MoralDeficit

Yesterday a colleague told me about a young woman he knows who had been date raped. This is not one of those apocryphal stories about someone who knows someone. This really happened to a real person. Not, as it turned out, to just one young lady, but to five of them. The culprit had raped five women that he was tried for. The police brought the prosecution and were successful. The punishment was a sentence of two years in jail. This will result in the culprit being released in about one year.

This equates to about two months for each rape.

At the same time as this if the crime was robbery the punishment would be much more severe. The message is that we value our possessions far more than our people. The result is that we face a moral deficit in which it’s understood, cool or even hip to stab, rape or even kill but you will be severely punished if you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

There is further evidence of this dual morality occurring every day where we, as a society, seem to value possessions far higher than people. It is a grave mistake and should be addressed.

In the final analysis it’s all about moral values or the lack of them. We have all witnessed a rise in binge drinking, misbehavior in young women, and apparent increase in knife attacks amongst British young men. In a society as rich as ours this is indicative of our loss of understanding of what’s right or wrong.

The solution surely isn’t the simple increase of policing, arrest and long- term incarceration. The UK and USA already have amongst the highest numbers of people under lock and key of any society. But the numbers keep rising, which means the systems are failing.

Unquestionably we must also face up to, understand and deal with the society’s ills, which have resulted in a disproportionate number of young black men in prison. This is not a question of color, but is about social inequality brought about by a series of problems within the larger society we all inhabit.

There are simply too many young Afro-Caribbean women left to raise too many of their children without the help or presence of their partners. Where are these young men, why do they leave, and how does this ever get corrected?

Without solutions these problems will become generational with the children of these dysfunctional single parent families repeating the same mistakes.

These are not problems about color, nor are the real question about the prisons; it is about a deeper, more difficult aspect of our society. We are not educating our children properly; they are not being given a moral code that is normally the job of both parents, school and our religious and spiritual upbringing. It might be fashionable to belittle old values but without them our society is lost for the foreseeable future.