Teenage & Adolescent Violence – Problem Solving Incompetence

As your guest blogger I am indulging my various prejudices and idiosyncratic concerns. Today its problem solving incompetence! Seems to me that there is a lot of this sort of incompetence around and maybe someone should sound off about it to reduce his level of generic angst.
When The City of Melbourne issues permits to an extraordinary number of all night drinking establishments (oh I mean clubs) in one street with obscene numbers of people allowed in each, and when said patrons, in an inebriated and aggressive state totter out onto the streets, it is really not too surprising that nightly people get seriously injured and occasionally killed or maimed for life.
My difficulty is, that we always seem to think that the only solution is to either put more policed on the streets or set up sobriety shelters or at least do some utterly absurd ‘finger in the dyke ‘ act, deal with the symptom.
Well, why would we not try and explore the extensive range of people and groups and systems and in fact the entire linked causal chain, the multiple causality that lies at the heart of every such difficulty.
We could start by being curious about the entire collection of stakeholders who have a part in this problem. Parents! Oh of course, they had something to do with it, teachers, and schools, The government who tax cigarettes to the limit to ???why is it,, um to get money for…, from tobacco …., anyway you know and who don’t tax alcohol at anything like that level because…. Well you know,,, and then there’s the Police, they of course are supposed to be able to fix all this, like in some special miraculous way? And then there are the Councils and the Club Owners and there are probably another dozen or more stakeholder groups but — hands up all those who believe that these groups contain people with the intelligence and the social skills and the relationship skills and the social concerns to actually engage with this issue, “Oh and is that hand in the corner –you – ‘tooth fairy’”
Phill Boas