As is frequently the case with profound social change, it is much easier to distinguish specific more or less disturbing features than the way in which they will react together. It is, for example, possible that we are seeing a long-term demographic change with large and undesirable consequences. The fall in the birth rate and the increase in life expectancy, which is a general feature of our time and by no means one limited to or most evident in Britain, will result in a smaller working population sustaining a larger elderly one. People of sixty-five today are generally fitter, healthier and more capable of remaining in work — indeed younger — than their counterparts of fifty years ago. Many of them, possibly most, would prefer to carry on working and resent enforced retirement. Eventually new social arrangements will have to reflect this, among them a raising of the retirement pension age. Until that happens, the fact that in Britain retirement pensions and other benefits are not ‘funded’, but rather financed on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, means that the burden on those in work will at some point be significantly increased. It is a matter of speculation how they will react.
Most public attention to changes in the demographic structure has, however, focused on the case of the teenage single parent. Understandably so, for this ‘lifestyle’ is an exceptionally irresponsible one, which both levies heavy costs on the taxpayer and imposes severe disadvantages on children growing up in conditions of relative poverty and without a father’s guidance.
Moreover, it is a problem that is getting worse. The number of one-parent families with dependent children as a proportion of all families with dependent children in Britain has approximately doubled since 1976. Of course, this group includes widows, divorced and deserted single mothers — and fathers — as well as the group which is the main focus of this discussion, the never-marrieds. It goes without saying that although the circumstances of these different one-parent families are superficially similar, they arise from very different causes and, as we shall see, require very different responses. To over-simplify greatly, widows with children require financial help; the never-marrieds need that — plus a change of outlook too.
That said, the number of single parents, though growing, actually understates the problem. Very often single mothers are concentrated either in a particular area or a particular ethnic minority. In these circumstances, complacent talk about relying on grandparents or the ‘extended family’ is quite unrealistic. For there may be no older married men in the narrower local community at all. Not only in such circumstances do children grow up without the guidance of a father: there are no involved, responsible men around to protect those who are vulnerable, exercise informal social control or provide examples of responsible fatherhood. Graffiti, drug trafficking, vandalism and youth gangs are the result and the police find it impossible to cope. There is also the financial cost. Of the 1.3 million single parents in Britain nearly 1 million depend on benefits, costing the tax payer £6.6 billion a year.
Charles Murray regards the dramatic rise in the rate of illegitimacy as a crucial predictive indicator of problems to come. Over the last ten years the proportion of births outside marriage has more than doubled, reaching one in every three live births. Never in Britain’s recorded history has there been anything like it. It cannot be explained solely by urbanization — the catch-all explanation or excuse for most behavioural deterioration — because in Victorian Britain, which saw the most sweeping change in that direction, the illegitimacy rate, like the crime rate, actually fell. The attempt is sometimes made to minimize the significance of this change by noting that three quarters of today’s births outside marriage are registered by both natural parents. This is supposed to demonstrate that the child has been born into a stable home. But a young child needs above all the total confidence that both his parents will always be there. If the mother and father do not have sufficient commitment to each other to enter into marriage, it would hardly be surprising if the child doubts their own commitment to him. And children are much quicker on the uptake than many adults understand.
As with crime and welfare dependency, so with family structures. Policy-making must be firmly based on analysis of what we know to be the facts. These do not show that everywhere the family is in retreat, or that most young men are criminals or that all those on means-tested benefits have accepted the culture of welfare dependency. Contrary to what the liberal-left would like to think, most children still grow up in a traditional family; most people marry; and most of these have children. In fact, no amount of philosophy, theology or social theory can provide stronger support for the argument that the family is the natural and fundamental unit of society than its resilience in the adverse climate of opinion and perverse financial incentives of the last thirty years. But this is no ground for complacency.
Changes in behaviour which may be limited and containable within society as a whole may have dangerous and dramatic effects when localized in small communities. It is far from clear that a capitalist economy and a free society can continue to function if substantial minorities flout the moral, legal and administrative rules and conventions under which everyone else operates. What is clear is that at present we are moving rapidly in the wrong direction.
A CYCLE OF CRIMINALITY
We could argue indefinitely about the precise relationship between crime, dependency and family breakdown: this is an area in which more research will be valuable. But there is now little doubt in the minds of most professionals — and none, I suspect, in the minds of the rest of us — that such a connection exists and is of the highest importance.
Take the large and important subject of juvenile delinquency as an example. The reduction of juvenile crime is not only of obvious importance in any strategy to reduce crime as a whole: it is also crucial to halt a budding career of crime in its tracks before it leads to serious and repeated offences. Discussions of the ‘causes’ of crime, both juvenile and adult, often end up in a cul-de-sac of generalities. The tendency to evil in human nature and the multiple opportunities for its expression are part of our ordinary experience. We can, indeed, do something about reducing the opportunities, by crime-prevention techniques such as ‘Neighbourhood Watch’. But in a world of greater mobility (where miscreants can more easily achieve anonymity and make their escape) and greater prosperity (where there is more to steal), the results of such strategies are bound to be limited. Moreover, although crime prevention may reduce the amount of ‘opportunist’ crime, it is only likely to displace the crime committed by determined habitual criminals from one area to another. Consequently, attention is increasingly focused on crime prevention at the level of the individual — the actual or potential delinquent — rather than on the physical environment in which a crime takes place.
Research carried out in both the United States and Britain has illuminated the connection between crime, the dependency culture and family breakdown.[95] British research suggests that juvenile delinquency is associated with low intelligence, impulsiveness and troublemaking at school. As regards background, common factors appeared to be low income and poor housing. The parents of these troublesome children were inclined to administer erratic discipline and poor supervision, in short either not to care or to care impulsively or ineffectually. They may well be separated or divorced or teenage mothers and have criminal convictions in the family. The small proportion of boys who became persistent offenders, continuing into adulthood, and who constitute the real criminal menace, apparently showed the same characteristics but generally in a more extreme form.
95
I am grateful to Professor Gary McDowell, Director of the Institute of United States Studies at London University, for letting me draw upon the proceedings of the Institute’s conference on juvenile crime,