Saturday Essay ; Scotland has a Higher Murder Rate Than America and the U.N. Says We're 'the Most Violent Place in the Developed World'. In This Controversial and Challenging Article, the Writer Who Turned a Literary Spotlight On the Underclass in Trainspotting Says It's Time We Were Honest About the Root Causes of Violence

Summary

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SEVERAL years back, I attended an event that was to resonate strongly with me. I was sitting in a crematorium with a sobbing family, mourning another youth who went to town on a night out and didn't come back.

The boy in question had called into a party on his way home and got involved in a drunken brawl with another young guy over some vague, trivial grievance neither could probably remember much about. One died in the hospital, the other was to spend the best years of his life behind bars.

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Saturday Essay ; Scotland has a Higher Murder Rate Than America and the U.N. Says We're 'the Most Violent Place in the Developed World'. In This Controversial and Challenging Article, the Writer Who Turned a Literary Spotlight On the Underclass in Trainspotting Says It's Time We Were Honest About the Root Causes of Violence

It forcibly struck me then just how many times I had been through different versions of this scene before witnessing a family's lives wrecked because one of its members was a victim or perpetrator of the kind of violence so interwoven into the fabric of Scottish social life as to be almost mundane.

This murderous violence happens out of view of tourists and the urbandwelling professional classes. Often, it's deemed not to occur at all.

If it is registered, it's met with derisive choruses of 'chavs', 'yobs', 'thugs' or that Scottish derivation made famous by th...

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