‘Do you know where your children are?’ I remember watching TV in Washington D.C. in 1969 and listening to my parents’ shock at the public service announcement. Who wouldn’t know what their offspring was up to? Did the government really need to remind Mum and Dad of their responsibility?
My parents had just arrived from Italy, carrying with them a host of unspoken but crystal-clear rules about raising children. Within months, they learned that they had been naïve to think these were the norm in urban America. ‘Let them learn from their mistakes’ was the prevailing pedagogy, and violent youths on the rampage made daily headlines. No one seemed interested in the connection between the two trends.
Fast-forward to 2026 here in Britain and the alarm raised by the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, this week: a growing number of children are ‘fixated with violence’. As in 1960s America, parenting is to blame.
De Souza points out in her latest report that schools are referring these children to Prevent – and nothing happens. The programme set up specifically to prevent people from being drawn to terrorist violence is failing: teachers claim that their whistleblowing seldom leads to any follow-up, and even when it does, 65 per cent of young people referred to Prevent were sent back to their schools and colleges.
