No easy answers as to why ordinary people were stirred into looting

YOUR 2-year-old upends his bowl of soggy cornflakes, putting it squarely on top of his head.

Your 2-year-old fills the toilet with your best shoes. Your 4-year-old hits the child next to her at the playgroup.

What do you do? You know you can’t belt a toddler. You have that urge well under control, because you are a good mother or father. Even as you mop up, brace yourself for the plumber’s charge or nod gravely at the woman who runs the playgroup, you restrain yourself from belting the child. You restrain yourself from yelling at the child.

Instead, you apply respect. That means dropping on your hunkers, so you’re at the same level as the toddler. You apply logic. That comes from the belief that if you understand the rationale, you can deal with the reality.

“Why did you do that?” you ask the child, keeping your voice at a low, gentle level, as opposed to the shriek you secretly believe the situation justifies.

Here’s the bad news. If you do that, you’re doing something that makes you a bad mother or father. Your parenting skills are in such serious deficit that you may need remedial teaching.

According to child development experts, asking a child why they did what they did is experienced by the child as an assault. They don’t know themselves why they did it, and being asked forces them into a dismal, if truthful “Dunno” or a frantic lie or a red-faced sulk, lower lip in swollen prominence.

The child development experts confine their rule of never asking the “Why?” question to children, but the aftermath of the London riots would suggest that the ban might usefully be extended to teens and twentysomethings.

One of those brought to court, post-riot, to answer charges of stealing other people’s property, was an 11-year-old. He was the youngest of the looters captured. He had stolen a trash can. It might have been a wheelie bin. Or it might have been a static garbage container. The details didn’t come out in court. All that came out in evidence was that he had stolen this trash can. Outside the court, his mother turned to him and asked him the lethal simple question: “Why?” And answer came there none.

The fact that he was only 11 suggests that we need to re-examine the old notion that a child reaches the age of reason at the age of seven. Or was it 10? I can’t remember — it was either before your First Holy Communion or your Confirmation. Either way, this kid didn’t seem to have reached it, any more than several of his much older co-accused. None of them seemed to have hit the point in their lives where it would be safe or productive to ask them the “Why?” question.

One of the looters was an aspirant social worker. Natasha Reid, aged 24, didn’t wait for the police to identify her from CCTV footage as the looter who had nicked a TV set from one of the shops broken into during the rioting. She turned herself in, having, according to her mother, spent a couple of days in her bedroom, doing nothing but crying. This young graduate knew she was guilty. She was ashamed of what she had done. But, like the toddler watching its parents’ Via Spigas shoes coming out of the toilet after he immersed them in it, she had no clue why she’d done the deed in the first place.

“She didn’t want a TV,” her mother told reporters, baffled by the three days which had put her daughter on the front pages of newspapers worldwide and put paid to any chance she ever had of getting a job as a social worker. “She doesn’t even know why she took it. She doesn’t need a telly.”

The 11-year-old and the 24-year-old each took something they didn’t need. Neither had a background in criminality or in gangs. They were among the significant minority of the looters who seem to have impulsively joined in the orgy of stealing that went on, even though everything in their make-up — their background, their education their economic circumstances — would, you might have thought, have predisposed them to be among the few who tried to stop the looting. Not only did they steal, but they stole without reason. At least a young man named Nicolas Robinson, an engineering student, was thirsty when he grabbed a bunch of water bottles. But even the longing for a quick thirst-quencher doesn’t amount to a sensible answer to the “Why” question, and he knows it. Sentenced to six months in the clink, he sat in silence while his lawyer talked of him being totally ashamed at “having got caught up in the moment”.

The lawyer’s interpretation does not fit any of the preferred explanations of the London loot-party. Thinkers on the left immediately found a ready explanation in the disaffected poverty characteristic of many of the neighbourhoods from which the looters came. It’s society’s fault — as long as we allow people to grow up poor and disenfranchised, we deserve what we get. Thinkers on the right viewed it as a political and police failure; David Cameron should have come home sooner and the police should have been on the job in greater numbers, at greater speed, with plastic bullets, water canon and whatever you’re having yourself. The technophobics blamed it on BlackBerry: time to abandon all this newfangled electronic stuff.

Contextual factors contributed, each to its own level, but the statistical analysis of those passing through the courts after it was over suggests that none of them was central. One estimate is that at least a third of those involved in the smash-and- grab riot were already criminals taking their chances on making a quick profit.

Now, of course, if someone followed any of them, they might find a cluster of pre-disposing factors in their background that might pre-dispose them to violent affray and appropriation of other people’s property. If an anti-social cohort exists, it can always be organised, and it was just BlackBerry’s misfortune (or fortune, depending on how you look at it) that made it the preferred riot management tool.

So far, so predictable. But the fact remains that middle-class youngsters without any of those factors in their background will serve prison time because they stole something they didn’t need, for a reason they didn’t have.

Uncontrolled impulsivity is a vast, killing and growing problem. We have no idea how it starts or how to stop it. So we work on other, much less immediately relevant problems, because it helps calm anxiety. The anxiety evoked by the unanswerability of the “Why?” question.

It’s a bit like the person who, having dropped their keys in the dark some distance from a lamp post, nonetheless searches for them beneath the lamp post. They know they’re unlikely to locate them, but they’re doing something and anyway, there’s more light there.