The real cause of crime.

Last month a 12-year-old girl appeared in a courtroom in Medicine Hat charged with murdering her family. Also charged in the deaths of the girl's parents and younger brother was her 23-year-old "boyfriend" who may or may not be a "goth," based on reports that have linked the girl to goth culture and goth websites.

While the triple murder is now raising questions about the world of goths, Meaghan Allen, a 20-year-old Winnipeg woman who goes by the name Creepie Kitty, says goth culture is not about violence.

"We feel there's a lot of prejudice involved," she said. Goth culture, she said, is about music, dress and for some, practices ranging from witchcraft to devil worship. "We basically want to tell everyone that music or fashion doesn't tell you to kill someone. You make the choice yourself."

While Vancouver goth Elaine Foster admits goth culture does have a dark side, she says that instead of blaming goth culture or the internet for the Medicine Hat deaths, people should be looking at why a 12-year-old girl was involved with a 23-year-old man and surfing on adult websites. Which brings me to another news item that appeared the same week.

According to Statistics Canada, the number of Canadian children in daycare soared by more than 25 percent between 1994 and 2003. In a report released in April, StatsCan said that in 2002-03, more than half of Canadian children (54 percent) aged six months to five years were in some form of daycare, up from 42 percent in 1994-95.

Cause and effect?

While there's no way of knowing whether these two news items are directly connected, what's obvious to most people by now is that as women have climbed the corporate ladder, sent their kids to daycare, and struggled to balance work, family and the redefinition of gender roles, it has been the kids who have suffered most and worst.

"Having it all" comes at a steep cost, producing exhausted mothers, ruined marriages and the feral children now being seen in courtrooms, charged with gross criminal offences at ever younger ages.

Yet, as the human costs and casualties mount, all of western culture remains in denial. Rather than remedying the problems caused by daycare, it appears that their solution is to provide even more of it.

The causes of crime lie in the widespread and systematic breakdown of all connections and restraints that create a civilized society. And its underlying cause has been the dismemberment of the traditional family. This has been overwhelming children who are abandoned to emotional and moral chaos, who are out of control, and who have parents who are either absent or inadequate.

Family collapse has also loaded far more responsibility onto schools which, in turn, have ceased instilling discipline or transmitting moral values to their pupils for a host of reasons--all of them bad. In this vacuum, children are left to make up their own values, to slough off all intellectual discomfort and notions of failure and, while sentimentalising self-esteem, find their way with neither moral nor intellectual maps.

The natural outcome has been the disintegration of self-discipline, leaving children increasingly self-absorbed, undisciplined, insecure, bored and unhappy. There has also been an alarming rise in childhood disorders, from anorexia to obesity, autism to ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It has always been entirely predictable that the collapse of the family would cause the massive breakdown in social control we are currently witnessing.

Underlying it all has been the Culture of Death, driven by the secularist welfare state which, in turn, has fuelled a rampantly selfish and destructive culture of appetite, entitlement and apathy.

If true civilisation is ever to be restored, western society must take itself firmly in hand. It must restore principles of self-sacrifice and true service, reconnecting professionals to the people they serve. It must unequivocally promote traditional marriage. It must confidently promote motherhood, not as a sideline, but as a full and admired career. It must declare war on the benighted ideologies that have blighted and nearly destroyed the traditional family and the classical education system.

And it must rethink the welfare state to create one based on true virtue, personal responsibility and duty. In other words, it must reintroduce and re adopt Christianity as if our lives and those of our children depended on it. Which they do. It's a tall order, but all else is spin.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.