Shocked by behaviour of some young kids in inner city. Scary experience.

[ObviouslyNotAMandy]

I live in a large ish city with 2 small children (5 &7). I was driving home through the city yesterday and 3 lads on scooters and bikes came round a bend on the wrong side of road and started hurling abuse at me. I was going very slowly (inner city traffic) there was no way I was doing anything wrong, it wasn’t a near miss, I got out of the way in good time, the lads even saw me coming before they launched themselves out.
I was alone in car with 2 kids in back and one of them started bashing my windows and was shouting things like “effing c*nt and I should smash your effing car in” and then rode off. My kids were terrified.
Just to be clear, there was absolutely no way I did anything wrong, just wrong place wrong time.
I thought of calling police after but city was packed and no way they’d find them.
what bothered me most is these kids can’t have been more than 11 and the thought of my kids growing up around this kind of thing, or growing up like this TERRIFIES me! How on earth do you keep your kids safe growing up in a city?!
Is it safer in smaller towns /countryside?
Has anyone else had similar incidents?
I’m feeling so rattled by the whole experience!

In the London suburb where I work it is very common for huge groups of young boys to ride their bikes into the oncoming traffic deliberately. Or they will purposefully drive in front of cars doing wheelies or stopping completely so that traffic can't move.

Where do you live now?

And of course when one or more of the little shits becomes roadkill the families and friends will be screeching for "justice for our hero" and calling for the motorist to be hung drawn and quartered. Happened in our town a couple of years back but it was a gang of early 20s men on mopeds

I think you were unlucky and it’s not the norm. However I have definitely seen more aggressive behaviour on the streets in the last year in my town and for the first time in my life I have occasionally felt intimidated (I have lived in three major cities including London and never felt like that before.)

My BIL is a bus driver. At LEAST three times this week, buses have had to be taken off the road, windows smashed by yobs who lie in wait with rocks. By the time the police can get there, obviously they have scarpered. Terrifying for drivers & passengers alike.
What's the answer? There is none. Cameras would only show idiots in dark clothes & hoodies - before they smash the cameras, of course.
There isn't the police manpower to lie in wait for them.

I think being / feeling threatened is shock value. If we turned round on them, most are cowards who would run. Of course, there's always the one who manybe would use a knife, so it's not recommended..

Not a new or recent thing, in the 70s gangs of skinheads (aka bovver boys) did this, in the 80s and 90s we had feral kids (think of James Bulger bless him), now it's kids with catapults and e-scooters. Worst place I ever saw gangs of feral kids was cumbria and I was brought up in the North East. Now live in a small, quiet rural town and we have a core of problem families with feral kids.

Have lived in my area for 6 years and have never seen any feral youth drug related behaviour until yesterday. Group of four male teenagers led by a female teenager, low level harassment of a group of younger males, who dealt with it brilliantly. Full of admiration for them. My thought was - the picked on could very possibly train for a caring profession like defence law, paramedic, and possibly will be called upon to offer a service to the ferals, and they will have the emotional intelligence and integrity not to lower themselves to the level of the ferals. We can’t choose our start in life. I do not feel compassion for those who lack emotional intelligence. I’m of an age when I would happily see the ferals punished rather than shown compassion. They are nasty people for whom any sense of compassion is reciprocated with malevolence. You can see the good in even the most damaged. But also spot malevolence in the malevolent.

Forgot to add kids played chicken in the 70s too, and threw stones at cars from bridges. It's nothing new. Difference now I think is the missing 'local bobby' who would have taken the kids home for a stern word with the parents

How is lockdown ,still responsible nearly two years on?
There have always been parents that don't really care what their kids are upto or what they are doing .

Generalisation.

I'm behaviour management (special Ed) and I'll remove students who are being disruptive because it benefits everyone.

I'll talk to them, find out why they are angry etc. I work on what do do/say next time they are feeling that way.

I explain they know the consequence and if they don't return to class and accept them graciously they know they'll get more.

And then return them to class for the teacher to set the consequence.

Ours absolutely understand teachers and I are a united front.

And many of my caseload now come to my office before they get to the point of disrupting everything and everyone because they feel safe and listened too.

We've sent kids on to MLD secondary schools who in year 5 we were worried wouldn't make the cut. (That's also strict!)

@x2boys exactly. I've lived in the same place for 16 years and the ones that are being a pain now are the younger siblings of the ones that were a pain a decade ago
They roam around with black clothes and hoodies/balaclavas, bully type dogs and don't give a shit about the police
My living room got set on fire when one of them threw a lit rocket in

The difference isn't just that the local Bobby isn't there. Kids back in the day had respect for the law and if taken home would be in big trouble with their parents. Feral kids nowadays would likely hurl abuse at police and their parents would either do the same or just not care what their child is doing. Most of these kids come from abusive or neglectful families, they don't know how to show respect or love because they've never experienced any. Children who have practically raised themselves turning into wild teenagers and worse adults. A pp said thst feral children have "No reason to care". Thst really struck a chord with me as I think that's very true and so sad.

