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.

We really shouldn't speculate about who started the fire based on third-hand information. Nothing has been released officially. It feels rather premature to blame parents and talk about making them accountable when investigators haven't even started investigating!

Nothing to be confused about. I have heard of it on news reports but I have never witnessed it or seen it almost normalised as standard teen behaviour.

I'm not being sharp??

I'm asking why it matters.

Surely even if you've never personally witnessed arson by young people you've seen the news and read newspapers?

I'd be interested in how you're backing up your 'fact'? I assume you either have evidence or don't know what fact means?

I think you are quite confused. Obviously not one person has mentioned this being normalised teen behaviour.

but you have, presumably, heard of arson and know that arson happens. So logically you would realise that all sorts of people commit arson. Men, women, teenagers.

We recently had 3 x 13 year olds set fire to a shopping centre at 4am, same question, where were the parents, why aren't they parenting

Yes it's the new name

Did you consider the children might be in the care system?

I also spent years working in the youth centre in Paignton at parkfeild, as well as working at the waterleat road high school site, I don’t think it’s anything to do with permissive parenting. We have a massive deprivation problem in the bay, and lack of upward mobility. I went to uni, did my masters got a job as a teacher and bought a house by the time I was in my early twenties. I was the only one of my group of 16 friends to not have had a baby before I turned 21, the only one not living in social housing, I was one of two who went to university, and one of 5 who finished sixth form.
Jobs are so hard to come by, and those that people do get are often 0 hours contracts unsociable hours making it harder to rear children,
there’s a massive substance misuse cuIture locally (I. married a drug addict ffs)
the gap between rich and poor is HUMUNGOUS
Rents have gone up astronomically- my first one bed flat just outside Newton abbot was £320 PCM just over 10 years ago, now it’s going for over 900. The house next door to me, (standard 3 bed semi) is rented for 1650!! It’s Insane.
Theyve closed down a lot of the children’s centres /youth centres - the family hub places are limited, portage for special needs is absolutely overwhelmed, there seem to be more and more children in the care system

as for people saying 40/50/60 + years ago there wasn’t a support system
you had a community, I hear all the older people at our church talk about it. All the little areas had a bit of something. The different suburbs/villages had their own school, with a local ish teacher and they had a chemist, and a post office and a shop, maybe a butcher, and a church and all sorts. my father in law was a milkman for Unigate in the 70s and 80s he knew all the families, kids and pets he delivered to. Mums worked smaller jobs or stayed at home, living in close proximity to families and friends, I was looked after often by my mums best friend, and vice versa. My mum was a drug and alcohol social worker in the bay and my dad ran a shop- I could go out alone safely from the age of 9 or so and know people, places to go, it would be rare that I didn’t see a friendly face around - my daughter doesn’t get that same experience at all.

times are changing.

My ds did that once when at a friends for a sleep over. All 6 of them snuck out in the wee small hours and the parents were oblivious.

ds was naive enough he told me all about their adventure 🤔 the next day 🙈

The sleepover parents were horrified when I told them 🤣

I work round the corner, office currently still smells of smoke. I assumed kids but was told it was electrical fault

It would be hilarious if after 6 pages of hand wringing about how awful parents are those posters found out it was caused by an electrical fault

I think you mean permissive parenting. Gentle parenting does have clear boundaries. The two frequently get confused.

Paignton and Torbay have been rough and rundown for decades. They are in a stunning location and the areas are undergoing vast regeneration to boost tourism numbers. Paignton seafront has some shiny new hotels, Torquay Harbour is being regenerated. The problem is it takes time to eradicate the social problems and after years of austerity there are still lots of pockets of deprivation. The bay being one of them.

That said, you will have a lovely holiday, it's not lawless and on the whole people are friendly and there is lots to do. I wonder if the op has spent much time in some of the UK's rougher cities recently, the South West is still quite genteel in comparison.

Not defending it, not at all...it's caused huge problems here in Cornwall...but the reason is that the councils need the money.

Apparently quick google tells me youth crime was on an upward trajectory from 1950s to till mid 1990s then it dropped. The number of children entering the justice system for the first time dropped by nearly 40% between just 2007 and 2010.

Long-term data tracking from gov.uk says that the number of children receiving a caution or sentence has fallen by roughly 65% over the last decade 2010-2020.

Teenage pregancies are also down as is drinking and smoking numbers.

So data seems to suggest kids are better behaved/or mointored more than in the past - there have also been kids who do crimes but all this narrative of kids are out of control like never before doesn't seem to match actual data.

It's terrible this has happened or been done - but I don't think it shows parents are worse than ever - I think there always been a group of parents who've struggled or not cared and cuts to SS and support won't have helped in last decades but overall kids seem to be committig fewer crimes than in previous decades.

Oh rubbish. Do you think any of this is new? There was loads of serious vandalism, criminal damage, arson and all out riots going on when I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Was it gentle parenting then that was the cause?

I'd be interested if you could link to some evidence for this fact.

The people I know who gentle parent have good boundaries and generally well-behaved kids.
The people I know whose kids might be out at this time, are parents who might not even be home themselves.

This.

About 25 years ago some teenagers set fire to a train seat at a local station. One of the platform staff boarded the train to try and extinguish the fire but was overwhelmed by the fumes and sadly died.

There was CCTV and to her absolute credit, the mother of one of the culprits reported her own son. It must have been such a hard thing to do.

I wonder at what point some of these teenagers will learn that setting fire to things isn't 'just wrecking stuff' but is actually endangering lives?

Will it be when one of their own number is burned to death? Will we then see their parents on the news, still looking for anybody but themselves to blame for the loss of their 'loveable rogue'?

I don’t have any stats or data to hand and am by no means an expert on this area so I could admittedly be talking out my arse. But I think in the 2000’s onwards there were changes to youth justice in the Uk Where things called referral orders were introduced- these are a restorative justice approach to youth crime and don’t hold the same penalties as custodial sentences or cautions so potentially there could be a similar ish amount of deviant or criminal behaviour but just a change to the way it’s viewed
although referral orders do seem to lower recidivism rates massively

The stress of it!!! You might never have known! I can imagine the parents' faces. On the plus side I'd guess it got you out of having to host a sleepover ever again?! 😂

The police are investigating and asking for information which is odd when people on here seem to know exactly what happened. Maybe they should share their knowledge with the relevant authorities.

As to damage at the station there has been talk for years about moving the station across to the other side of Torbay Rd. I believe there is a new car park over there so might be the opportunity for a nice new station with a car park adjacent.

No. They're shit parents. Their kids just committed arson.