Mindless Violence

Out of Winnipeg has come, all too startlingly-frequently, stories of violence at odds with standards of social conduct and respect for others in a civilized society. Violence visited against adults, young and old, is hard enough to accept. But mindless violence represented by vicious assaults against infants staggers the mind, and alerts the public to the full extent of a culture of dystopian violence, of nihilistic disregard for the social compact.

The city of Winnipeg, just over half-a-million population, is rated to represent the Canadian city with the highest rate of violent crime. And the incidence of violent crime is on a steep rise. That level of violence was once restricted to a number of inter-urban areas, but has steadily moved beyond those neighbourhoods to infiltrate other communities. The violence is held to be a by-product of street gangs whose members battle for territory, drugs and 'respect'.

Gang cultures in various parts of the country often are represented by ethnic groups; in Vancouver, those of Asian or East Indian ancestry; in Toronto those of West Indies descent, for example. Whereas in Winnipeg armed street gangs are represented by aboriginals with their various pride-of-origin names. What they all have in common, these gangs, is the assurance among the young gang members that they'll receive that proverbial wrist-slap.

The Youth Criminal Justice Act is relatively lenient with young offenders. So too when a young woman viciously beats a two-year-old child, and a young father of another infant seriously wounds his child by stabbing it in the face, their substance-dependence and youth and background of poverty will ensure a free-pass leniency. The youths that stab and shoot and bludgeon the old and the innocent don't much care what results from their violence.

The mayor of Winnipeg, in discussing the issues before the city council and its policing authority speaks of the "revolving door of justice". Arrested, tried and sentenced, a short prison stay in juvenile detention sees the offenders back on the street in quick order. Worse, perhaps is that they manage, while in detention, to recruit other vulnerable imprisoned youth to gang membership.

"Today, about a third of the inmates within an institution are gang-affiliated", according to the Chair in Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. Some of those young people who become affiliated with the various gangs represent socially-aversive youth whose reserves have expelled them for violent crimes or substance addiction.

So where do the answers to this problem lie? With the all-too-often aboriginal communities whose own levels of child-rearing dysfunctionality is legendary because of parents unwilling or unable to properly raise their young because of their own debilitating addictions? Or with the municipalities that end up inheriting these dangerously violent social misfits?

Should Canadian society look more deeply into investing in remedial opportunities within the aboriginal communities themselves, in an effort to forestall these problems of ineffective child-rearing to begin with? Undeniably yes. The other, less palatable alternative is to battle violence with violence. And that devalues us all.