Same where I live its a deprived area, and we do get trouble ,my sons phone was stolen and he was threatened, and a gang of kids put my kitchen window through ,of course there are loads of kids who are not trouble makers and whose parents do care what they are up to ,but there are a minority of problem families who cause trouble for everyone else.

mamabear had the same in my very twee and rural bus route through lovely expensive Sussex villages...passed a wooden bus shelter and three rather robust young girls sprung out and launched clods of earth and stones at the bus causing considerable damage .Probably had their screens confiscated that day ...

Imo the problems are worsening as we are now a generation away from corporal punishment and kids being so scared of authourity they were compliant. While I agree these had to be removed the problem is they have been replaced by an empty void where many kids have few boundaries and even less consequences. The kids know it and are now feral.

Too many (not all) parents are letting their dc down, whether it is because both parents work FT and dont make time to parent or they dont have the skills or inclination to put the massive effort required into raising a well rounded human being. Many parents today abdicate what is their responsibility instead blaming anyone else from schools, police, Internet, alleged lack of things to do, peer pressure etc for their dcs resulting behaviour. They simply do not realise they themselves are the ones to blame.

A friends ds was cornered by some kids, banged him about a bit, threatened with a proper beating and he was terrified, hyper ventilating. Someone ran home and told his dad who ran down to stop it. The dad shouted at the ring leader and literally poked him once in the chest with his finger once to tell him to keep away from his son. The police were called and all anyone was interested in was if the dad assaulted that child. The gang of thugs got off scot free from police and parents and had a good laugh into the bargain!

I have no idea what the answer is when the problem is a pandemic of feckless parenting.

I do think it starts young. There are a number of parents in our primary class who seem to be in denial about their children (in general boys) behaviour. there is a lot of ‘boys will be boys’ and slagging off of the teacher trying to discipline them. This is in an affluent area but I can well believe a couple in particular will be challenging once they’re in secondary. One of the boys who has been aggressive has an older brother who has already had exclusions in primary school.

if you have that sort of parenting plus low aspiration I can easily see how you get teens being antisocial/drifting into criminal behaviour.

itsgettingweird - not a generalization at all - that is a fair representation of my experience after 3 decades of teaching. I have family and friends in other schools who say exactly the same things are happening there. In mainstream schools that I have worked in or know about this is exactly what happens. HTs seem to be at a loss regarding behaviour managment, and the money just isn't there to support programmes. Unqualified behaviour managment posts are being advertised regularly and the pay is very poor for what they are expected to do. No wonder they try to make the job manageable for themselves by setting themselves up as 'friend' to the ill-mannered, challenging students they deal with.

I really wish these families would all be plonked in one large estate under a dome so they don't ruin everyone else's lives. I think some would soon change their ways.

The problem is wealth inequality, lack of family support services, lack of family support, lack of early intervention, lack of alternative curriculums and alternative provision in schools, lack of community initiatives.

Countries which do better with the above have fewer problems.

I blame lockdown for a lot of things but not this.

my parents retired ten, fifteen years ago and the first thing I said was "do not run errands at school ending time". I am freelance and make a point of never being in the high street at that time. I try not to be on public transport at that time.

it's been a problem for ages, though like every problem, it gets worse as the population goes up.

I am old enough to remember when we had family support workers and children centres and curriculums designed to support those who weren’t academic. Some of these children now lost were saved but there has always been children destined to be largely outside of society. Countries with corporal punishment still have problems, often worse violence problems. The lack of any consequence can’t be helping though.

This: We're in a fairly affluent area too where having a high income and lots of holidays, new cars etc is paramount. No one teaches responsibility or good manners - parents turn a blind eye and their kids are gods who can't be challenged.

Not disagreeing with you - in fact I specifically put austerity in my post - but lockdown exacerbated poor children's isolation, detachment from school and other services, exposure to abuse and risk and lack of opportunities. This isn't just me - many children's experts including UNICEF have found this in their research on the impact of lockdown on children.

I don't believe corporal punishment in school was ever a deterrent. Incurring the wrath and disappointment of your parents was. It's poor parenting that leads to most of this behaviour. The parents neither know nor care where the kids are, or encourage them to go out for a quiet life and claim there's nothing they can do to discipline them. It's hard to be strict over what behaviour is acceptable, especially once kids are influenced by friends.

I agree. I also wouldn't limit the association to cities either - this sort of thing has been happening in cities and rural areas for a long time now. And it isn't just "deprived" or poor kids either - it's easy to assume that the issue is about poverty, but we have been seeing this sort of thing in amongst more middle class kids for a coupel of decades now. I rural areas the issues are often concentrated in specific centres - kids travel out of the neighbourhood they live in, often to the bigger towns. Behaviour has become more feral in "nicer schools" and colleges. My friend was teaching in a "nice" school until last year, when she was cornered in a stock room by a knife-wielding child - the child was 9 years old! That was the final straw for her and she no longer teaches.

People assume that cities, and inner cities / deprived areas are the only focus of such behaviours, but they really aren't. They contain more people, so behaviours are often more visible. There are simply more young people acting in this way to be seen, and they tend, for a variety of reasons, to do it "in their own back yard". But just because the parents are sitting in a nice area, a small town or village, with lovely middle class jobs, doesn't mean that their kids aren't misbehaving somewhere "out there" - it means they assume they aren't.