Letters: Street crime

For decades, we have been implanting irrational fears in the minds of our children about the dangers in the streets, and how unsafe it is to step outside the house door. Our children are not arming themselves because it is fun or cool, but because they fear for their own safety. "High-visibility" policing will simply add to this fear.

Real outreach work needs to be done and irrational fears about knife crime replaced by rational fears about car accidents and accident fatalities. If we don't manage to return the outdoor space to our children safely, we will see a lot more knife crime, obesity and teenage pregnancies.

Related articles

• Woman, 28, is latest victim of surge in knife crime
• Janet Street-Porter: Knife crime's real perpetrators: parents
• Leading article: There are ways we can tackle knife crime
• Search the news archive for more stories

Cherie Blair's delusional approach ("I fear for my children", 2 July) is aimed at robbing our children of their childhood even more than we already have.

Dr Ludger Hofmann-Engl

Croydon, Surrey

So Cherie Blair "fears for the safety of her children when they go out on the streets". Perhaps she should be grateful that their warmongering father did not send them to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Then she would have reason to fear for her children's safety, a fear which all of the mothers of service personnel must know too well.

Mike Stroud

Swansea

Dominic Lawson comments on moral panic over paedophilia (27 June).

Some years ago I helped a young boy who thought he was about to drown. He wasn't. I simply waded in, took his hand and led him to dry land. Am I to believe that in doing so I put myself at risk of prosecution? Should I have turned myself in?

I would do the same again, but since ignorance of the law is no excuse, would someone tell me what Act of Parliament or what judicial precedents say that I cannot touch a child or in what circumstances I can and what would be the penalty for my wrongdoing?

I am not interested in advice given out by organisations guarding their backs. We need to know the law. Without chapter and verse, I must come to the conclusion that "You can't touch" is an urban myth, widely believed, of course, as urban myths always are, but without foundation in law.

Possibly, the law is obscure, leading organisation to play safe, but I dread to think what this sexualisation of touch is doing to a child's emotional development.

Peter Francis

Twickenham, Middlesex

Faith schools and a free society

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (30 June) is right that religion should not be allowed to make ghettos. Cristina Odone's report on faith schools, published by the Centre for Policy Studies, misses the point. The point of is not that faith schools have discriminatory admission codes and employment practices, cream-skim pupils, or turn away children in care, although they do. Rather, what makes faith schools fundamentally bad for children is that they are more concerned with the inclusion of religion – the religion of the child's parents – than the inclusion, wellbeing and educational needs of the child.

According to Ms Odone, Islamic schools are crucial to the emancipation of girls because they give parents the confidence to keep them in school for longer. But relegating girls to Islamic schools where they are indoctrinated in their parents' beliefs, segregated on the basis of sex (imagine how unacceptable this would be if it was based on race), veiled, prevented from mixing and playing with boys, prevented from doing sports, dancing and so on is anything but.

In Islamic schools students are taught to despise unbelievers, and to hold males and females as unequal.

Ibrahim Lawson, headteacher of Nottingham Islamia School, clearly states their main purpose: "The essential purpose of the Islamia school, as with all Islamic schools, is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children." Education, however, is meant to give children access to science, reason and advances of the 21st century. It is meant to level the playing field irrespective of and despite the family the child is born into. It is meant to allow children to think freely and critically – something that religion actually prohibits and often punishes. Contrary to Ms Odone's claims, this can only be guaranteed by a secular educational system.

Until children are given precedence over their parents' religion, the Government, with its commitment to faith schools, will continue to fail them.

Maryam Namazie

Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, London WC1

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in her columns has continually and laudably called for the protection of personal freedom. Yet she reacts to the publication of the recent report into faith schools by calling on the Government to refuse to facilitate parents with a faith in passing on that faith to their children.

Where does Yasmin stand? Where do we stand as a society? Do we respect freedom to pass on a faith and also the time-honoured principle that parents have primary responsibility for their children? Or are we in fact backing the approach adopted by totalitarian regimes that the children belong first to the state?

In 1937, Hitler said, "The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."

Chilling words, which were never more timely.

Karen Rodgers

Cambridge

Epic expense of a night at the cinema

I wonder why it seemed so obvious to cinema exhibitors why sales are so down ("Economic woes take their toll on UK box office", 27 June). The typical price of a regular cinema seat at a local multiplex is now £7.50. It's an eye-watering double that for a West End showcase cinema. Couple that with the usurious prices charged for popcorn and drinks, and it soon becomes obvious just how expensive a night at the movies has become.

I have just returned from a short visit to Los Angeles, where a ticket costs $8 and popcorn is less than half the price of its British equivalent.

It's extremely unlikely that UK cinemas will actually reduce seat prices, as the industry loves to wow us and itself with statistics that will show that a film has taken such-and-such in its opening weekend, thus breaking another record, whereas in fact cinema attendances are actually falling; the jacked-up ticket prices artificially give the impression that certain films are "breaking box-office records".

The impact of illegal downloading and bootlegged DVDs, often selling at four for a tenner in shopping centres, is definitely having an effect as well.

During other recessions, cinemas always did well as a refuge to escape reality for a few hours. It's time for cinema exhibitors to take a serious look at their pricing policies.

Michael S Fishberg

Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire

Police state has some way to go

I do not recognise the country described by your correspondent Xavier Gallagher (letter, 30 June) as the one in which I live.

Treatment like a smuggler or money-launderer? I travel abroad frequently, and the last time I was asked politely by a Customs officer on re-entry to the UK to open a suitcase for examination in the Green Channel was 15 years ago.

