The TimesOnline has a story about parents in the UK buying body armour for their children. What an incredible world we live in when they even make body armour for children let alone manage to sell it. Apparently the parents are concerned about the rise in murders among London teenagers.
This feels so wrong and as one of the comments to the TimesOnline story writes
Dressing up a small child in something that costs hundreds of pounds and sending the child out into a rough neighborhood doesn’t sound like it advances the child’s safety at all.
But where does the limit between paranoid parenting (Furedi 2001) and common sense really go? Obviously dressing children in bullet and knife proof clothing does not send out a good signal to the children or to others but then again it may save a life.
An interesting quote in the article was: “The cheapest version will stop any knife attack while the higher end will stop a bullet from any handgun or sub-machine gun.” Considering how fashion conscious children are today we are also running the risk of creating an attitude among children about who can afford the good stuff.