The Home Office is soon to announce that rates of violence have continued their inexorable rise. Yet most other kinds of crime, such as car theft, go on falling. Criminologists are mystified. While it may be imperfect, my explanation (Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture, Free Association Books, 1995) increasingly looks to be the most likely one: that the rise was largely caused by Mrs Thatcher's policies.
The rate of increase in violence against the person from 1950 to 1979 was like the acceleration of a Metro - a steady average of 3,000 more crimes a year. The rate of increase between 1980 and 1986 was not much faster - a middle-range Sierra at 4,000. But since 1987 there has been an acceleration like a formula one Ferrari: an average 12,000 more crimes a year.
The joyrider on this statistical rocket is increasingly likely to be juvenile. Juvenile violence also rose from 1987 and the proportion of all juvenile crime that is violent doubled (despite the fact that juvenile violence should actually have been falling by one fifth, because of a 20% drop in the birthrate in the 70s - there were actually one fifth fewer youths around to commit crime).
Worldwide and throughout history, people who commit violence are nearly all young, from a low income family and male.
Studies of identical twins and adopted boys prove that genes or biological makeup are very rarely involved. Rather, the difference is caused by three aspects of parenting in childhood: severe physical abuse, usually dressed up as punishment; witnessing parental disharmony, with or without fighting; and maternal irritability, nearly always caused by depression.
Using all the family predictors, we can estimate with an 80% accuracy which of the one in five of all boys who are aggressive will become the violent men. What causes these violence-inducing parental patterns? The answer is very well known: a low income. A Home Office funded study following 412 boys from age eight found that 42% of the boys from the poorest homes had become seriously violent by the age of 32. All the studies there have ever been have had similar findings.
It then stands to reason that the more boys being raised in low income homes in a given society, the more boys there will be experiencing violence-inducing care; and the more violent men there will be a few years later.
In 1979 in Britain, 19% of boys were being raised in a low income home (defined as 140% of supplementary benefit - about £160 a week). From 1981 the proportion was 30% and it has only recently begun to fall. So I estimate that every year since 1981, an additional 17,000 16-year-old boys who will become violent have been growing up.
And that, I believe, is why violence started to mushroom in 1987: more boys from Thatcher-created violence-inducing homes growing up to be violent men. Neither the police nor the present government can possibly be blamed for the fact that Mrs Thatcher spawned an American-shaped society with a dog-eat-dog, winner-loser culture and violence statistics to match.
What is more, my theory accords with the broader picture. Assaults are twice as common in poorer, developing nations as opposed to richer, developed ones. Between developed nations, murder rates correlate strongly with the size of the gap between rich and poor in the nation - the more inequitable, the more murderous. North America has a very large proportion of its population living in almost shanty town conditions, with virtually no health or other welfare support. It also has by far the most millionaires. This, far more than its gun laws (only half its murders involve guns), explains why America is far and away the most violent developed nation.
A 70s study found that the higher the levels of benefit, the lower the levels of violence in the States across America. Texas was both one of the most violent and the least supportive of its poor people; Wisconsin one of the least violent and most supportive.
To give it its due, this government is well aware of all this, especially Jack Straw and Gordon Brown, with his war on child poverty. To what extent they will actually address the huge disparities in rich and poor remains to be seen, but Surestart and attempts to improve the income of low-income parents are surely signs that the government does have an eye on the long-term violence statistics.
But in the shorter term, it is not so easy to see what they can do. The uncomfortable truth is that Mrs Thatcher's violent legacy will be with us for a great many years to come.
