Woman's Own April 4 1959 Page 42

Woman against the World

continued on page 45

THE WAY I SEE IT . . . by Monica Dickens 

• Teenage mobsters attack  passer-by: this brutal age, as exposed in Violent Playground

YOU can stop this EVIL

THEY have called it many things, this era which grew fumblingly out of the depressed muddled years after the war. The new Elizabethan Age; the Space Age; the Jet Age; the Bloodless Revolution; the Teenage Squeal-age; the Jazz Age; the Rebirth of a Nation; the Twilight of a Great Power, the list of titles is endless. 

I am inclined to have many viewpoints, depending on where I have been and the people I've been with, but I have at the back of my mind a haunting suspicion that there is one name that these times have earned above all others. 

It is an ugly name, an evil name: the Age of Brutality. 

Assault and murder 

YOU don't agree? You think that this is the age of social enlightenment? I feel that sometimes, and praise be, it often does look like that on the surface. But underneath, you will detect a terrifying swing back to a selfish physical cruelty that compares with the brutality of the Middle Ages.

If you read the newspapers, you cannot miss it. Every day brings its horrifying tale of old ladies unmercifully battered in their shops or homes; of children attacked, assaulted, murdered; of gang warfare where the motives are meaningless, but the weapons lethal. 

You read of things that make you fearful to walk home from the bus stop at night. You read of the persecution of coloured people by mobs of youths, infected by a lynch mob excitement they cannot resist. You hear of fires being set, homes looted, property wantonly destroyed. 

And there can scarcely be a newspaper in the country that goes to press on any single day without at least a line or two reporting some new case of cruelty to a child.

Medicine triumphs with a lower death rate among babies and young children than ever before. Infantile paralysis, diphtheria, rickets are all but conquered. 

But the dismal figures of the NSPCC remind us that in one year more than 100,000 children were preserved through the hazards of birth and babyhood, only to suffer unmercifully at the hands of their own parents or guardians. 

However, the increase of cruelty to children goes side by side with an equally shocking evil-the increase of cruelty by children. 

I don't mean the rough, puppyish cruelty of the playground, I mean the vicious cruelty of the children who are called teenagers. 

For children they are, in their unreasonable immaturity, these teenage cut-throats. As children, they should be subject to their parents, but most of them haven't paid any attention to their parents since they were old enough to talk back. Some have parents who have never said anything to them that they could have profited by. 

Look into the background of almost any juvenile delinquent, and you will find, if not an actually unhappy home, at least an unsatisfactory one. . . !

Broken homes 

PARENTS separated, and the child brought up by a lax, doting grandmother, or by one parent, and a step-parent who resents him. 

A drunken father, filling the house with abuse and violence. A mother always out at work when the child is home. 

Sometimes the parents are not so obviously at fault. "He's always had the best of care," they tell magistrates in bewilderment. "W e gave him everything. " 

Everything except discipline. Wanting to show their love, these are the parents who, when their child is a mischievous boy, let him 'get away with murder,' and when he has developed into a vicious teenager are struck dumb to find that murder is the literal truth. 

We women are always thinking we could run the world better than the politicians if only we were given the chance. Why don't we begin by running our own small corner if it? Here is something we can do, something important. 

Power in our hands 

WE can raise our children into decent men and women, who will model the raising of their own brood on our example. 

We have the power. When they are little, we are their universe. They believe anything we tell them. If we start early enough, they will accept our discipline, as long as it is fair, and return our love as long as we show it generously. 

It is unfair to lay the blame for teenage delinquency on  mothers? There are other factors, I know, but a large share of the responsibility belongs to the mothers, some loving too lavishly, some not loving enough.

And an equally large share of the responsibility for doing something about it belongs to those of us who are mothers now, or will be in the future. 

Is the Age of Brutality here to stay? Perhaps it is only we who shall decide. 

ANOTHER ARTICLE BY MONICA NEXT WEDNESDAY