UNITED KINGDOM: DELINQUENCY REACHES NEW, AND LETHAL, PROPORTIONS

Britain’s media again goes into overdrive as yet another child falls victim to a murder, this time a ten-year-old boy called Damilola Taylor, who had only been in Britain for some months with his mother, having moved from Nigeria earlier in the year, looking for a better life. This “better life” in a modern European capital cost young Damilola his life. It is reported that he had written to his father, still in Nigeria, shortly before this incident, saying he was scared in Britain and that he was being victimised by the other children, both black and white. His mother had spoken to the head teacher at the school where Damilola was bullied daily by his classmates – just because he had recently arrived from Africa – but was assured that the situation was under control. Instead of being welcomed into a country which, who knows, he could have contributed greatly to in future years, the ten-year-old terrified boy was chased into a housing estate, where a long knife was driven into his groin, cutting an artery. Bleeding to death, he managed to drag himself 100 metres in the direction of the house he shared with his mother. The spot where he died is not covered in flowers, but any society in which this sort of incident happens must do some serious introspection. Stories now emerge that another boy had been killed on the same housing estate nine days earlier, as a sixteen-year-old girl from Leeds, in the north of England, went missing. All these incidents in the same year in which eight-year-old girl Sarah Payne was sexually assaulted and killed, shocking the nation into a campaign against its reported 100,000 paedophiles show a shocking and horrific scenario of sexual abuse, wanton violence, rape, murder and terror on the streets more befitting of a banana republic inhabited by machete-waving savages than a modern European democracy. Although it is true that boys will be boys and that it is natural for the strongest to impose themselves over the weakest, reflecting the natural trends of any society, and while it is true that sexual deviants are present in any society, so many murders, especially of children, are too many to be considered “normal”. Something is wrong. When this trend turns to the horrific murder of a ten-year-old boy, the alarm bells start to ring, showing that something is seriously wrong. To date, the police have not made any firm link to this killing, although it is suspected that this time, the murderers could be children, maybe even schoolmates or neighbours of Damilola. John Ashtead, Pravda.Ru, London