The New Year’s Eve fatal stabbing in London of 16-year-old Harry Pitman shocked people internationally and highlighted, far from the first time, the agonising question of youth violence. The trend is not restricted to the UK. Only a few weeks earlier, eight high school students were arrested on murder charges in Nevada after a 17-year-old boy was beaten to death. In Toronto, Canada, last year, a group of teenage girls were arrested following the stabbing to death of a homeless man; the two oldest among them were 16, the two youngest only 13 years of age. These are not isolated examples. What drives such aggression? The easy assumptions are that it’s a matter of “bad kids”, poor parenting, lax punishments, all in a culture of permissiveness. Or, perhaps, some people are genetically programmed to be violent. While such beliefs may be easy to digest or may satisfy our sense of moral outrage, they have nothing to do with reality. As with any living creatures, humans develop in the context of an environment. To understand what is driving youth aggression and, more generally, the rising tide of youth mental health and behavioural problems, it is the context we must examine. We must face the fact that in today’s world, many children and adolescents grow up and function in a traumatising environment, one that wounds them — wound being the root meaning of the word trauma. Such wounding can occur if children are hurt in their families of origin, by parents who were themselves hurt when young, or bullied at school, or have come too much under the influence of culturally accepted and even celebrated violent examples. Read full story here: https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/knife-crime-youth-violence-harry-pitman-gabor-mate-b1133188.html Subscribe to the Evening Standard: https://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-Evening-Standard for latest breaking news from the UK, US and around the world, plus podcasts and features. Evening Standard on socials: Check out our full video catalog: null Videos, daily editorial and more: https://www.standard.co.uk/ Like us on Facebook: https://www.fb.com/eveningstandard Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eveningstandard and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evening.standard