Glowering Alone

"A grey weekday morning at 7.40am in Edmonton bus station in north London, and it's teeming with schoolchildren. As the bus arrives, a crowd surge forward to squeeze their way on. People get knocked over. The children, screaming and pushing, panic. Small ones, horrified by the melee, hold back. The ones with the sharpest elbows make it. The rest have to go through the ordeal again with the next bus and the next - and get bad marks for being late when, battle-scarred, they finally make it into school.

When I recounted this incident to my 12-year-old, hardened by 18 months of secondary school travel, she smiled at my naivety. Being pushed, sworn at and squeezed on to overcrowded trains and buses is already routine to her.

Trivial personal anecdotes, you might say, with some justification. But what I saw at Edmonton bus station left me enraged. How can we complain about children's antisocial behaviour when we show such dereliction in developing in them any understanding of social behaviour? Where are the buses, the stewards or bus conductors they need? Why are transport services in poorer areas so under-resourced? Treat people like animals and, chances are, they will end up behaving like them. Every morning, these kids are getting a crash-course in how aggressive self-assertion is your passport in life.

One-third of respondents told the British Crime Survey, published last week, that they were worried about antisocial behaviour. Crime may be falling, but something more intangible and just as important is moving centre stage: a pervasive anxiety about a deterioration in the everyday interactions between strangers. Typically, the aggression erupts when someone gets in someone else's way. It's a pathology of individual entitlement. What's crumbling is the civility that is so essential to wellbeing, to trust and to the conviviality of our lives. We have failed to invest the resources, both material and cultural, in the places where we interact with strangers. Antisocial teenagers are simply playing out their own version of the aggression and indifference that has been meted out to them."