Exclusive: The lawless generation

THE scale of broken Britain is laid bare today in a Yorkshire Post investigation revealing the thousands of child criminals in care, the growing number of teenage troublemakers and escalating violence in schools.

Broken Britain: More reports

A shocking dossier shows the full extent of the problem in the region, where young people in children's homes and foster care are being convicted or cautioned by police at a rate of more than one a day.

Serial young offenders are responsible for 3,400 crimes a year and 22 youngsters are added to the national crime database every day.

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Problems have also spread to the region's classrooms, with Yorkshire schools forced to exclude pupils for violence 26,000 times in the last three years alone.

Experts blame family breakdown, an over emphasis on children's rights and a decline in moral standards and say a raft of Government initiatives have failed to tackle the problems.

Official figures show the number of broken homes is increasing across the UK and the proportion of children living with married parents fell from almost three-quarters in 1997 to less than two-thirds last year.

The revelations come ahead of the sentencing this month of two brothers in foster care who attacked two boys in Edlington, near Doncaster.

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The brothers were aged 10 and 11 when they hit their young victims with sticks and bricks, burned them with cigarettes and forced them to perform sex acts on each other.

With a General Election approaching, tackling youth crime is also expected to be high on the agenda of all political parties.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, who heads the influential Centre for Social Justice think-tank, said young people were more likely to turn to crime if they had experienced family breakdown, gone through the care system or been excluded from school.

His view was endorsed by Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, who said the figures uncovered by the Yorkshire Post were "merely a symptom of a deep-seated decay in our society".

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Mr Wells added: "The causes are complex, but it is no coincidence that the rise in youth crime has accompanied a large-scale abandonment of moral absolutes, an emphasis on self-gratification and self-expression, the vigorous promotion of a children's rights culture, and the fragmentation of the family.

"There is an established link between the breakdown of traditional family structures and rising levels of youth delinquency and crime.

"Simply put, if there were less family breakdown and more family stability, there would be less crime.

"Two-parent families are in a far better position to monitor anti-social behaviour which often leads to more serious crime."

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Tory Shadow Home Office Minister James Brokenshire said: "Crime and unacceptable behaviour are in part a symptom of the fractures and fault-lines that run through Britain today.

"The reality is that too many children are progressing from nuisance behaviour to a fundamental disregard of the law with all of the consequences that this brings.

"We are simply not prepared to sit back and coast along as the Government has done. Crime and unacceptable behaviour are just too important for that because of the devastating impact they have on communities and on young people in particular."

Policing Minister David Hanson insisted the Government was doing more than ever to tackle youth crime by targeting the young people most likely to offend.

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"What we have is the Youth Crime Action Plan, which has put in extra resources right across the board in 80 local council areas," he said.

"We are continuing to work on that prevention work, along with other strategies and activities for young people, and the Government will continue to do that after the next election."