AIBU to think parents should lose benefits /homes for persistently antisocial children?

[Soddingcat]

This has been suggested, im not sure if it will happen , but i think this is a great idea, if the parents think they will lose their council house and benefits , they may attempt to to control their feral offspring .

My friend is in a local harriers group that starts at a local sports centre in the rough part of town, they are now having to stop their favourite route because of gangs of young teens who intimidate them , run along side them and are abusive, one delightful boy said “ lift your legs higher you c**t ,

How have we come to this ?
Do you think it will make any difference ?

I would remove child benefit from them too , maybe this will force them to parent if they risk losing money or their home

Obviously not all the parents are bad, but virtually all the awful kids round here riding motor bikes with hoods, abusing people are from the council estates near by

Im absolutely sick of it, and sick of decent people being targeted by them

What rules /sanctions would wise mumsnetters suggest ?

Crime rate would go through the roof if their money was cut. even the scum element has eat and pay bills. If anything, they are having kids they can't parent properly because they weren't parented properly themselves. It's a vicious circle.
Why should decent people get lumped in with the scummy types?

If homelessness and destitution made people better parents then your point might have merit, but I'm pretty sure that they actually have the opposite effect, and the practical effect on behaviour would be that these kids would move from antisocial behaviour to more serious (and lucrative) crime.

A return to sure start centres, parenting classes, and early interventions would make more of a difference, but would also cost more and not be punitive enough for some people.

Thank you.

Gosh, I don’t have time to break down every point in your post but you are clearly a nasty racist.

In my utopian world, if I was PM, I would build public schools and run them exactly along the same lines as Eton etc, with the same facilities and the same discipline. I would send seriously feral children to these schools, and they would permanently board.

This gets them away from their useless parents (the parents would also lose child related benefits), get them away from the environment that has created them, and bring peace to their neighbours.

It would be cheaper in the long run than the cost to society of the damage these scrotes inflict over a lifetime.

I don't for one minute think that all council tenants are like this , but most of the kids like that are , certainly round here they are

However , i think we need to be able to have conversations like this without people getting offended because they live in social housing.
I am only referring to the families who behave like this, not everyone else.

Also, I know full well that antisocial behaviour is not always these kids, But the better behaved children round here are not behaving like this

Maybe, i would hope that the threat of it might be enough for families to try and do something about it, Maybe i am naive….

I think the sure start centres should be brought back and early intervention needs to be introduced

Community service and youth detention for the kids so they can learn how they should behave. Same for the parents.
I think removing housing/benefits would make it worse, people would become more feral just to survive- they’d have to steal from others.

A lot of families don’t want to change - they need incentive to do so. But what type of incentive?

Doesn’t matter if the bait is nice or nasty - although nice would probably annoy some people.

If your UC was sanctioned for not attending parenting classes you’d catch a few ASB types. Food banks stop any hardship.

A family I know like this had one option as kids: get out. Trouble is not many women (we are talking about boys/men here, obv) want to take them on. But it works when they do.

The other kids hugely enjoyed the regular drama with the police etc - the family saw it as an achievement.

Tired of anti social behaviour too but not sure this is a solution

there is no longer any respect for authority in our society and this has partly to do with status and pay. Police and teachers and social workers and anyone really are not just not respected, they are despised and treated badly and paid badly, which all fits together.

Not sure what the solution is

there is no turning back

it is like a cultural shift where everyone knows their “rights” but nobody wants to have any duties or obligations

or maybe I am just officially old haha

I don't even think that parenting classes would work so well for someone who has a teenage child that's a lot bigger than them and does whatever they want. Early intervention sounds more promising but does nothing for teenagers and adults already in this lifestyle.

