To combat violence, support humane conditions for all children to grow up in.(News)

BYLINE: Margaret Legum

Being attacked in your home destroys everything that gives you security; it disorients your sense of self and threatens what gives life meaning. We heard words to that effect from a social worker in a Special Assignment programme on violent crime earlier this month.

That experience - of being attacked in your own home - is the experience of most young males who inflict violent crime throughout the world. From their babyhood onwards, when vulnerability and fear are at their most extreme, they have been attacked, physically and or emotionally, in their own homes.

That is the cold evidence from all countries where research is done. It is not a soppy theory by academic sociologists, or an "excuse" invented by bleeding …