I've often studied law over the years... and today has been no different for me. Because there is an element of psychology to law, I tend to study that as well - however, the course I'm studying right now and today's method of "helping those who are most in need" has thrown up some issues that have left me unable to focus on my coursework... so I would like to throw them out there and see what other people think of them.
The first problem that I encountered was three paragraphs looking at the involvement of young men in gangs and criminal activity. On the whole, I'd agree that, at one time, young men were more likely to end up in gangs and committing crimes - but these days, I also feel that young women are in just as much danger of ending up leading a criminal lifestyle as young men are... to that end, I felt that it was more than a little unfair to have half a page dedicated to young men and their involvement in gangs and criminal activity to then compress the involvement of young women into 2 sentences right at the very bottom of the page.
My second issue revolves around the age old idea of class. Our government has spent a long time focussing on how to get the lower classes out of poverty in the hopes that it would reduce the overall crime rate of our nation. Fair do's we all want to cut crime, right?
While I appreciate the stereotypical view that poverty and crime should theoretically go together because it would make sense that those who cannot afford to buy things might be more likely to commit crimes in order to own what everyone else has and takes for granted, I also think that the upper classes are also at greater risk of committing crimes too - the only difference here would be the types of crime that the two classes are committing. While the lower classes are more likely to commit crimes that are more directly related to survival, the upper classes are more likely to commit crimes that would be more recreational since they have no need to do anything in order to simply survive from day to day, they can spend their time seeking to have a good time.
If I'm right and both the lower class citizen and the upper class citizen are just as likely as each other to commit crime... then wouldn't it stand to reason, that for once in our lives, we would be better off dropping the class divide and working with children because they are children as opposed to the class of society that they originate from?
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