Headline, May01, 2013

'''THE CRIMINAL FRATERNITY​? 

-DEAR DEAR US!!'''

To the outsiders  -not so very long ago-  the surprising thing about Beatrix Campbell's speech at the conference on : ''Family, Children and Crime,'' organised by the Institute of Public Policy Research, was that none of the audience of about 250 academics, social and probation workers, laughed at her.

To insiders, Campbell's remarks were perfectly acceptable. For it is becoming axiomatic among some middle-class left wingers, influenced by a strand of contemporary feminist thought, that crime is caused by barbaric young men, that masculinity, defined either as the genetic inheritance of the Y male chromosome or the social conditioning men receive, is the major cause of crime.

And if you think about it, Campbell and the audience who applauded her seem to have a point. After all, crime is an overwhelmingly male occupation. Eight out of ten suspects cautioned by the police and nearly nine out of ten criminals found guilty of indictable offences are men. A survey of the time found that 36 percent of the men born in  1953 had been convicted of serious criminal offence by the age of 30.

A leading prison reformer, who dedicates his life to reducing the jail population, once, only half-jokingly, said:

''If you really wanted to stop crime in Britain. you would lock-up when he was 14 and not let him out again until he was 35!!''

Surely. it is not unreasonable, as Angela Phillips. author of the The Trouble with Boys, asserts, that we should look to the Y chromosome if we want to explain violence in the society.

There are many popular explanations for male aggressiveness which do just that. You may have heard someone arguing that, since Stone-Age men were hunters who needed to be violent and aggressive, natural selection favoured these violent traits because they brought food to the hunter and his family. Now, however, the pop psychologists say, these old manly virtues lead to dangerous, anti social, criminal behaviour.

You may be convinced by these vulgar misinterpretations of Darwinism, but no reputable biologist gives them a second's credence. Stephen Jay Gould the science writer and Harvard palaeontologist, calls these  ''just-so stories'' -fairy tales that explain behaviour by inventing a theory of how a trait  -aggressiveness, in this case  -could once have been useful and helped a violent animal to survive and produce a more aggressive offspring. But such just-so stories require no evidence. They are circular, cannot be tested and are therefore scientifically useless.

Let me try putting it straight and another way. A man knew that he was a member of violent race and that the ''challenge of handling that violence'', both within himself and without, was measure of his humanity.

That challenge was always surrounded by a grey zone of moral ambiguity, but so is all of human life. Negotiating the grey zones is what makes us human beings; an attempt to eradicate them only leads to worse. It seems unlikely that the testosterone-depleted  'blokes'' and the strident ''girlies'' of the quality press will succeed where the religions did not.

But then in the safety of the most peaceful society in history, it's easy to affect a cowardly cynicism, a fashionable contempt for mankind, a curring of favour with a newly feminised establishment.

All fair minded people in the world should despise these attitudes because the safety in which to articulate them was purchased by blood  -by and large-  of very courageous men. So instead of waving a perfumed handkerchief at violence we must reclaim it   -for it is but ours- and take a fresh look at it with the respect it deserves.

The most common method of killing a man: Sharp instrument: 41%. Hitting and kicking : 24%. Shooting 10%. Blunt instrument : 9%. Strangulation : 6%. Burning 3%.

Suicide Attacks: 97%

IED's: 98%

Love and harmony it seems has little part to play in the building of the Civilization

Can mankind demon harness the demon within itself?  Or know when to unleash its power!!

This remarkable post continues. With respectful dedication to all of mankind, specially to the Students of the world: Our true future!go

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless