My local train station is currently burning down

[thehardestpartis]

Reportedly due to children being on the station at 5:45 this morning and setting fire to an equipment cabinet.

AIBU to ask where the hell are the parents?! This will cause chaos in the town, reduce holiday maker visits and just generally worsen an already run down town.

The parents should be punished for arson with intent to endanger life, as should the children.

@igelkott2026 the steam railway is fine and running as usual today.

No, of course they aren't prisoners; but they are children. I'm privileged enough never to have been a looked-after child. I'm not actually blaming the children themselves, but the systems in place are clearly a catastrophic failure if this is possible. It really makes you wonder why the authorities might bother to insist on taking children away from neglectful parents in the first place, if their own plans for the children are to just keep on neglecting them anyway.

NO children should be in a position where they're able to roam free at 4am... I mean, maybe if you live in a peaceful rural setting and you have sensible early-rising teens who like to go for a country walk for a bit of exercise to start the day; but that's hardly the same as going out vandalising and setting fire to things, is it?

Do you know what recidivism is? It's reoffending following conviction and sentence. The US has higher rates of recidivism than we do, by some margin. So your argument holds no water. If you want to reduce reoffending look at the Norwegian system, much lower rates of recidivism and therefore fewer victims. Their system is very very different from that of the US and the model we should all be looking at as an example. It doesn't involve locking people up and throwing away the key

Maybe some people get confused because it has 'good' in its name (albeit in Greek) - except that it was originally named by people for whom up was down, day was night and evil was good.

My husband used to work in youth justice and works in an adjacent criminal justice mental health field now. Some people really have no idea outside of the MN bubble. I work in adult criminal justice and see the grown up impact of exactly the trauma and lifestyle you saw with the children

Torquay. My parents live nearby 😲

Yes, I know what recidivism is.

Of course I would far prefer people to be helped and guided into making good and responsible decisions - but I think the state can only go so far when you get multiple generations of people who do not want to be helped. The way they want to live their lives is feral and full of hate and disdain for everybody, including themselves.

Expensive, nice community amenities are established to guide them and give them purpose, and they come along and trash them and burn them down, because they do not want nice, orderly things.

I'm not saying to throw the parents in prison and ignore them until they get out - far from it. I know very little about the US prison system - I stated my (hardly original or controversial, you would think) opinion on how to deal with this problem; and then people responded that this is something that's done in the USA (I'm guessing far from exclusively) and somehow made a reach to assume that I was saying "We need to copy the US criminal justice system"! If they do do this in US prisons, Maybe that's the reason for their high rates of recidivism?

Compulsory parenting classes, in basic concrete facilities that they cannot destroy - and then, once they have learned a better way to live in society, they get a second chance. If they fight against it and don't want that, then what alternative is there but to end up back where they can't harm others and drag down communities to their own chosen level? Forcibly take their kids and put them with adoptive parents? Even then, the damage and destructive mindset would often already be ingrained.

I'm not saying that it's an easy problem to solve; or even possible. I just believe that the needs of the decent people who do want to live in a nice society should take priority over the rights of others to do hurt, harm and kill those people. Yes, rehabilitation is essential wherever possible; but ultimately, if somebody is determined to choose this way of living, and will never change, we need to protect everybody else from them, so they can only hurt themselves.

We have dreadful problems with teenagers on our estate here in Norwich. When we moved here a decade ago, totally unaffected by any youths causing trouble.

Now they've all grown up, they hang around the local Co-op on bikes, doing wheelies in the roads, taking books from our community library and burning them in the woods and behind houses... it's endless.

One of them even accused a dad in the park of being a pa--d- after he told them off, he wasn't doing anything wrong. The police came, and he was told he could press charges but didn't.

Last weekend we had 5 police cars and a van, taking away a teenage girl who'd shoplifted from the Co-op.

They've all been doing so much awful stuff, it's making people here move away. And the estate itself is generally a good one, and I've loved being here. Not much any more 😞

The parents obviously are crap and don't care. It makes me cross.

Massive difference between gentle parenting and letting your children run feral.

What does it matter?

Yes let's blame the weather. Not the feral children.

I've seen on Facebook there's a fire at Cockington too (that is pretty close to Paignton for those who don't live locally). That one is a house fire though. Hard work for the local fire brigade.

I saw this just before I left for work. Traffic is already a nightmare with the building that needs to come down opposite the station. Occombe Farm had a blaze a few days ago and I've just seen that there's one at Cockington too. The latter 2 incidents (I think) are due to the dry grass and heat though.

The difference is, even in the 90's when I was a teenager, if an adult told us to move along or quieten down - we'd listen and do it(often muttering under our breath). Nowadays teenagers just tell adults to fuck off or laugh at them and smash their windows. There really is a massive change in society and I don't know what it's going to take to change it.

We had part of one of our local shopping centers burnt down by two 13 year old boys at about 4.00 am a few weeks ago
It has had to be knocked down

Children in care, parents punished.
Won't happen because Paignton isn't within twenty miles of Manchester.
South of Coventry people, get some NHS glasses and a cardigan if you want to be heard in the next fifteen years.

We've lost a small block of shops nearby - a hairdresser, a cafe/takeaway and a small convenience store. All busy shops with a good amount of customers using them. Youths set one of those huge industrial bins on fire behind the shops which spread to the main building.

Thats three local families who've lost their livelihood, the people who worked for them are out of jobs and the customers are inconvenienced as we no longer have those shops within walking distance.

They just don't get the wider impact when they think it's funny to set a bin on fire.

What on earth does this mean?

Is it a fact? Where did you get this fact?

The children I've worked with with serious behaviour issues did not have parents who practiced gentle parenting. They had families with serious, chronic, generational social issues or trauma and / or they had significant neurodevelopmental disabilities or mental illness.

I'm glad it's not just me 😳

It reads like someone threw a load of words up in the air.

1982, was that part of the riots? To explain what happened. Teenagers set a flat on fire, after attempting to set a few on fire. The police and firebrigade turned up and were attacked. They left, people are on their own when it comes to youth crime. In the 80s the police would throw them in the back of a van and do them in, which would calm some behaviour down. How many children were stabbed and shot, or shot/stabbed adults to death, during your time in the police, in just your area?
We are being gaslighted that nothing has changed.

More than 40 firefighters needed and four shops lost. This is just horrific. Even the combined financial cost alone must have been millions and millions.

The naughty kids in my area when I was young got their giggles from knocking on doors and running away, and that was frowned on enough as being antisocial.

It would probably work out cheaper to offer all of these problem families a lovely free house on a deserted island, so they could establish a community of like-minded people there.

I'm not talking a prison or oppressive place; we could build them somewhere really, genuinely nice and beautiful... but no doubt they would still trash it and burn it down before long, and establish their own criminal, antisocial sub-culture, as that seems to be the way they genuinely prefer to live.

I'm only half-joking - we could ALL then live in our preferred way, so everybody would presumably be happy.

I haven't said nothings changed but kids weren't all angels for any part of my life.

The failed petrol bomb wasn't part of the riots but it wasn't long after they ended and I would imagine what they'd seen might have given them ideas. Basically a mate got arrested and they didn't like it. We had a similar incident a couple of years later where we were sort of trapped in a police station (it wasn't the same one) for hours with a huge crowd outside as they wanted a prisoner released.

I left school in 1970. Nice girls grammar school. The year after I left a girl in the year below me stabbed a boy from the boys school. I can't remember figures for the twenty years I worked for the police.

Gentle parenting lets them get away with more and more until they do this. I’ve never met a child that’s been “gently parented” that’s any good.

Phew! I have been scrolling this thread searching for just that. We are due to travel on the steam train from Torquay to Paignton next month