Mugging. It's an everyday thing.

It seems shocking to me but our children accept 'muggings' as an everyday thing.  Ask any group of fourteen year old boys and they'll tell you they expect it. Nothing to get excited about or lose sleep over.

So it was that one balmy summer's Saturday evening my phone rang at around 9.15pm.  A fellow mother said: "Ben's OK but he's here and you need to come and collect him".  She explained that a group of seven of our fifteen year old children had been attacked whilst walking across a London park.  

I raced around there and charged in to find all seven in her living room with mine (only mine) covered in blood from his dripping and very swollen nose.  He seemed quite cheerful and stable but then, he's always been a laid back kid.  One of the other parents, a doctor, after checking him over advised us to take him to hospital.  She thought his nose may be broken.

So what had happened and why had my son come off so badly?  Our children had been walking to a friend's house where a party was due to have been happening but then wasn't, due to the fluidity and scattyness of teenage arrangements.  They decided to walk back to one of their houses.  It was summer, it was light and they were in a large group.  Turning a corner, they were set upon by a gang of four or five "seven foot tall nineteen year olds" who promptly singled mine out from the edge of the group, knocking him to ground.  Making the mistake of struggling back to his feet, he was knocked down again but this time, for good measure, they kicked him hard about the head and face.  By now, the girls were screaming and the other boys were unable to do much as they were outnumbered, out-muscled and frankly, scared out of their wits.

Fortunately, after a while, our children were able to run away and take refuge in a local Chinese take-away.  During the fifteen minutes it took for the Police to arrive, their tormentors loitered threateningly outside in a further effort to intimidate and terrify. Unsurprisingly, they scarpered when the plod arrived.  Although the Police took the incident seriously, taking statements and later calling us in to look through mug shots, no-one was ever apprehended. And what of these young criminals?  Do they have parents? One policeman confided to me that many parents he meets aren't averse to giving their kids a good old thrashing; not actually for committing the crime but for being stupid enough to get caught.

Meanwhile, I had an adverse reaction.  I couldn't sleep for weeks, I lost my appetite (believe me, a real sign of stress) and I was spontaneously bursting into tears all over the place.  I felt profoundly disturbed by the wanton violence meted out for no reason.  They weren't even after money or mobiles, they just wanted to kick someone's head in for the hell of it.

They had indeed succeeded in breaking Ben's nose which meant surgery followed by weeks of a Hannibal Lecter style plaster case attached to his face by long strips of plaster.  Travelling to and from school on the tube became the bane of his life.

Waiting anxiously for a delayed reaction from him, I decided to call Victim Support who suggested that I get Ben to call them to talk things through.  He looked at me as though I was mildly insane.  "Look Mum" he said, "I was attacked, I've had my nose broken and there's nothing I can do to change that.  I'm just not going to let it ruin my life!"  And that was that, he didn't want to delve any deeper.  Surely he should have been traumatised whereas I should have done the soothing it'll- be-all-right-let-me-kiss-it-better mummy thing?  What could be the explanation for our polarised approaches?

Well, back in the golden olden days of the 1960's and 1970's when we were growing up, as long as you steered clear of skin-heads, muggings (or to give them their proper label - serious assaults with or without GBH) were abnormal.  We feared them, we worried about them.  They were unusual, terrible and they often made local or national news.  Now that they're two a penny, they have insidiously filtered into the fabric of our kids' everyday lives. Episodes that were so awful, so dreadful in our day have, empirically, become simply another routine hazard in theirs.

Our normal, law abiding, young boy teenagers are a soft target for thugs and there's clearly not too much safety in numbers.  What a horrifying indictment of liberalisation that our kids all expect to experience assault at some stage - particularly the boys.  Instinctively shrugging it off, they put it down to experience whilst our own childhood conditioning makes their laissez-faire acceptance of this current phenomenon hard to grasp.  Even more alarming, let's project forward twenty or thirty years when our grandchildren are out on a Saturday night.  What will the natural order be by then?  Full body armour and a bouncer on hand?  Today we are witnessing a terrifying rise in London's gun and knife crime which bucks the trend of other decreasing crime statistics but we seem powerless to thwart it.

This was my son's third mugging experience.  During the previous two less violent episodes, he only lost his mobile telephone.  Well, thank heaven for small mercies.