The grim image etched into my memory by a Channel 4 documentary on tonight is of two very young women staggering down a dark street, skirts riding up above their knickers, their legs splayed and buckling beneath them, while the police attempt to help them walk.
Eventually, one girl falls against a lamp post and collapses, so drunk she cannot carry her own weight, as one woman police officer says, helplessly, incredulously: ‘I’m like a mother to them all. Don’t they know the dangers?’
The central focus of this shocking, despairing documentary shot with the emergency services in Blackpool is that the gravest danger facing young girls, right here in Britain, right now in 2012, is not from a stranger or a violent partner, but from themselves.
More young women than ever are deliberately crippling themselves with binge drinking, putting themselves in real peril by fighting and carrying knives, and using their fists and foul language as offensive weapons.
And I have to ask, echoing that police officer and speaking as a mother of daughters myself, where are the mothers of these loutish, brutalised girls?
These extremely young women seem so determined to self-destruct that it makes me wonder if they ever had a loving role model — namely, their own mother.
While so many girls work hard, achieve, support good causes and fill their families with pride, why do these others fill the city streets at night, cluttering up our police cells, our ambulances and accident and emergency departments, existing as nothing but living, breathing symbols of ‘broken Britain’?
