Youth need to know consequences

What must have gone wrong for them?

SITTING through youth court can be quite disheartening.

We've got young people facing all sorts of charges from theft to assaults, rape, indecent assaults, driving charges and burglaries - to name a few.

Some faces you see often, others are new. Many who are before the court appear lost.

I say lost because the look on many of their faces is fear of the consequences.

Admittedly, there are some who will snub their nose at authority no matter what but what about the first-time offender who just makes a mistake or falls in with the wrong crowd? There must be hope of putting them on the right track rather than putting them through the legal process.

What must have gone wrong for them?

This is a question society needs to address if we want to make a difference for them; to turn them into productive, contributing members of society before they head down this criminal path without a way back. It's horrible to see them progress to the adult court.

We could easily throw our hands up in frustration and give up or just blame the parents.

There are plans afoot to make parents responsible for their teenager's offending but how this will work or how they decide which parent should be taken to task might not be that easy to do.

Will it be every parent who faces providing answers, including the absent one who has left their ex to do the child-raising?

Seriously though, these young people need some sort of guidance and we can't blame every parent or caregiver for their behaviour. Some kids push until the boundaries are so blurred they can't even see what is right or wrong no matter how much they have been shown the right way.

The reality is today's kids have far too many rights with little responsibility tagging alongside those rights.

We can't always blame parents for failing them because often they can't enforce the rules on that unruly teenager who believes their rights allow them to do what they want when they want and how they want. These kids aren't afraid of anything let alone a judge they are standing before.

What the answer is I don't know but maybe we could start by parents going back to how our grandparents did the job.

A smack never did many of us any harm neither did consequences for actions.