Was this a hate crime?
The other day a 14 year old boy stepped on the foot of a grown man in Essex. The boy apologised, but the man followed him into the train station and demanded “Have you got a problem?” then punched him in the head. The teenager was unconscious for 20 minutes. His Dad saw the CCTV footage and told the Evening Standard newspaper: “To see my son lying sprawled out with the man over him and pools of blood, I just felt sick to the stomach.”
When I saw the CCTV camera image of the perpetrator, he looks normal. He wears a woolly hat and is layered against the Spring chill. He’s in his mid to late 20s. What worries me is that teenagers have been quietly demonised and some people see no problem in attacking them – verbally or in this case physically. A bit like members of some religions, whose persecution was once tolerated because they sit outside society’s norms in the way they dress or speak or look.
Teenagers have been stereotyped, seen as some sort of other being. Not children. You can see people wither slightly when they see them, eyeing them sideways as if they’re somehow devious and rude and wrong – guzzling legal highs and watching girls in bikinis dance on YouTube to rapped swear words. That man probably thought he was doing society some sort of service. “That teenager stepped on my foot. I’ll show him”. This has to stop, or we risk descending into a spiral of casual violence that would be accepted for no other group.
As parents of teenagers, we need to take a stand against their demonisation. If we don’t, nobody else will and the violence and vitriol will continue to make their late childhood miserable. And scary.
This is terribly sad. I like giving my daughter a hard time because she’s a crotchety teenager, but in the grand scheme of things, I know she’s a good person. I can’t imagine a place where someone would think violence is a reasonable solution to having your foot stepped on. Every concert would look like a battle ground!
With that said, I’ve seen her get the sideways looks, assumingly because of her age.