I regularly send money to an account in a third-world country through the local branch of my bank with the minimum of formality. However, last September I was "grilled" most unpleasantly over the money I might have been carrying by a French official on the train between Basel and Paris.

"Our pictures taken when we leave the house"? Not in Birmingham. The nearest fixed CCTV cameras to my house are: 1) in my local supermarket, one and half miles away; and 2) in the city centre three miles away. I do notice that there are cameras in the buses which I use daily, which help to cut down rowdyism and illegal behaviour on the upper deck.

No police officer has ever asked for my DNA, and I am not aware that any doctor has taken it, without my permission, let alone passed it on to some database.

What evidence does Xavier Gallagher have that his emails and telephone calls are intercepted as a matter of routine?

J Michael Walpole

Birmingham

So John Roger Tardif (letter, 1 July) would gladly surrender a little liberty to walk the streets without fear of violence. Would he gladly surrender a little more to save one life? How much liberty for 100? If he could be convinced that millions were at risk would he hand over all his rights? Down this road lie the ruins of fascism, communism, Stalinism and all other dreadful philosophies that somehow convince themselves (and their misguided followers) that the rights of the individual are inferior to a common goal.

Robert C Dobson

Tenterden, Kent

This arrogant judge should resign

The arrogance of Sir Stephen Sedley is breathtaking, when he argues that the Government's action in introducing asylum laws is a serious invasion of judicial independence ("Asylum seekers put at risk by law, warns top judge", 2 July).

Can I remind him that in a democracy the legislature makes the law and is accountable to the electorate? The judiciary deals with cases in accordance with the law. If Sir Stephen wants to make laws he should run for office at the next election.

He should certainly resign from the judiciary, as he has clearly shown himself unfit to exercise properly his role as a judge in a parliamentary democracy.

John Spellar MP (Warley, Lab)

House of Commons

A heathen baffled by Wimbledon

"Ten million TV viewers" were not "won over by Murray" (headline, 2 July). A lot of us had innocently tuned in at 9pm to watch Criminal Justice and were obliged to watch, baffled and bored by this incomprehensible game, sitting before our screens praying for a thunder storm or an eclipse of the sun.

The commentators made no attempt to explain the rules to the uninitiated, or to speak peace unto the heathen with reassurances that it couldn't go on for ever. Finally everybody started cheering and one of the players showed himself to be a thoroughly bad loser by pulling angry faces and throwing things at the crowd, but it seems that he was the winner.

Peter Forster

London N4

Please tell Mark Steel ("If only Andy Murray came from the Home Counties", 2 July). It's not the supporting Scotland we dislike, but the open anti-English attitude. Pro-Scotland is OK, anti-English not acceptable.

Robert Gillan

Sunderland

Election with voters away on holiday

The timing of the Glasgow East by-election for 24 July is quite extraordinary. It is unprecedented to hold a Glasgow by-election during the middle of the Glasgow Fair, and the Labour strategy seems to be based on holding an election with no voters. Labour are clearly running scared and in a blind panic, having lost the trust of the electorate.

With a deadline for getting a postal vote being 9 July, the people of Glasgow East must make sure they are not disenfranchised from a by-election which may not only see the SNP win the seat, but see Gordon Brown toppled from power.

Alex Orr

Edinburgh

Briefly...

Kington's last column

It has been inaccurately stated here and there in the press that Miles Kington's last column appeared in The Independent the day before he died. It was, in fact, printed on the day of his death, 30 January 2008. My father had a high regard for accuracy and attention to detail, so for his sake it would be nice to set the record straight.

Sophie Jones

Hopton, Suffolk

Happy commuters

I note that those claiming that Monday morning blues are a myth (report, 2 July) are from the University of Sydney. Having experienced the Monday-morning commute into the beautiful Sydney Harbour on the Manly ferry, coffee and newspaper in hand, basking in the crystal-clear midwinter sunshine, I can't help thinking that if the scientists had included in their study the endurance test which is the crawl through Birmingham traffic in the drizzle – my Monday morning commute – they would have reached a different conclusion.

John Middleton

Birmingham

Grammar at the pub

Guy Keleny (Errors and Omissions, 28 June) is right, overall, in his criticism of the use of initial capital letters in titles while allowing them for books and works of art where authors and artists dictate how their work is titled. I take issue with him when it comes to the names of pubs and other named institutions where the same principle should apply. The name should surely depend on what appears on the sign or fascia. It is unlikely to say Dog & Duck, Hero of Waterloo or Duke of Cambridge.

James Snowden

Nottingham

Champions of cruelty

In your toe-curling eulogy on Spain and the Spanish (1 July), you neglected to mention yet another area where they appear to be the Champions of Europe, that of animal abuse. Not just the ghastly spectacle of bulls tortured to death for public entertainment, but in any area of animal welfare, the Spanish are in a class of their own. Man is unspeakably cruel to his own and all other species, but to be an animal in Spain is to draw a pretty short straw.

John Wood

St Austell, Cornwall

Not fitting like a glove

Correspondents have commented on washing-up gloves being unavailable in men's sizes. Not only do men wash up, but women lay bricks, mix concrete and do all the other jobs required to (in my case) restore canals as a volunteer. While I appreciate I am in a minority, a similar frustration is experienced when looking for small-sized work gloves other than those with a floral pattern which are only designed for light gardening.

Rowena Gaskell

Oxford