I appreciated the following article as it drew from the knowledge of a man who clearly knows one of the communities implicated in the riots…
“Parents are fearful about how they chastise their children,” Clasford Stirling, a veteran youth worker, who runs the football club at Broadwater Farm community centre in Tottenham, said. “There’s been an erosion of authority for a long time. Parents move very gingerly not to upset their own kids – that’s the reality.”
Broadwater Farm estate is again at the centre of the unrest in London. Mark Duggan, whose death last week sparked London’s riots, was brought up here, and sent one of his sons to Stirling’s football classes. On Wednesday, Stirling was making arrangements for his wake.
Struggling to make sense of the violence that has turned buildings on Tottenham High Road into smouldering piles of rubble, Stirling wondered whether weakened parental authority might have something to do with it.
A chorus of establishment voices responded to pictures of school-age children looting late at night by reaching to blame the parents. MPs were urging them to make sure they knew where their children were, David Cameron was talking again about a broken Britain, and London’s mayor said adults and teachers needed to be given back the right to impose authority.
Stirling’s analysis is more nuanced – citing poverty, unemployment, failings of the education system, police harassment, among other triggers – but he believes parents have become afraid to discipline their own children, and warns this is at least part of the problem that has erupted across cities this week.
