The Broken Community

I love London. I love its vibrancy. For me I would not want to reside anywhere else in the world. Quoting Samuel Johnson: "When a man is tired of London is tired of life". However, one thing that has made me weary of living in this great metropolis in the last few years, is the level of violence committed by and to teenagers. The most recent and horrific example was the brutal slaying of 16 year old Ben Kinsella. His assailants were only a fracture older than he was.

It has reached a stage where these atrocities have become so frequent in the capital that it hardly makes the local press let alone the national newspapers. You don’t have to be a contestant on Mastermind to know that the one incontrovertible factor that these killings have in common is that the perpetrator and the victim are nearly always black. The notable exception is that of Ben Kinsella.

It is become clear to me that the cause of this escalating problem in London is due to the devastating social consequences of illegitimacy within the Afro-Caribbean community. The last official census figures revealed that lone parents form the majority of Afro-Caribbean families. The family structure is increasingly disappearing – where crack, crime, murder and social anarchy are evaporating once stable black communities.

Black commentators would argue that problems facing the black community can be laid at the door of Institutionalised racism as outlined in the Macpherson’s Inquiry into the Death of Stephen Lawrence. There is no doubt that there is a good deal of residual discrimination in society and in the police, but not enough to explain the over representation of black people in prisons, crime figures, and school exclusions. Racism in itself is not the sole explanation.

The absence of fathers as role models for young black males is critically important in the genesis of delinquency. We know that some single mothers succeed better than some couples at raising well-adjusted children but the downward spiral of deprivation among lone-parent families is far more pronounced than among comparably poor two-parent ones. The stronger the family unit, the better the economic and social progress, as witness with British Chinese and Asian families.

Today, Black people found themselves at the precipice, as a result of the unwillingness among its ranks to tackle this single most important issue facing the community – it is more critical than crime, drugs, poverty, welfare or homelessness because the disintegration of the Afro-Caribbean family structure lies behind and drives them all.

As a Londoner we need a debate on this issue if we are to avoid repeated scenes of inconsolable parents appearing on our TV screens mourning their loss of their sons and daughters in such a violent and appalling manner.