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By Alek Yerbury,

Party Leader

 

The National Agenda recognises the need for legal reform (Demand #8 and #9), and that the current system clearly isn’t capable of preventing crime and atrocity from occurring – and preventing is better than reacting. To that end, we have to diagnose what is failing in the current system, which is this:

 

Our legal system effectively treats serious crime (including terrorism) as something that happens in a vacuum, and refuses to accept or address the collective culpability of the groups, families, or communities that enable and inspire serious crime to occur.

 

If a boy is brought up by his parents to believe that violent sex and domestic abuse is acceptable, then the parents share culpability if becomes a rapist.

 

If a person’s religious community is telling them that murdering or attacking unbelievers is acceptable, then that whole community is culpable if that person commits a shooting spree of unbelievers.

 

If a person’s associates are telling them that extorting money from people or dealing drugs is okay, then their associates are collectively culpable if that person becomes a usurious loan shark or drug dealer.

 

If a person’s religious or ethnic community is telling them that genociding certain people is okay, then that whole community is culpable for war crimes.

 

Our current legal system fails to recognise this. It understands the concept of incitement, but does not recognise the very real danger of COLLECTIVE incitement.

 

Collective incitement can only take place if people are allowed to create sectarian communities of any description. By sectarian communities, we mean the creation of insular, minority-focussed groups of any description that see themselves as ‘separate’ from normal society or seek to remove themselves from it. It doesn’t matter what the reason or demographic is, the danger is consistent.

 

Sectarianism of any kind is an inherent precursor to crime. The mentality that it gives people takes them and their actions out of context, and creates an asocial disposition in people. This disposition is what leads people to develop a warped sense of right and wrong that is government by minority (and selfish) interests rather than the greater good of society. Therefore, sectarian groups like these cannot be allowed to exist, including as lobby groups. In instances where entities based around some ‘minority’ interest exist (and there are few legitimate reasons for this), they must be heavily regulated and scrutinised to ensure that nothing they are telling people or engaging in is contradictory to society’s best interests, and that they recognise the supremacy of the legitimate authorities over their own. If they will not accept this, then they are automatically, as a group, guilty of incitement.

 

Where these kinds of sectarian communities already exist, they must be broken up and either re-integrated into the national community where this is possible, or removed from it completely when it isn’t. When serious crime and atrocities occur from members of communities like this, the entire community must be collectively sanctioned. After all, they are choosing to create that community in the first place, therefore they are being punished for a choice, not some inherent characteristic. If those individuals do not want to be collectively held responsible, then they have a choice to disassociate themselves from that group.

 

The only way to fully eradicate serious crime and atrocity is to eradicate all of the support networks, institutions, and associates who enable it to occur. Crime does not occur in a vacuum, especially in an age where communication is so easy, and it can no longer be treated like it does.