Melanie Phillips: Catastrophe looms due to social and familial breakdown

Article here. Excerpt:

'Once again, Britain is recoiling from the sickening spectacle of childhood innocence being turned into its monstrous antithesis.

Two young brothers aged ten and 11 from Edlington, South Yorkshire, subjected two other little boys aged nine and 11 to sadistic attack and torture, leaving one fighting for his life.
...
People call these boys 'evil' because such absence of feeling is inhuman. But they are not evil. They are children.

We are all born with the capacity for both good and bad. Everything depends on whether the immature child is raised in a way that develops the good and discourages the bad, or whether something goes wrong with that process.
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Their mother, who has seven sons by three fathers, is an alcoholic and drug addict who left them to forage from rubbish bins and fed them cannabis to keep them quiet; their father is a drunken brute, who regularly beat them and forced them to watch violent horror films.

We know that there are thousands of other children being raised in broadly similar backgrounds. There are areas of the country where the overriding problem is not material poverty but social, cultural and spiritual disintegration - at the heart of which is the collapse of family life.

Children are being born to lone mothers who were themselves raised in shattered homes by mothers who in turn came from identical backgrounds. The outcome is households in which children are neglected and maltreated, subjected to drug and alcohol abuse, violence and emotional chaos; and where the cruelty and indifference they endure is often translated into the sadistic way they treat others.'