Blimey, there's a lot of people here with some quite shocking and intolerant views!
On neds, chavs etc. can I point out that they all to a man & girl come from low income backgrounds, have crap education, no prospects and so on. Their unpleasant behaviour comes from that - they are nothing more than a product of their circumstances. Frankly if we really tried to tackle the poverty, exploitation & inequality that comes with free market capitalism, then most of these social problems would vanish.
Roderick
There's nothing naive about it Amy - ask *any* community or social worker and they will tell you - give these kids something to do and the level of trouble would plummet.
BTW there's nothing wrong with wearing baseball caps back to front, or hoodies, or any item of clothing! Frankly, there is an atmosphere of hatred towards young people, AND towards poor people in this country. We seem to be going back to 19th century ideas about the 'undeserving poor' whereby people on the lowest income bracket are blamed for their own predicament and told to 'get a job'. Meanwhile, multimillionaires earn thousands a day while paying their workers peanuts.
Oh gosh, have I stirred up a load of hornet's nest or what?
Well, I'm not backing down. Amy you will have to do a lot better than that to convince me these 'chavs' are from the well-healed middle classes.
As to the other comments - so basically what we're saying is that there are groups of people who are inherently criminal and evil. Rubbish! Are we saying it's in their genes or something? (Then again any minute now some 'scientist' is going to claim he's found a gene for criminality, if one hasn't already done so - or possibly a gene for wearing Burbery).
And I'm sorry, Gareth, your comment is priceless. First you agree that this is a social problem, and then you say it's irrelevant and we should lock all these people up anyway - in a concentration camp. Rather like Wolfy's comment about gas chambers, the historical symbolism seems to have passed you by completely.
Much as I'd love to get into a full debate about this I just don't have the time (hence the delay in sending this reply). So I'll come straight to what I think is the important issue at stake, which has nothing to do with the rights of chavs, or indeed any other group or individual, to be violent and aggressive.
Your last post, Gareth, suggests that you see this from a personal angle, while I see this in political/ social terms (it's my training, I can't help it). So you say, if someone attacks you or yr loved ones, you take revenge. Fair enough - except we don't live in a survivalist camp in the desert, nor in a totalitarian state or the 18th century. Emile Durkheim said something very important about the role of justice in society - he said the earliest stages of justice as a social system start as nothing more than collective revenge by proxy on behalf of individuals, but this then changes as society develops, industrialises, and becomes more rational, secular and democratic. This BTW is not an abstract philosophical point - almost every democracy in the world has scrapped capital punishment, while every dictatorship still has it!
You have to ask yrself who would support locking up/ executing/ exiling for ever, undesirable elements in society? It is of course, the Daily Mail, the Monday Club, the BNP, Kelvin McKenzie etc - the same people who'd attack asylum seekers, gay people, Muslims, trade unionists, and who (I rather suspect) would in the main be antipathetic to our cause as another minority seeking legitamacy! This again, is not a coincidence.
Finally, I'd just like to note that the type of society we live in is actually determined by how much humanity we employ in dealing with the *most* unpleasant people in society.
I would like to see it made illegal to do cruel things to animals like declawing cats and docking dogs' tails, and if people are caught doing worse things to their animals, they should be put in jail and have their pets confiscated.