Four years after this piece, the government announced that the suicide rate for young males had doubled over the previous ten years. It is estimated that there are in the region of 20,000 suicide attempts by adolescents in the UK each year. And as for Bosnia, who hears about it any more? No one over here, I'm afraid.

I once taught in an American school, where the youngest classes were almost entirely children of "female one-parent families". Well-dressed, comfortably middle class kids, they were disturbingly different, wildly uncontrollable and violent. Now it may just be my impression, but they had something in common, and it wasn't right.

With 10,000 children in Scotland coping with parental divorce last year, clearly the nuclear family is no longer the norm, but does that make fathers optional? It seems they now spend less than five minutes a day talking with their children, but do kids get much more from working mums? Is it right that we now often consider a parent's role to be earning and purchasing, not sharing and caring?

Ali Izetbegovic, the Bosnian President, once wrote "Modern civilization has preferred the calling of a salesgirl, model, secretary or cleaner, to that of mother. It has proclaimed motherhood to be slavery and promises to free woman from it. ... But children's homes along with homes for the aged have a common feature in the elimination of parental relationships; in a nursery children are without parents; in homes for the aged, parents without children."

According to Scotland on Sunday, a third of us no longer think it matters whether a child is brought up by one parent or both. Yet violent crime by and against young people has increased by over 40% in the last eight years, while the number of suicides among 15-24 year olds has risen by 70%. The young see a world of frustration and hopelessness, poverty, unemployment, and unavoidable family breakdown. Must we accept this as inevitable?

Children need support from not just one parent or two, but also grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins. They need family. They also need a feeling of societal justice, that their voices can be heard, and their efforts achieve something to improve their situation. They need hope.

But if our society is floundering, what hope for Bosnian children reduced to impoverished one-parent families in a far more traumatic fashion than our own. What happens when those children grow up, poisoned by the injustice that established their situation? It's a bigger problem than our present crime wave, festering and waiting to erupt.