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Teen terror? British society confronts its fear of the young

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 21, 2007

LONDON - Homeward-bound commuters hurry past the gaggle of teens sprawling and skateboarding at dusk on a London street. Hooded and raucous, they're an image familiar from a thousand newspaper scare stories.

Almost daily in the media, Britain's young people are treated as a threat. To the tabloids, they're "hoodies" or "chavs" - feral youths bent on binge-drinking and delinquency.

The government has its own lexicon for dealing with troubled teens, from NEETS - young people "not in employment, education or training" - to ASBOs, or "anti-social behavior orders," used to control the wayward. Recent gun and knife murders involving London teenagers have kept youth and crime together in the headlines.

With such an attitude, children's advocates say, it's no surprise that Britain placed last in a recent UNICEF survey of children's well-being in 21 developed countries.

A British think tank has a catchy term for it: pedophobia.

"There has always been a culture in Britain that's a bit anti-children," said Julia Margo, one of the authors of a report on British youth for the Institute for Public Policy Research, a center-left think tank. "In the newspaper letters pages, you see constant debates about noisy children on trains."

"There are (also) a great number of children on the streets without anything to do," she said. "This is what's contributing to pedophobia."

The institute's research found that British adults, more than those in other European countries, view teenagers as a menace. Britons were much less likely to intervene than those in other countries if they saw teens vandalizing a bus shelter - 34 percent said they would try to stop it, compared with 65 percent of Germans and 52 percent of Spaniards.

The UNICEF report, released in February, ranked the United States just above Britain. The countries that scored highest - the Netherlands and the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Finland - displayed relatively low poverty rates with supportive networks of family and friends.

Newspaper columnist Barbara Ellen - a rare adult voice in support of teens - said the rebelliousness of British youth was worth celebrating.

"British teenagers are, have always been ... a lot less interested in being fair than they are in being interesting," she wrote in the Observer. "Which to my mind is much less creepy and disturbing than the thought of all those sucky-up kids from Holland and Sweden ... chirruping away about how much they respect their elders."

[Last modified March 21, 2007, 02:20:41]