious crimes which do ruin lives. The Metropolitan Police has “900-plus specialist officers” investigating hate crimes. Last year the Met’s “clear-up” rate on burglary offences was just 6.63 per cent.
But criminal activity is not primarily a question of police numbers or political priorities. It is also a matter of individual conscience. Conscience relies on morality and in many cases on faith. These are inherited things: we adopt them long before we understand them, and they are taught in the home.
A sharp rise in violent criminal activity marks a shift in public morality, a failure by one generation of adults to transmit their values to their children. It is the poisonous legacy of Britain’s culture of failed families.
The ONS tell us that “higher-harm” crimes are concentrated in London and the cities. These are the same metropolitan areas with high levels of family instability.
A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2010 showed significantly higher rates of family breakdown when a mother was either black, poor or a tenant. The conclusions we draw from the data are variable, but there are council wards in some urban boroughs where it appears a new mother has a high chance of being all three. This matters. There is probably not a single concept in sociology as well evidenced as the benefits to children of growing up as part of an intact family with both parents at home.
Children from these backgrounds earn more, have better mental health, commit much less crime, are less likely to use drugs or become alcoholics, do better at school, are less likely be in an abusive relationship when older, and are less likely to be sexually active or pregnant as a teenager. They live longer, they get better jobs and their own marriages tend to last. Inherent in many of these achievements is a stronger moral grounding through the family.
And where families remain intact, it is almost always because the parents are married. The Marriage Foundation found that only 55 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds live with both parents. Of these, 93 per cent come from married families.
Cohabitation does not produce anything like the same level of stability. Cohabitees make up 21 per cent of new family formation but more than half of all family breakdowns.
Despite the benefits, marriage rates have collapsed among the poor. Children born into households in the top two income deciles have a 87 per cent chance of being born to married parents. In the bottom fifth their odds are 24 per cent. Given the difference married parents make to life outcomes, this is a scandalously neglected area of social policy.
The crisis in marriage is also a crisis in fatherhood. This is important as fathers have a leading role in the transmission of moral values. Studies have shown that children of either sex are more likely to retain their childhood faith if they associate it with their father rather than their mother, and I think this holds true for moral attitudes too.
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It is not for nothing that we talk of God the Father. The relationship of child to father is that of man to God in microcosm: a blend of love and gratitude, but also of awe and fear. Not one of these qualities alone results in obedience, but rather in combination they all do.
Young men without fathers will go out and find alternatives. They adopt the alternative morality too, more often than not. It is fatherlessness as much as poverty that draws boys to the strongmen of the gang.
The Centre for Social Justice found recently that for every £1 the Government spends helping families stay together, it spends £6,000 picking up the pieces after they fall apart.
If the price was only monetary the neglect of marriage among the poor would be foolish. Instead it is tragic. The cost of broken boys from broken homes is one which has been paid by other people’s children in blood. It will remain so until we start putting marriage at the heart of our national family policy again.
Thomas Pascoe is campaign director of the Coalition for Marriage (c4m.org.uk)
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