It is easy to be blase. Look back at our history, say some academics, and you'll find that Britain has always been a brutish place.

In Victorian England child prostitutes roamed the streets and eight-year-old lads formed mugging gangs. Child abuse was so commonplace that no-one bothered to report it.

Turn-of-the-century Birmingham was home to the Peaky Blinders,fearsome street gangs described by city church workers as the worst "social, civic and Christian problem of our great city".

Look further back and you find 18th century Britain staggering along Gin Alley. Alcoholism was the norm, crimeendemic. Babies were raised on gin because it was cheaper than milk.

Look across the Channel and you'd find the old French city tradition of drunken youths molesting passers-by and assaulting women as if by right.

"Gang rape was commonplace," says Ian Bell, producer of Radio 4's Hindsight series. "The authorities would turn a blind eye, so long as the women were unmarried and no-one broke into any property."

Yet when today's middle-aged and elderly look back, they remember a lawful, chivalrous Britain. Did it ever exist?

Dr Roger Hood, Director of Oxford University's Centre of Criminological Research is sceptical.

"People always look back to a golden age," he says. "But you only have to look back to the turn of the century and the number of children inrags on the streets to see the large amount of neglect thatwent on."

But Professor Jeffrey Richards, professor of cultural history at the University of Lancaster, disagrees. He believes that youth crime today is uniquely different from anything that has gone before.

He says that Britain really was a better, and improving, place during the period from 1870 to the 1960s. But since the 60s society hasfallen apart. We are reverting to a level of lawlessness unseen for 200 years. "I really believe we are on the downward slope."

To see the future, he says, look at the barricaded and guarded housing estates of America, where frightened, respectable families are besieged by an amoral, drug-ridden underclass.

If he sounds like some crusty old ex-colonel, Jeffrey Richards is in fact the 45-year-old son of a working-class Birmingham family.

There WAS a golden age, he insists. In the first 30 years of this century, crime was falling. Britain enjoyed the most lawful period in its history. But why?

He traces it to the crime wave of the early Industrial Revolution. In order to control city populations of young, rootless newcomers, politicians founded the police force, lit the streets and encouraged distractions from crime such as the music halls. Full employment and better housing helped.

At the same time came a wave of Evangelical Christianity. Cruel animal sports and public executions were banned on the grounds that it was harmful for people to be exposed to such violence. A new breed of gentlemanly, chivalrous heroes emerged in popular books and magazines.

Underpinning it all, says Jeffrey Richards, were two institutions:

An educational system which emphasised personal discipline, thrift, and good manners. "And it worked," he insists.

The factory system which, by demanding punctuality and commitment, reinforced self-discipline.

It is still distinctly unfashionable for academics to blame all our ills on the Swinging 60s. But Richards, author of a book on sex crimes, makes no apologies.

"In the 1960s the old education system collapsed. It was accused of `imposing middle-class values' on the working class. In fact, the working class was always divided into two groups, the rough and the respectable.

"What we are seeing today is the triumph of the rough ethic, of immediate self-gratification without restraint. It has percolated up throughout society."

So in a week which sees a Liverpool mob attacking the vans carrying two ten-year-old alleged killers from court, whither Britain?

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, warns against over-reaction.

"While a measure of media and public heart-rending over James Bulger's death is understandable, it is now getting out of proportion."

She says we should not confuse one-off homicides - still a "relatively rare" event - with the problem of persistent young offenders.

"Most people who commit a minor offence as a child or teenager just grow out of it. They do not repeat that part of experimenting with life. Over-reaction by adults and institutions would probably only make things worse."

Frances Crook offers no solution but says that hard-line plans by Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke and his Labour opposite number, Tony Blair, would be counter-productive, "severing these children's already fragile roots in their community.

"No-one canguarantee a crime-free society and it may be that we will just have to come to terms with a certain amount of crime, like environmental pollution".

Crime expert Roger Graef, the writer and film-maker, spent two years interviewing young offenders for his latest book, Living Dangerously. He believes increased spending on community centres and social services would be cheaper and more effective than locking up young offenders.

Even the novelist Dame Barbara Cartland has entered the debate, blaming it all on broken families. Her solution? Pay mothers to stay at home to look after their under-fives.

At Lancaster, Professor Jeffrey Richards is not impressed.

"I don't think it would work. You can't change attitudes by that kind of thing.

"The youth of this country has become completely Americanised, drenched in the profoundly violent American culture. In Manchester they are already shooting each other almost on a daily basis."

But if the Establishment, the Church and popular fiction took control 100 years ago, could they not do the same again?

"Absolutely not," says Jeffrey Richards. "I do not see the public willing to go back to what there was. In any case, the international media is so pervasive; there is no way of keeping it out."

The irony, he says, is that one obvious route towards a disciplined, safer society would not even be contemplated by Britons.

"The Church of England is dead on its feet," he says. "But Islam is one solution."

"However, it won't happen because of the racial element. The British will not be dictated to by a race that they see as being less than themselves. I am profoundly pessimistic for the future."