Machetes by the door, drugs on the table - and mothers paid by the state to have babies with men they barely know. What HAVE we done to the British family?

It's the most destructive crisis of our age - a generation of violent, illiterate, lawless young men living outside civilised society.



The Mail asked a leading investigative journalist to spend nine months exploring their world.



Here, in the second part of a fascinating series, she reveals her chilling findings - and exposes how the benefit system is breeding boys condemned to a life of crime and despair because they've never known the benefit of a loving family. . .



When Prince opens his front door, the first thing you see is a machete hanging from a hook on the inside.



As a drug-dealer living alone on a South London estate, he needs to be on guard. With his Gucci trainers and single diamond ear-stud, he seems an unlikely candidate to be a caring father.

A generation of fatherless boys doomed to crime and failure

Yet Prince, who is of black Caribbean origin, has five children - by three different mothers - and sees them all regularly.



As he sorted out 'sweeties' - ecstasy tablets - on a coffee table for his night's work, I asked him how he came to be a dad.



It always started the same way, he said: he'd start seeing a woman, and she'd tell him she was on the Pill.



Then two weeks later: 'Bang, she gets pregnant.' There was never any discussion about the pregnancy.



As far as he was concerned, they were barely an item at that stage - and they were certainly not about to move in together.





'I don't want you to be a lawyer, son. Just sell drugs'



So why did these women choose to have babies by a man they barely knew?



Prince, who is 37, laid the blame squarely on benefits: 'Women get money from the Government; men get eradicated. What do you need a man for? The Government has taken our place.



'I'm old-fashioned, from the ghetto, and I'm serious for my kids - but the Government is the provider now.'



Unfortunately, he is absolutely right. He may be a Peckham drug dealer, but he can clearly see what the Government has failed to register: that the benefit system is cutting fathers out of the equation.



Not only that, but it is condemning thousands more children every year to a poor start in life.



Politicians, for their part, blame the rising numbers of troubled children on the breakdown of the family and the absence of fathers.





This is a fundamental mistake: they are presuming there is a family in the first place.



Above all, the Government needs to recognise that benefits are a powerful incentive, particularly for young girls.



For the past few years, Britain has had the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, with 90 per cent of births occurring outside marriage.



The consequences are dire. Babies born to teenage mothers are 60 per cent more likely to die in their first year, compared with those born to other parents.



And 72 per cent of children born to single mothers of any age will grow up in poverty.





The boys take to crime, the girls get pregnant



Two young men from council estates as far apart as the South Coast and the North-East told me girls giving birth at 16 or 17 were no longer the exception in their area, but the norm.



'They only go down that path because not too many paths are open to them. By 18 or 19, they've got two kids,' one of them said.



Over the past nine months, I have been investigating why teenage boys from low-income white and black Caribbean backgrounds are the most at risk of failing at school, and of being sidelined into a life of benefits and crime.



I talked to dozens of these boys themselves, as well as to men in their 20s and 30s from the same background - and found that most of them had grown up in single-parent families.



The cycle seemed likely to be repeated with their own children.



A young white man from the North-East, recently released from prison, told me: 'If I had a father, I would have got a good hiding and I probably wouldn't be here now.'



His 17-year-old friend, who is on the police list of top-ten troublemakers in his town, nodded. 'You need a dad for growing up,' he said.



An overhaul of the benefit system is clearly at the heart of transforming the lives of disadvantaged children. But to accuse their mothers of being feckless is unjust: they are merely responding to the economics of the situation.



They have grasped the consequences of our poor education system better than our politicians ever have.

Teenage drug-dealers always need to be on guard

Last year, less than half of teenagers finished compulsory schooling with five good GSCEs that included maths and English. Of those, the ones who do worst of all are children from lowincome families.



Then what happens? The boys take to crime - and the girls get pregnant.



Incredibly, more than a quarter of British children are now raised in single-parent families - and nine out of ten of them are headed by women.



Children with one parent, according to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, are more likely to have behavioural problems, to do less well at school, have sex earlier, suffer from depression and turn to drugs and heavy drinking.



And, according to evidence from the U.S., they are more likely to get involved with gangs and crime.





