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Are adults destroying a generation?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Tanya Byron thinks so.
From my pov, I think prejudice against teenagers is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the UK - remember this?
From my pov, I think prejudice against teenagers is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the UK - remember this?
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The two positions are no irreconcilable, but it is far more complex than just spending money. In certain areas underinvestment in youth services and opportunities may be a problem - in addition to the genuinely shocking and underreported liberties that are taken with young first time entrants into the labout market.
But in other areas it is case of getting young people to actually engage with the services that are provided, and this is commonly a problem in areas with the highest long term detachment from employment and training.
Oh and beware the term 'NEET' as well - it's a catch-all for a series of social outcomes that's far to general to be of much substantive use.
I blame the media personally, they seemed to have tapped into this fear of youth and are making it worse. The only time young people apear in the pares is under headlines that inlcued the words 'chav' and 'yob'.
I think groups of youths being rowdy and intimidating people get a bad press of course, rightly so.
Well they do. I've experienced it in the past.
The amount of people that support the use of curfews and the Mosquito Teen Deterrent is pretty telling I think. Youth decrimination often goes unchallanged, infact it would seem many woudl actively support it.
Just look at ASBO's - used to crimalise youths for activities that under criminal law wouldn't be offenses. There's no trial or innocent to prooven guilty with ASBO's either. If you break your ASBO you can be locked up.
Most other countries don't have such a clear division between their youth and their adults. Why is it we do?
I 'lead' a few message boards on AOL (and no need for a chorus of groans, they're not long for this world), and have for just over a year (well, it must be two years now) been trying to put a fire under some organisations that claim to be promoting children and young people, who have just abandoned the web sites that illustrate how badly they have failed. Fact is, however much I hate to see such poor representation, I feel more comfortable speaking up for faceless teens that I would getting involved with local youth activities.
It may have been just the same in Juvenal's time, but it certainly seems like the teens on the street are a different species, with no recreational avenues to speak of, and when there are, the people providing them can be a little suspect.
That's what I like about The Site (which I wouldn't even know about if it wasn't for a 60-something former US marine trying to stir up a site war). Complete transparency, lack of coercion, intelligent conversation, stupid conversation, and people just being themselves.
They should get out more, though.
Children have always been viewed with a certain amount of caution - that has always been the way, as those quotes demonstrates. That is almost certainly never going to change. Incidentally, whilst on the point of perception of children, I had to laugh when Barnardo's were whinging in November about how horrible we are to children by using quotes of things people had said on newspaper websites about children. I'm not sure if anyone's told Barnardo's, but newspaper websites - particularly Mail Online - are crammed with amoebas capable of only producing the first, most simplistic, gramatically incorrect sentences that come to mind.
But I digress. There are reasons why children are doing badly in the UK - she notes some, but not all. We have an "increasingly risk-averse culture", for example. Correct. We see children drugged en-masse with Ritalin and other tablets which hardly any of them actually need, because of governments that are in-thrall to the pharmaceutical companies. As long as Labour can continue pissing our money up against the banks, business can do whatever it fucking well pleases, can't it?
We have children who are condemned to fail because of a crap education system which has been designed purely to make politicians look good. It has shit all to do with teaching children, and everything to do with making the latest batch of sub-standard "teaching assisants" look clever. No wonder children have it so bad in the UK - if they can't count and write properly, what chance have they got of accomplishing anything? Unicef recently condemned the UK in a report they did about children - the Government's response was to effectively ignore them!
The negative perception comes because of feral filth - the likes who killed Rhys Milford Jones in Liverpool, for example. The likes of these need to be dealt with far more effectively. At the moment, many of them openly mock and laugh at our joke of a justice system. Sean Mercer laughed out loud as the details of what he had done to Jones were announced in court. This is not good enough. If you punish the likes of them properly, with long and harsh jail time that will act as a deterrent to others, you'll soon notice that the feral minority has to improve its behaviour.
I notice that Byron completely omits one thing from her article completely. How she could have missed it, God only knows. The white elephant in the room - family breakdown. The evidence in favour of strong families is absolutely overwhelming. Families are far stronger at keeping order and looking after themselves than the state ever will be - it's far easier to look after a family of 5 people than 60 million, isn't it?
Now that's fine, but not when it turns into a ground where these troubled youths hang out and cause trouble. I hate walking that way every day, just incase that day might be my last. This problem never happend when it was just a open field, without rules, fees, security officers etc.
God knows how many people on my estate have ASBOs, but they certainly do nothing. Just last week someone was shot, the cops came round with pamflets telling us they take guns seriously - AFAIK nothing more has came from the shooting. They are even now stopping and frisking ANYONE down who looks to be under 21. It's just plain bullshit. With all this friction between youths and the police, no wonder most of them act out and cause mayhem.
I don't know what the soloution is and it seems neither does the government, but it certainly has jack to do about "redefining/re-building communities". Where I live used to be nice, then they just kept moving all the trouble makers from other estates over to here.
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I actually agree with this.
Now whilst there are some absolute little shits out there who do make people's lives a misery and who would be best served with a clip round the ear and an extended stay at borstal, I think the coverage of it is disproportionate to the reality of it.
Demonisation of the youth is nothing remotely new. I read an article somewhere where the author stated that the earliest reference he found about an adult lamenting the state of the youth was ancient Greece.
A quick bit of Googlage confirms this:
Attributed to Socrates (469-399 BC, by Plato)
Sound familiar?