The decline of the family has exacerbated every social ill

The camera can capture hope. All the front pages carried the same picture, of a pretty, charming, clever-looking girl, with every appearance of being happy in her own skin and with a brave new world in front of her. The camera can also capture tragedy. Elianne Andam dominated the news because she had been murdered.

What words could express the grief of those who loved her? What comfort could heal their traumas? At the end of Macbeth, after young Siward had become the tyrant’s final victim, Ross tries to reach out to the youth’s father: “Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.” Old Siward fell back on stoicism, which is unlikely to console those closest to Miss Andam. One suspects that several of them will indeed be afflicted by measureless sorrow and life-long pain.

That will probably be shared by others. There is a boy in a cell, awaiting trial. We do not know what is going through his head. Perhaps he is a mini-Macbeth, incorrigible, embracing evil as his good. Yet it somehow seems more likely that he is now a frightened youngster, who would give anything to reset time. Instead, it will be dawning on him that prison time now stretches inexorably in front of him and that whatever plans he had for his twenties and thirties are no longer relevant.

Although we do not know about his background, it does not seem unlikely that he will have a despairing mother who would also like to reset time and who is asking herself where she went wrong.

In the bigger picture, a friend of mine who is a criminal silk says that the part of his job which he most dislikes comes after the end of a murder trial, when his client has been convicted and he is saying good-bye. The criminal will be a young male, who has probably stabbed another young man – very likely a friend – to death, in a drunken or drug-fuelled rage. The murderer will have been sentenced to life, with a minimum tariff of at least twenty years. It will be sinking in on him that he will be spending more years in prison than he has yet been alive. The criminal is usually one of his own principal victims.

So what can be done? Often, the first response will be anger and there are already calls for longer sentences. But the roots of the problem are deeper. In some parts of the country, we are dealing with young males – they usually are male – who are completely desocialised: whose upbringing has left them wholly ill-equipped for a civilised existence. Cubs in a wolf-pack will have a better gasp of discipline and order than these feral humans.

There is a simple explanation: the collapse of fatherhood. The family is the most powerful social antibiotic and though single mothers can often do their best, it is much easier when the father is the head of the household and his sons learn from his example what it means to be a man. In the absence of fatherhood, many boys find an alternative route to socialisation: in a gang. Their route to manhood is beset by drugs and knives. 

The decline of the family has exacerbated every social ill. But there is no easy way to put that right. Clergymen and community leaders could help, by emphasising the need for sexual responsibility. But realistically, that is unlikely to have a dramatic impact. Yet there could be a partial remedy. Let us accept that a lot of children will be brought up by young single mothers who do not know how to cope. So they need help. They need assistance, from social workers.

That might seem a perverse proposal, especially to those on the right who assume that social workers are far too ready to make excuses for their clients and can often be an expensive way of exacerbating social problems. But this is curable. We need to recruit a different sort of social worker.

These would be men and women approaching middle age, with no professional social work qualifications but with lots of relevant experience, of life. They might be people who had been made redundant from a managerial post and who are unlikely to find an equivalent. They could also be wives, who have devoted themselves to running a family but whose children have now left home. They might also be former servicemen or policemen, who have come up to retirement but still have plenty of energy and an appetite for a new challenge. That appetite would be a common feature among all the recruits. 

Give these characters as much training as they need, and then a case-load of underclass families: in effect, single mothers. Boost their morale and generally help them to manage their and their children’s lives.

The figures suggest that a quarter of a million males aged between 15 and 24 are responsible for half of all crime. A means of early intervention which would give those youngsters a proper route to socialisation before they were habituated into wrong-doing would not only help them. It would improve the quality of life for everyone around them.

As it is, the route to mayhem and destruction is unchecked until there is a prison sentence which is likely to turn the young villain into a life-long jail-bird. Young human ferality ends with ageing human detritus. There is a moral imperative to find a better outcome and it is also in the self-interest of all law-abiding citizens. That said, the likelihood is that nothing much will happen and we will forget about Elianne Andam – until another innocent girl is struck down. But that means acquiescence in failure. Those in charge of policy have a duty to act, and the rest of us should encourage them. 

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