A generation of fatherless boys doomed to crime and failure

Four out of ten of these children will have no contact at all with their fathers by the age of three. Indeed, for many boys, their first experience of spending any significant time with adult males is when they enter prison.



Prince, however, is determined not to let that happen with his own three daughters and two sons. On the day we met, he'd taken his eldest daughter, aged ten, to her new private secondary school, for which he is paying the fees.



Proudly showing me a photograph of her dressed in school uniform and playing the piano at a school concert, he commented: 'The school's wicked. They discipline the children and she learns the right values.'



Then he pointed to the ecstasy tablets on his coffee table. 'When she's here, I never discuss business or have weapons or pills lying around.



'Estate people leave everything in front of their kids: knives, guns, their stash, the lot. Not me,' he said, nodded emphatically. 'I try and show her the right way.'



By ensuring his daughter has a good education, he is doing the one thing most likely to give her a chance of escaping poverty and making a success of her life.



What future is there in Britain today for a girl without qualifications?



Skilled and hard-working immigrants now monopolise menial jobs, and the next step up - a job, for example, in catering or hairdressing - pays about £10,000 a year before tax.



Which is slightly less than a girl with two children receives in benefits, and without the incentive of somewhere to live rent-free.



In Streatham, South London, I overheard two young girls pushing buggies talking about a friend. 'Why she got pregnant?' asked one. 'She's got a good job!'



In other words, if you were in well-paid employment, with good prospects, there was no reason to have children.



Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire Police, summed up the situation starkly: 'We are talking here about the perverting influence of welfare. The more kids you have, the more money you get.'



Nor does that include the extras the mothers receive from the fathers of their various children.

As Prince pointed out: 'All those little trainers and bikes - £50 here, £40 there. If I had no children, I'd be a rich man now.'



Many single mothers are excellent parents, of course. But the Government has put disadvantaged girls in a position where the only career open to them, the only possibility of an independent life, is to have children - whether they want to or not, whether they are likely to be good mothers or not.



The state, as Prince pointed out, has indeed taken over the role of both husband and employer.



With a combination of financial incentives and poor schools, it is ensuring a steady supply of babies who start life with all the factors in place to become the next generation living on benefits or the proceeds of crime.



What is the Government doing about this cynical cycle of deprivation?



Over the past few years, it has come up with a plethora of schemes to intervene ever earlier in the life of a disadvantaged child. In other words, it has concentrated on the consequences of single parenthood - but not the cause.



Failing to address the poor education on offer at too many of our schools and the incentive of benefits is self-defeating.



What is the point of setting targets to end child poverty when the Government's policies are creating tomorrow's poorest children - and grandchildren? Between 1979 and

2003, the number of single parents more than doubled - from 1.4million to 3.2million.



Even Government advisors acknowledge that this is a major factor in the increase in child poverty.



So why hasn't the Government reformed the benefit system? It's as if they're offering car drivers a bonus for every crash - then acting surprised when accidents shoot up.



Boys with two parents are more likely to attend school regularly; they are also far less likely to be thrown out of school.



There is a wealth of research to show that boys, in particular, need fathers - but single mothers don't always see it that way.



In Manchester, I visited Simone, the mother of three boys from three different fathers - all well-known criminals in her community.



An attractive, slender black woman in her 30s, with elaborately tattooed shoulders, she was bouncing a baby on her lap in the sitting-room of her council flat.



At a side-table, next to an empty bottle of Moet and Chandon, her 18-year- old son Dion, who'd recently been convicted of driving without a licence, was folding up a pile of ironed clothes.



Dion had begun truanting in Year 9, and now Simone didn't know what to do with him. 'His school should have got the kids out more, taken them away on holidays and at weekends. One day's work experience would have helped,' she complained.



The idea of going to college held no appeal for Dion. 'I can't sit in one place too long,' he said.



Simone commented: 'You talk and talk and talk until you tired of talking. I don't want him to be a lawyer.' She turned to him: 'Just do your ting on the side [sell drugs] and have a job.'



Dion, she said, spends 'too much time' hanging about with his friends. 'It's boring, they're in each other's face all the time.



'That's where this violence comes from - boredom. One's got better trainers than another and they kick off.'



