John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
It will be 32 years this month since Sir John Major dropped one of his few memorable lines:
“‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less” when it came to young criminals. It was partly a response to Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” position – but also to the shocking murder of James Bulger, a crime marked by both the cruelty and youth of its perpetrators. That children could murder another child sent a moral shock through the nation and drew the attention of both major parties. Now, we seem to have become worryingly inured to extreme violence between children.
Nothing has perhaps matched the sadism of the Bulger case, but children are harming and killing each other with alarming regularity. Some instances break through the national consciousness, like the crimes of Axel Rudakubana or the murder of Brianna Ghey, but this is often because of how they relate to other issues rather than the sheer fact of children killing. Others are more quickly forgotten, with no great national outcry.
There was little national attention for Ava White, just 12, when she was stabbed by a boy two years older in the centre of Liverpool at a Christmas lights switch-on. The 60 or so teens murdered in London since 2022 are noted as little more than a grim statistic, even though many were killed by others their same age. Already this year, there have been two murders of teens, in London and Sheffield, where the main suspects have been fellow children. There will be many more times when serious violence has fallen short of causing death. Though each of these cases has its own proximate causes, it points to a greater trend of worryingly violent children.
That trend is also apparent in schools. This week, a 14-year-old was convicted of attempting to murder two teachers and a fellow pupil at a school in Wales. The unnamed girl had taken a knife to school every day before finally using it in an outburst of violence. It is far from an isolated incident. Teachers have warned that schools are becoming more violent, with reports to the Health and Safety Executive trebling in a decade. Reports have included broken bones, amputations and even sight loss because of pupil violence. This doesn’t even include incidents between students.
It is a worrying picture.
Not quite one of feral children on the rampage, but where there is a persistent core of children readily committing serious violence. It is something we need to both understand and condemn. Understanding will help us engage with the complexity, where incidents can be driven by gang involvement, mental health issues, parental abuse and other factors. But condemnation will give us the wherewithal to act and arrest this worrying trend.
There is every reason to do so. It is wrong to tolerate or excuse children hurting those around them. In schools, it hinders the education of well-behaved children and drives otherwise good, capable teachers out of the profession. Very few of us would expect educators to put up with the threat of violence. We should also remember that violent children are likely to become violent adults and escalate to a point where their behaviour is harder to manage and more devastating.
So far, existing government strategies have failed to stop these increases. They are marred, by the Home Office’s own admission, by a lack of understanding of what drives violence and disorder among young people and what interventions are likely to stop it. Often, it is made worse by not thinking comprehensively about the issue, instead treating it as separate problems – whether that is county lines, radicalisation, or mental health – rather than looking at the common things that drive children into violence.
We know from examples around the world that early, targeted intervention is the most useful approach. In the US, Multi‑Systemic Therapy for Juvenile Offenders, a family-based intervention that targeted at-risk children from ten years and up, proved hugely cost-effective at reducing violence and increasing prospects for young people. So too did the Perry Preschool Project, a targeted early years programme for at-risk children – one analysis suggested it saved seven dollars for every one spent on the intervention. We now need the political will and determination to implement similarly effective measures here.
This means punishment where appropriate. We should resist the calls from the left, for example, to stop excluding and suspending violent pupils from schools. Other children and staff deserve to have safety, and there should be clarity of consequences for when children are violent. Those interventions should, however, also be productive and channel perpetrators away from endless cycles of violence. In the most serious cases, this will be backed by the criminal justice system – improving and utilising young offenders’ institutes to both punish and reform young criminals.
However, the real benefits come from interventions long before that stage.
On the right, we need to be less ideologically squeamish about getting involved where parents are failing. Often, violent children come from the most neglectful and violent of households. We should be proactive about intervention here, utilising cost-effective and proven methods to support families. Other times, parents try their best and struggle to cope with a disturbed child – where they seek support should be forthcoming. The story of Axel Rudakubana is firmly in the latter, with authorities repeatedly aware something was going wrong yet seemingly incapable of forestalling the worst consequences.
As a wider public, we should also be more concerned by this rising tide of violence. The shock of children killing seems to have dissipated. Many are easy to dismiss. The children caught up in gangs are often perpetrators as well as victims, troublesome as well as troubled. We should not be so glib about young lives, not blind to the horrible consequences of this violence. Thirty years ago, two children murdering another was society-shocking. It should be again.
The increase in violence committed by children is bad for all of us. It consumes state resources, worsens the lives of innocent people, and fuels the sense of lawlessness that grows in the worst affected areas. Once, an incident was a call to action for both major parties. It should be again, and we should get serious about stemming the rising tide of violent children. Otherwise, it will become a bigger and bigger problem.
