The Turangi Attack: the sentence

As most of us were, I was shocked by the Turangi attack, and moved by the response of the parents of the child.

The attacker was sentenced today to ten years in prison, after pleading guilty. He is a sixteen year old boy who, according to the Herald:

had come from a troubled, violent background and dysfunctional family and was drunk at the time of the attack and could recall little of it.

He had been bullied, abused, attempted suicide and began taking drugs and alcohol from an early age, the court heard.

The families of both of his parents had been involved in gangs.

How is it that we can tolerate a system that permits such gaps in our social fabric to let fall youth in this way? The Right will blame the parents and youth, and pontificate about personal responsibility and retribution. My side of the debate too often takes the simplistic structural explanation. I do stand somewhere towards the latter - we are capable of making decisions and choices, but in circumstances often, even usually, not of our own making, and frequently heavily loaded against us (ask the workers in Affco about this, where management wants to impose utterly their will over the working lives of employees). Societies that tolerate inequality as an acceptable outcome, that accept, even promote, unemployment as a "good', that argue solely from the perspective of personal responsibility and, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands of any collective responsibility for who and what we are, create the perfect breeding ground for the circumstances that gave rise to the Turangi events.

I am glad that justice has been done in an appalling case, but hope that most of us think beyond the narrow terms of retribution and blame that some will adopt.