I actually think that bringing back national service would work better. My son’s just come back from a country that still has this and he couldn’t get over how polite and respectful everyone was.
Uniforms are always a great leveller. It may also provide a good circuit breaker for young people who have gotten themselves in bad situations/mix with the wrong crowd. Teaching teamwork, resourcefulness, discipline and self accountability as well as an opportunity to carry a good reference forward could set youngsters on a different life course and show them that there are other ways and opportunities.
It wouldn’t just unfairly target lower income families.
Added bonus of a more capable nation in the event that things (as seems increasingly likely) go south!

Not sure about losing homes but there should be more sanctions against anti-social behaviour.

My friend used to run her boot camp groups outdoors. They were doing it in a local park but kept getting abused by youths on bikes/scooters with balaclavas on. They were riding through the activities and swearing at the participants. Police were called several times but nobody came out.

She changed the venue to one of those multi sport cages next to the community centre, but they kept doing it there and throwing things against the cage to make a noise.

She's now had to move it indoors into the community centre but can't open the doors due to them hanging around outside so it gets stifling hot and that puts people off coming.

It's horrible that youths can get away with ruining someone's livelihood and nothing is done about it.

I agree - bleeding heart doesn’t work. It’s unfair on everyone.

You can't reasonably remove people's benefits; if they're entitled to them then they need them to survive and if they're not entitled to them then you need to tighten up the system at the point of application or renewal so that people aren't taking advantage (although in practice, as far as we know, that's rare). Deal with the actual perpetrators. This may mean reducing the age at which children can be arrested, which can then be offset through age-appropriate sentencing guidelines and limits. Send the guilty to mandated therapy, education/training, and/or community service and send the parents to parenting classes. Of course, all of this costs money - including actual effective law enforcement - and people will howl about the expense, but it should have been done decades ago. None of what you're describing is normal behaviour and it should never have been normalised.

Well I don’t live in social housing, I just think starting nasty benefit bashing threads like this encouraging hate is completely unnecessary and small minded, and this whole ideal totally lacks any critical thinking or common sense at all. There is literally nothing about increasing homelessness and poverty that suggests it would have positive social impacts. Homeless people would have no real way to get jobs and with no money they’d be forced to turn to crime to feed their children, and obviously local crime rates would sky rocket, it only takes 5 seconds of thinking to see that as a starting point.

This is what happens when society allows poverty.
What we need to do is even out. We get the wealthy privileged to contribute more rather than hoarding their treasure.
We have created this. Lack of opportunity and hope has created this.
We make good schools and education available to all if we want to fix this. We make small pockets of social housing in affluent areas where there is more opportunity, rather than having huge social housing estates.
We pay decent living wages where it pays people to work.
There is so much wrong with our system and we need to look at cause.

So what’s the answer?

A bloody good hiding would have nipped this behaviour in the bud once upon a time.
Teachers and the police had authority.
All gone now.
Now we have children stabbing children.
Children assaulting their parents.
Police more like social workers.
Be careful what you wish for.....

My kids are not perfect at all, they are young adults now, we have all had terrible racist abuse, my 26 year old son was punched in the chest by a tracksuit clad cyclist when walking across a bridge recently

My post was intended to discuss what people think solutions are,

I just think that the current acceptance and excuses made for them do not help in the long term .

Im happy to be wrong , it all just feels a bit desperate now.
I live near Middlesbrough and it is lawless there.

Fine, but even being practical, would you want all of these families roaming around the streets with no money? Many will have younger children, want to put them in care for £30k minimum per child per year or do the babies have to live under bridges too?

Meh. The feral yobs around here live in £1m houses.

I’ve always thought this. Strict boarding schools but with really good educational and trauma informed standards. Get these kids away from
dickhead waster families and show them there is a better way.

And what are we taking away from crappy parents who have a mortgage and don't claim benefits?

Is sure start coming back? Our local labour council has cut our children's centres from a peak of around 20, to 6 over past 5 years. 5 closed this year alone.

I can see why it’s an attractive idea-but I don’t think adding more disadvantage is the way forward. Don’t ask me what the way forward is, though….