The big news story this morning was the release by a judge yesterday of a set of pictures showing a group of youths beating up a homeless man on the South Bank of the Thames in London while a girl videoed the whole episode on her mobile phone’s camera. This type of behaviour is an extreme form of what is known as “happy slapping”, a misnomer like “joy-riding” (stealing cars and driving them at speed on public highways) which provoke some commentators to say they don’t like using them because they bring neither happiness nor joy to anyone except the culprits. Yesterday the “feral youths” all got lengthy jail sentences of eight years minimum.

The incident videoed was part of a spree in which the youths also killed David Morley, a barman who survived the nail-bombing of a gay bar in Soho a few years ago, leading to the suspicion that the incident might have been of homophobic motivation. In fact, it was simply random. Naturally, the incident was the main topic of conversation on the morning phone-in today on the BBC’s London station. The comments were not sympathetic; the usual talk of woolly-liberals commiserating on the criminals’ miserable upbringing, the solution being to bring back “discipline”, meaning corporal punishment, and of why they were acquitted of murder, the more serious charge for when the killing was premeditated, or when serious harm was intended, resulting in death.

Now, this part of London is one I walk through on average twice a week, often late at night, so I could easily have been one of their victims had I walked through at the wrong time. I also have to walk through a certain subway because the two buses which run near my home late at night run to the other side of a busy six-lane highway, and there is no bridge nearby, and certainly no pedestrian crossing. Fairly often I find people loitering in that subway, and so far when I have passed through, I have not been molested in any way, but it’s a long way from the nearest well-frequented street and while police pass by quite often, they are usually on the way to somewhere else. People also ride motorcycles through the subway. The problem is that the police need a way of tackling people, youths in particular, who loiter in public places at dark times, or subways at any time, because they make people feel endangered, sometimes with justification.

In this particular case, as with the Bulger murder, those responsible did indeed have awful backgrounds:

[Chelsea O’Mahoney, who is pictured with the mobile phone] was born in south London to parents addicted to heroin. At a young age she would sit and watch her mother inject heroin in the flat where they lived, the court heard. From the age of three, O’Mahoney was left to wander the streets of London unsupervised until she was taken in by her aunt, who attempted to offer her a better life. But the experiment of living with her aunt did not work out and O’Mahoney was taken into the care of the local authority.

One of the actual killers had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and his upbringing was described as “wretched”, “with no parental support”, while another had learning difficulties, although the judge said that their difficult backgrounds did not mitigate against what they had done:

“You are all old enough to understand the realities and the consequences of your actions,” he said. “You sought enjoyment from humiliation and pleasure from the infliction of pain.” Mr Morley’s family said afterwards they hoped the long prison sentences would serve as a deterrent.

Of course, not everyone who is a bully is a past victim of this or any other type of abuse, but in my experience, when it’s tolerated, it does not go away. I know I’ve said this before, but in some schools (among other places), it’s an accepted as fact that if you “give verbal”, you deserve a good smack in the mouth. I received more than one lecture on this subject during my first few weeks at boarding school, and subsequently witnessed one particular bully getting away with attacking people on four separate occasions on flimsy pretexts, and whenever I hear of thugs shooting people in the street for showing “disrespect”, I think of the ways staff passed the blame onto the victim.

A big problem with any discussion on this subject is that people always want to go back. They talk of bringing back corporal punishment, without realising what exactly it was used for, and what it wasn’t used for, in the past. They bemoan the lack of respect shown to the likes of teachers and policemen, but the victims in this case were a tramp and a barman. Tramps (long-term homeless men, not prostitutes), in particular, are not respected. People avoid them, call them scum, and suggest that they are really just drug addicts and not needy at all. One caller to this morning’s show mentioned a group of local thugs who used to hunt down a tramp every week or so simply to steal his dole money, and one morning when they found him and could not find the money, they set him alight. I don’t know if I ever saw the tramp murdered by these thugs on the South Bank on my fairly frequent trips through the area; I certainly didn’t notice him gone.

And the people responsible for this fell through all of society’s nets, and I don’t think anyone can come up with a glib solution such as “bring back the death penalty” or “bring back the cane”. But if we are to bring back the cane, it needs to be aimed firmly at those who persecute other children for fun (or for gain), not just at those who talk back to teachers or break petty rules. Anyone who talks of respect for authority as a big factor in this awful case is missing the point: they are likely to have chosen the tramp as their victim because he was there and was “scum” and a “pikey”. I heard on one occasion people talk of fear as a motivating factor: if not fear of God, then of whoever you might have to answer to in this life: parents, teachers, the law. But while we may feign respect for those people out of fear, where does this leave those we don’t fear?

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