THERE'S no missing evolutionary link between ape and man, some cultural anthropologists now half-jokingly suggest. Rather, man himself is the transitional ? and inadequate ? link between the apes and a higher, more wholesome life form yet to emerge.

Current levels of violent behaviour in Bermuda have served to make this droll opinion an increasingly popular one among commentators of all stripes.

Criticisms of the island's galloping hooliganism are freighted with enough bestial references and analogies to fill the index of a zoology text.

The thugs are animals. Creatures. Brutes. Bermuda, it would seem, is under siege by an army of Darwinian throwbacks rather than disaffected young men who critics seek to not only dehumanise but actually "animalise".

Attempting to put evolutionary distance between civic society and the trouble-makers who threaten its norms may be emotionally satisfying. But it's a dead-end street in logical terms. Branding the malcontents as refugees from a quite literal human zoo is a mechanism for venting anger and frustration, not a particularly helpful method for addressing the growing social problem to hand.

Those who dwell in the pampered Eden that prosperity has created in Bermuda clearly take tremendous solace in viewing those who inhabit the surrounding suburban jungle as falling into the tooth-and-claw category. It's a very comforting delusion but a delusion nonetheless, an entirely unfounded point of view as well as one that is more than slightly coloured by pseudo-scientific, racist assumptions.

No sane person can either rationalise or minimise the increasing ubiquity of violence in Bermuda. Mini-riots in Hamilton on weekends are so commonplace they rarely make the news now let alone trigger the states of emergency once employed to combat occasional outbreaks of widespread violence in the 1970s.

No-go areas are not confined to the island's drug-trading backwaters as elderly ladies are mugged outside post offices in mid-afternoon and teenagers are butchered in the parking lots of fast-food restaurants. Motorcyclists are dragged from their bikes and beaten with impunity, no Samaritans in evidence as other travellers pass by wilfully blind to the horrors unfolding on the other side of the road; bands of roving young people have transformed night-time St. George's into something closer to a free-fire zone than an international cultural landmark; football games are disrupted by machete- and club-wielding berserkers.

The most recent incident at a soccer game, of course, triggered the current wave of revulsion, hand-wringing and tongue-clucking.

A single photograph of hoodlums in mid-rampage has a more profound visceral impact than the contents of even a hundred bare-bones police reports or court transcripts. So crime, and more particularly the increasingly brutal nature of criminal behaviour in Bermuda, has now been catapulted to the top of the chattering class's agenda. At least for the time being. The impact of some other momentary, gut-level issue will doubtless see violence relegated to a minor talking point again in the very near future.

More's the pity. Violent crime is a long-standing problem and requires the long-term attention of Bermudians, not simply shock value-induced hysteria that will fade and yellow as quickly as the front page Gazette report on the St. George's football melee.

It's not as if there has been an abrupt spike in crimes of violence on the island. The reality is there has been a long, slow escalation over a protracted period, one that has gone largely uncommented on until fighting recently spilled off a football pitch and onto the front pages of the newspapers.

Photographs of a no-holds-barred melee in St. George's may have temporarily stimulated the community's condemnatory reflex actions but so far they have produced nothing resembling sensible approaches to containing, let alone reversing, the growing problem.

Some of the perpetrators are clearly sociopaths, mentally disturbed individuals who literally lash out at society and individuals in the grip of homicidal rages. Others are professional malingerers, wall-sitters and drop-outs propelled to acts of violence by the need to fund illicit drug habits. If the violence were confined to one or two small social sub-sets, it would be a relatively easy task ? even given Bermuda's slap-on-the-wrist court system and a prison fitted out like a four-star hotel ? to identify and, eventually, take the perpetrators out of circulation.

the reality is that so many young men are now opting for violence that this must be viewed as a sociological problem, not just a criminal one. The eternal internal battle between instinct and legal, social and religious injunctions is being lost by too many young men.

There is no single, root cause for Bermuda's increasing lawlessness. It is as unhelpful, for instance, to identify the racial residue of colonialism as the basis of violent crime as it is to indulge in the fantasies of Social Darwinism.

There are multiple factors at work, all of which need to be addressed if Bermuda's future is not to be marred by the accelerated progression of the bloodshed that's blighting its present.

The education system, of course, has systematically levelled all academic standards and replaced the code of discipline with a glorified honours system, one far more respected in the breach than the observance. Although the cost per student of educating children in Bermuda's public school system could cover tuition and airfares to the best private schools in the world, too many graduates emerge only quasi-literate and completely innumerate.

The guardians of the public education system remain oblivious to the fact that the law of diminishing returns continues to take its remorseless toll on even a lowest-common denominator construct like Bermuda's cretinised school system. So with Bermuda's shift from a tourism-based economy to one increasingly reliant on international financial services, a majority of school leavers are immediately marginalised as soon as they enter the island's progressively more sophisticated job market.

Unable to gain access to a burgeoning economy, believing themselves to be neglected, under-appreciated and of no account, too many young men denied the opportunity to engage in socially valued work turn their energies towards destroying the society that has created a value system they believe excludes them.

Self-esteem stems, in large measure, from social acceptance: the significance placed on an individual's efforts by wider society. In Bermuda, where million-dollar starter homes are now the norm and a Tucker's Town income is increasingly required to maintain a Middletown lifestyle, the frustrations stemming from social and economic inequalities are increasingly manifesting themselves in violent frenzies.

Reforms to the education system that can, over the long term, diminish the growing sense of alienation from mainstream society are both long overdue and very necessary if the widening socio-economic chasm is ever to be bridged ? and the attendant social tremors minimised.

There are other social dynamics at work, of course, quite apart from a failing education system.

The topic of inadequate and neglectful parenting is largely taboo when it comes to critical debate in Bermuda. Yet there can be no doubt those who have failed to forge meaningful personal relationships in childhood are more likely to be at odds with the wider community as adults.

there is the overcrowding of Bermuda, the shoehorning in of ever more people into a limited land area. The territorial imperative is never as bloodily in evidence as it is when a territory is diminishing. Hence the otherwise inexplicable blood feud between the "Town" and "Country" gangs (although protecting drug turfs probably plays a role in these fights as well). On a larger scale, this tension can also be witnessed in the escalating friction between Bermudians and expatriates, particularly the well-paid professionals who view the island as a 20-square mile, palm-fringed corporate suite and locals who bristle at their systematic exclusion from an industry that makes millionaires out of the island's guests while increasingly pauperising their hosts.

There has been a profound cultural shift in Bermuda over the last 20 years. Long-established social structures and conventions have been pulverised, new ones have yet to emerge.

The remaking of Bermuda from laid-back resort island with an all-inclusive economy to go-go international financial centre with very exclusive upper tiers has not taken place without exacting a profound human cost. Denying the very humanity of those who believe they have been left behind will do nothing to counter the ongoing aftershocks of this seismic social shift.