| Saturday, June 30, 2007 |
| Boy, 14, stabbed to death 'for wrong look' |
A popular 14-year-old boy was stabbed to death in a north London street after being set upon by a group of youths for "looking at someone the wrong way" in the latest in a string of fatal attacks on teenagers in the capital. Who'd be a kid nowadays? I know this makes me sound ancient (and to be honest, the kids at youth group think I am!), but it wasn't like this when I was a teenager. OK, so I grew up in the country, but still. My friend who grew up in this area says the same: kids have got it so tough nowadays.
Why is this? Why does the wrong look cause one kid to start on another? Why do the clothes you wear mean you could get beaten - to death - by your peers? Sure kids used to fight, but when did guns and knives become the norm? OK, reading Run Baby Run might disprove my case here completely, but things have changed.
I look at the kids who come to youth group on Friday night. I have to admit - they do my head in most of the time! Year 6 have just started coming and they're hyperactive little wotsits who wind one another up, pick on and bully one another. And I don't know how to talk to them. I'd just got used to the lot that were there and now there are another 20 new kids to get to know. I'm not sure I'm cut out for this.
But... every so often I seem underneath. I see the vulnerable boy underneath the ADHD. I see the self-consciousness underneath the bravado. And I see that some of them are good kids. Some of them aren't.
And then I find out that one or two of the kids there this evening went to school with this kid who was killed because he looked at another kid the wrong way, and my heart breaks for kids growing up today.
What hope do they have? |
posted by Calia77 @ 1:09 pm  |
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| 1 Comments: |
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extremely disturbing and sad...I don't understand the anger and lack of respect for life that some people have...and these are teens! what will they be like as they get older and more cynical?
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extremely disturbing and sad...I don't understand the anger and lack of respect for life that some people have...and these are teens! what will they be like as they get older and more cynical?