Kate Hawkesby: Now it's even too dangerous to go to a mall

As a parent whose kids are at the ‘wander the mall on their own’ age, I do worry about headlines like “Screams heard before mall stabbing in Auckland”.It’s terrifying that young people are carrying weapons; it’s terrifying that they’re so brazen about using them, it’s terrifying that Police still appear powerless to stop youth offenders.One of our kids asked us the other day why the country feels less safe these days, why there's so much violence. And the question made me sad, because it’s not how we grew up. Walking the malls and streets at night felt safe, doing it in broad daylight wasn’t even in question. But these days parents are rightly thinking twice about their young people heading off to the mall with their mates unsupervised.And even the teens themselves are thinking twice about it. And what worries me is that as the bar dips lower and lower on social responsibility these days, and public behaviour gets worse, how much are we just sleepwalking into accepting it? Why are we putting up with more aggressive youth robbing our retailers, ram raiding our dairies and intimidating other kids with knives, then stabbing them?Why are we allowing this to glide past us without outrage? Decent law abiding kids have to now watch their backs or worse, not even go out, while aggressive youth get to run riot. It seems the balance has tipped in favour of the lowest common denominator these days to such a degree, that the onus is on you to just watch out.And every time this happens, the local community leaders involved always dismiss it as ‘a one off’ or ‘an isolated incident’ and nothing to see here. They don’t like to accept that bad behaviour, actually let’s call it what it is, criminal illegal behaviour, has crept into their backyard.This denial starts at the top. We have a government who constantly heaps praise on itself while gaslighting those who dare to question it. Ministers who deny issues as being real issues, and a PM who constantly ‘rejects the premise of the question’.We seem to have collectively lost the ability to accept responsibility for anything anymore or acknowledge where things have gone wrong.The problem is, denying it doesn’t get us anywhere. Friday’s stabbing in a mall started with chairs being thrown between groups of teenagers near a Muffin BreakWhy at that point did no one step in and stop them? Where’s mall security? Where are the retailers who observed this? Why were they not irate, responsive and intercepting? Why is chair throwing allowed to go on inside a mall until it ends in a stabbing and someone seriously injured in hospital?One of the mall workers heard screaming before it all kicked off, and reportedly ‘thought nothing of it’.Are you kidding me?Here’s the cold hard truth. We’re all going to have to think just a wee bit more of it. Screaming and chair throwing is not ‘nothing’. The councillor who in response to the stabbing said it was ‘a one off youth scuffle’ is going to have to work a bit harder on learning to call a spade a spade. A stabbing is not a scuffle.It’s a violent criminal act endangering someone’s life. We all need to wake up a bit here if we don’t want to watch the country go completely to hell in a handcart.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.