I found this article extremely interesting as it focuses on one of the fundamental underlying problems that we have in our society today. Violence in crime.

Albeker analyses the violence in the crime in SA, and tries to get to a root cause for it. I believe this to be a good approach to solving anything - find the underlying reasons, sort it out and the problem will go away.

There is, in relation to the inequality-causes-crime argument, an even more serious problem. This is that a large body of economic thinking suggests that the widening of inequality is one of the inevitable by-products of rapid economic growth in developing countries. There is no universal consensus on this, but if inequality really does tend to widen as economies expand, then we had better hope that it is not the principal reason we’re so violent because it isn’t going to get better soon.
extract from Antony Altbeker’s new book, A Country at War with Itself taken from M&G atrticle 25 sept.

He compares our situation with others around the world seems to come to a thought that says we are not different as we believe we are -
One reason the apartheid-did-it explanation doesn’t completely satisfy is that South Africans are not unique in the world in having gone through long periods of disenfranchisement, oppression and collective violence.
pretty much every nation on the planet outside North America spent some portion of the 20th century on its knees, the victim of catastrophic violence directed either by local tyrants or by foreign overlords.

And yet only a handful has levels of violence that even approach ours.
Thought provoking stuff - what causes the violence?
  • Our history
  • Poverty
  • Hopelessness/humiliation
  • Inequality
  • Resentment

These are crime related, sure - but violence in the crime?