When I asked Dion about his father, he said: 'I don't know where he is - he's never played a part in my life.' Did Simone feel he lacked a father figure? 'Once upon a time, I would have said it didn't matter,' she said. 'Now I think it's important. You do need a man around.'



Simone is obviously a loving mother, but she had Dion at 16 and has never worked.



It hasn't occurred to her to march her son down to the local college to sign up; nor does she know anyone in work to give him a helping hand.



This is crucial because, according to Britain's chief inspector of schools, boys like Dion are unlikely to get it from school.



The requirement to include ' work-related' and 'enterprise learning' in secondary schools has not yet been 'embraced wholeheartedly' by all, she admitted in her annual report.



The result? The number of vulnerable young people like Dion - who are not in education, employment or training - 'is alarming and unacceptable'.



The contrast between Dion and a group of boys living on an estate not 15 minutes' walk away was sharp. They looked similar: all seven of them, aged between 13 and 15, were wearing hoodies; and when I came across them, they were jumping up and down on a garage roof and throwing things to the ground.



But unlike Dion, these boys - one Somali, one Iraqi, two white, two black and one mixed race - could talk confidently about what they expected to be doing in five years' time.



The two white boys were attending Cadets and thinking about joining the Army.



Mustapha explained he wanted to be a plumber because 'most of my dad's friends are plumbers' - and they'd offered him work experience.



Raphael played a lot of sport and planned to be a PE teacher. Hussain was going to be an engineer, like his uncle: 'My dad drops me off at my uncle's most weekends and he shows me what he's doing.'



What effect does a father have, I asked? 'You want to follow in their footsteps,' said one, and they loudly chorused their agreement.



Only Gabriel had relied on his mother to find him work experience. And Cody planned to work for his mother's boyfriend, who'd come out of prison, failed to find a job and started his own scrap-metal business.



As far as they knew, the families of their classmates weren't making any effort to find activities for them. 'So they go out,' said Mustapha. 'And follow bad boys.'



Steve said he knew his dad was sending him to Cadets 'because he doesn't want me getting into gangs. I could get seriously injured and hurt.'



And, poignantly, Raphael added:



'Everyone will give up on you, but a dad doesn't because he's your dad.'



Later, I talked to Bigs, a black man in his late 20s who is the former leader of one of the most notorious gangs in Brixton, South London.



There was a big divide at school, he said, between those who had single parents and the mainly white boys who had fathers.



At primary school, the boys 'had all started from the same place.' But when they all began misbehaving at 14, the white boys' fathers would send them off to the Cadets or to their mates, who worked in various manual trades, for training.



The father of one boy - 'a nut case, a real live-wire,' according to Bigs - took him to the Cadets and told the colonel: 'I don't care what you do to my boy, but he's going down the wrong road and needs straightening out.' Bigs, who was brought up by a single mother, wasn't so lucky.



Far from being taken in hand, he was serving his first jail sentence at 15.



The absence of a male role model has a particularly profound effect on disadvantaged boys during their teenage years.



A third of 14-to-25-year-olds questioned for a survey by the Prince's Trust did not have a parent whom they considered a role model.



More than half said they'd joined a gang to acquire a sense of identity, while a quarter said they were in search of someone to look up to.



These boys are unlikely to find male role models in schools. The number of male teachers has slumped to its lowest level in at least 20 years; and in primary school, 85 per cent of teachers are female. Even in youth offending teams, women make up the majority of the staff.



This year, according to the latest research, one in three children who live with a single mother will spend less than six hours a week with a male role model - whether a father figure, relative or teacher.



All the odds are stacked against them. Even children on the 'at risk' register are five times more likely to have single teenage mothers - as Prince knows all too well.



Two of his children, he discovered recently, were being neglected by their 19-year-old mother.



'The house was like a crack house: dirty clothes everywhere,' he said. 'She fed them crappy food, she left the kids [to] fall asleep in front of the TV. My boy was underweight and quiet.'



Social services removed the children and gave them to their maternal grandmother to bring up. But Prince's ex-girlfriend, he says, has made no attempt to get her children back.



He shrugged. 'She's never had a job. She's lived off the Government and what men give her.'



Now, she is pregnant by another man. Having another baby, she has told her friends, will allow her to keep her council flat.



