AGAR: Fatherlessness and weak justice spurring rampant crime

Published Sep 09, 2024  •  2 minute read

Mario Giddings is pictured last year after he returned from a trip to St. Lucia. The 15-year-old was shot and killed at a North York plaza on Sept. 2, 2024. (Supplied photo)

Fifteen-year-old Mario Giddings of Toronto was shot dead the day before he was to begin Grade 11 at Weston Collegiate Institute.

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Will you be surprised — should the police solve the crime — to learn the perpetrator or perpetrators were on bail despite a previous criminal conviction?

One man was murdered and another had a hand severed in vicious attacks in Vancouver.

Does it surprise you to learn, according to CTV News, that the suspect, “Brendan Colin McBride, 34, of White Rock, B.C., was on probation for a 2023 assault at the time of his arrest and had 60 previous interactions with police.

Court documents show McBride was sentenced to 18 months of probation in April for an assault last September. He was previously charged with assault causing bodily harm in January 2021 and sentenced to 12 months of probation the following year.”

McBride, we are told, is “very troubled.”

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I am sorry he suffers from mental illness, if that’s the case. But that is no reason for him to be loose among the public.

If the rights of criminals and the criminally insane trump public safety, the public is not safe.

What are we paying judges and a court system to do if not to use their awesome powers to protect the public?

What do we do about that?

Research shows the majority of the public wants a tougher-on-crime approach. We need to elect politicians who share that attitude and, if necessary, who will make changes to the Supreme Court of Canada by appointing judges who care about public safety.

The other anti-social behaviour that threatens public safety is rampant fatherlessness.

The Canadian Children’s Rights Council says “father deprivation is a more reliable predictor of criminal activity than race, environment or poverty.

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Father-deprived children are 72% of all teenage murderers, 60% of rapists, 70% of kids incarcerated, twice as likely to quit school, 11 times more likely to be violent, 3 of 4 teen suicides, 80% of the adolescents in psychiatric hospitals and 90% of runaways.”

So what do we do about that?

How about a change in societal attitude?

The Children’s Rights Council quotes: “Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: “Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?”

Many single moms did not intend to be so when they had their children.

Great numbers of single moms are doing heroic work raising their children.

Many fathers are divorced from their former partners but remain present and influential in their children’s lives.

But too many men weren’t there past conception and the numbers are what they are. Reality is what it is.

Fatherless children are massively more likely to be a danger to society.

We need to adopt the attitude that children need a father or a strong, decent, male father figure. There is no excuse.

Maybe we should go so far as to say that fatherlessness is child abuse.

Quick, easy bail for repeat offenders is societal abuse.

We need change.

The status quo is not acceptable.

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