Opinion: Youth crime - are we reaping what we sow?

A smashed bus shelter on Harewood Rd in Papanui, Christchurch. Photo / George Heard

OPINION

There’s another report today of people being assaulted and having their property stolen after an incident at Christchurch’s bus interchange.

Two young women have been struggling to sleep at night after being brutally assaulted by five young people while they were waiting for a bus.

The assault happened at a bus stop near Christchurch Hospital - but it followed an earlier incident at the bus interchange in the centre of town.

What happened, was two friends - an 18-year-old woman and a 20-year-old woman - had been in town last Sunday and were at the interchange waiting to get a bus home just after 9pm.

This group of young people, who the women reckon would be between the ages of 12 and 17, came over to them and demanded to have a drink of some alcohol the two women had with them.

They said “no”, muttered a few things under their breath, some words were exchanged, and a security guard at the interchange saw what was going on and suggested the two women just get on a bus just to get away from the trouble.

They did that but realised pretty quickly that they weren’t on the bus they needed to be on, so they got off outside Christchurch Hospital to wait for the bus they needed to catch to get home.

Unfortunately, the bunch of kids who had been hassling them at the interchange had walked in the same direction and when they saw the two women at the bus stop outside the hospital they crossed the road and came up to them.

One of the boys in the group started shouting at one of the women and started hitting her. And the girl that had been hassling them at the interchange, and two other boys, started yelling and kicking the other woman.

Long story short, they were both hit in the head and the stomach and it only stopped when an ambulance drove past and the paramedic on board saw what was going on and intervened.

He checked for things like concussion - all clear on that front. But, as it’s being reported today, there won’t be any ongoing physical injuries but the psychological impact of what happened isn’t going away fast for these two victims.

One of the women has had anxiety attacks when she’s tried to talk about what happened on Sunday night and both women have been staying together at the same place ever since.

Aside from the vicious assaults, these mongrels robbed the two women and have been using an iPhone they nicked from one of them to message them on social media.

They’ve been using the victim’s TikTok account to send her taunting messages, telling her how much money they’ve made from selling her belongings, and telling her that what they haven’t sold - they’ve just dumped.

Here’s a quote from one of the messages these mongrels have sent one of the victims: “We just wanted to make some quick cash. No one was meant to get hurt.”

So I’m being polite calling them mongrels. There are other words I could use, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

The thing is, this sort of thing - unfortunately - is not unusual. And it seems all year we’ve been talking about why kids these days seem to be getting involved in this kind of behaviour more and more.

When I saw the quote about these kids saying they only did what they did last Sunday night because they wanted to make some quick cash, it got me thinking about the materialistic world we now live in - and how we are all to blame for that.

We all want stuff, don’t we? Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to buy a house do that, and then there’s all the talk about getting a rental property. Then we want the iPhones, we want the holidays, we want the coffees, we want the dinners. We want want want.

So why should we expect the kids to be any different?

The only problem is, the kids don’t have the incomes we have. So what do they do? They help themselves to other people’s stuff. Which is what happened in central Christchurch last Sunday night.

But then I thought more broadly than that and wondered whether it’s more than just our own materialistic obsessions that are to blame for what’s going on.

Is it possible that as a society, in general, we have become so lenient that we are reaping what we’ve sown over the past 15 to 20 years?