Mobile laboratory to conduct ‘brain scannings’ on UK teen gang members
July 21, 2009 by supermario
Filed under Police State, World News
Spiked Online
So promised a headline in the UK tabloid the Daily Mail last week. Reading like an excerpt from Brave New World, the report that followed was even more fantastical. A ‘mobile laboratory’, we were told, would test the brains of ‘hoodies’ in England’s inner cities, in an attempt to find what causes said hoodies/gangs (the terms are seemingly interchangeable) to turn violent.
One could imagine how such a story came about. Dreamt up by some rogue academic, and seized upon by a newspaper famous for thinking Genghis Khan a little soft, it fitted the all-too-familiar narrative of morally degenerate youth run amok, writ tragically large in the killings of Gary Newlove, Rhys Jones, Ben Kinsella, and others. It was surprising, then, to find that this scheme – this reported proposal to look for increased neural activity within youngsters’ pre-frontal cortex – was not the product of some crackpot consultancy predictably fastened on to by those redoubtable moral visionaries at the Daily Mail. No, this scheme was being proposed by respected children’s charity Kids Company and supported by a team of researchers from University College London.
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