@Bostar; thanks for sharing your story and congratulations for accepting your responsibilities and for your personal commitment to raising your own kids as best you could.
Youth crime is essentially a KPI for alienation from society at large - the film 'A Clockwork Orange' often haunts me in that regard.
Unlike any other western country Australia has headed down the path of publicly funding elitist, apartheid education - kids in private schools and public schools almost never interact with each other and basically loathe what each other represents.
The most extreme examples include our 'faith-based elitist taxpayer-funded private schools'. Our federal governments have been pouring taxpayers' money into them for decades and the net result - unprecedented levels of youth alienation, rising youth crime rates and potentially explosive ethnic enclaves.
Many 'done to' kids in public schools couldn't give a rat's rear end about what they regard as privileged and spoilt rotten kids from taxpayer-funded 'private schools' while those privileged taxpayer-funded 'private school kids' believe they're 'special, chosen ones' - a situation which never existed until John Howard's governments decided to relentlessly $Feed $Greed and to grease the wheels of privilege with taxpayers' money [ ie. extreme Socialism unparalleled anywhere else on Earth].
It's not going to improve anytime soon since NONE of our governments are addressing the root cause of disadvantage and discrimination caused by many decades of under-resourcing public schools and of ignoring the plight of single parents.
