In Sweden criminal gangs are recruiting children to carry out their most heinous crimes, including even murder. Some of the reasons for this are spelled out in this recent statement by the Swedish police: https://polisen.se/en/victims-of-crime/are-you-worried-that-your-child-will-be-lured-into-crime/. Children have various legal protections that adults do not have; they’re easily seduced and influenced; and they’re better at using modern technology, if that’s what the crime involves. Some of these gangs are now apparently sending kids down into Denmark to do their dastardly and sometimes murderous deeds there. The Danes are not happy, understandably.
This is obviously not a unique or novel phenomenon. (Shades of Fagin and the Artful Dodger. And of the kids in my favourite Cagney movie: Each Dawn I Die.) But how common is it now, I wonder, outside Scandinavia?
Porter’s Pensées 
A terrible story.
I see one Swedish commentator has blamed this trend on a digital youth culture that celebrates criminal values. As I don’t play video games, I don’t know what to make of that.
Perhaps (a) it’s a Mary Whitehouse-style moral panic like the one over on-screen violence in the seventies; or alternatively (b) online games are lot more violent and harmful than I realise.
I do remember the very sober-minded computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum arguing that computer-mediated warfare deadened soldiers to the consequences of their actions. And when I consider how the Daily Mail uses war videos as a form of readers’ entertainment, I start to lean towards (b).
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