KEY POINTS:
How hard could it be, people are asking this summer, to stop juvenile crime in this country? Seriously. Think about it.
We are a village by world standards, a comfortable, amiable, capable little society in a temperate, fertile place surrounded by sea. It cannot be beyond our wit to stop any child drifting down the path to serious trouble.
The question is being asked in places that crime does not often penetrate, by people who resent newspapers that serve it up in large, indigestible doses of senseless, repellent verbiage.
What's the point, they wonder, of confronting them with savagery and misfortunes that defy human comprehension, let alone solution?
There are exceptions. Some crimes are all too human, especially the worst of them - murder. The most touching are those committed by people who seem essentially good but succumbed to provocation in a way that law cannot forgive.
But random, inexplicable crime leaves most of us cold - or at least it did until a few weeks ago. When we read of the attack on the young couple at Milford, something clicked.
That was close to home; friends of mine witnessed it. It brought home the realisation that some parts of the city suffers this junior gangland nonsense all the time.
This and much worse. You hear of neighbourhoods where young hoodlums push drugs on children in playgrounds and induce them to commit robberies and other crimes that bind them to the culture.
Police and courts become a helpless cog in the criminal recruitment mechanism, arrests and ever sterner punishments endured as rites of passage to a late maturity.
Most do mature eventually. But what can it be like to be a parent, probably alone, and try to keep your kids off these skids? You'd know that by the time they came to their senses they'd be scarred for life, sullen, dissolute, barely employable. You'd probably known just such a wreck in their father.
Nobody needs to be consigned to that life cycle and we need not tolerate the danger and damage it spawns. If leading politicians turned their minds to dealing with crime seriously rather than rhetorically, they could probably offer some answers.
This week, in his first speech of the year, John Key did so. He would have heard the call in better-off electorates since the Milford incident. The text was devoid of the easy vindictive tough talk that usually passes for a law and order policy on the right.
It was the first speech I have seen from a political leader that came with three pages of factual footnotes and corroborative references. He must have had researchers working on the subject for months and they had consulted the specialists who were invited to comment on his suggestions this week.
He proposes new or strengthened forms of detention and treatment for offenders, and incentives to try to keep 16- and 17-year-olds from dropping out of school with nothing to do.
The next day Helen Clark too proposed that everyone should be enrolled in some form of education until age 18. But her new year address had nothing to say about youth crime except to blame it on the "mother of all budgets" in 1991.
She must have had a sheltered youth. As a teenager in the heyday of the welfare state, I can attest that random street bashings occurred back then.
I went with two companions to a Christchurch hamburger bar one night and when we left I lost a few minutes of my life. Afterwards I remembered only a glimpse of guys alighting from parked cars as we walked past. I never saw the first blow or even felt it.
By the time I awoke only my battered companions were around and nothing had been taken, not even the burgers.
The only interesting aspect of the experience was that the police knew immediately who had done it. A few months later the assault was just one of a list the gang admitted in court.
Even today local police probably know all likely offenders by name and family dysfunction. We should make more use of that knowledge. Key's plan deals with kids once they come to court; it must be possible to divert those keeping bad company before they hurt someone.
Why not enable poor parents to do what the better off can do when a child is going off the rails? They send them to residential schools where the transformation is often remarkable.
There is no reason the Government could not provide such schools if it cannot bring itself to pay fees to the excellent private preparatory schools we have.
Social agencies could monitor children in unpromising households much more closely than they do and provide wider range of custodial institutions without the taint of jail.
As Key said, it is a matter of exposing these kids to better models of character and discipline. According to survivors of boarding schools and Army training, the discipline works by breeding constructive loyalty. Offend, and your friends suffer too.
They learn co-operation and come to like it. They find value, recognition, self respect. Seems worth a try.
