Homeward-bound commuters hurry past the gaggle of teenagers sprawling and skateboarding at dusk on a London street. Hooded and raucous, the youths are an image familiar from a thousand newspaper articles.

Recent gun and knife murders involving London teenagers have kept youth and crime together in the headlines. And almost daily in the news media, Britain's young people are treated as a threat. To the tabloids, they are "hoodies" or "chavs," feral youths bent on binge-drinking and delinquency.

The government has its own lexicon for dealing with troubled youths, from Neets, for "not in employment, education or training," to Asbos, for "anti-social behavior orders." With such attitudes, children's advocates say, it is no surprise that Britain placed last in a recent Unicef survey of children's well-being in 21 developed countries.

"There has always been a culture in Britain that's a bit anti-children," said Julia Margo, co-author of a report on British youth for the Institute for Public Policy Research. "In the newspaper letters pages, you see constant debates about noisy children on trains." She added: "There are a great number of children on the streets without anything to do. This is what's contributing to pedophobia."

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

Many children share that view. It turns out that they are afraid of one another. The group of hood-wearing skateboarders honing their skills on the concrete steps and sidewalks of London's financial district may appear just the type to annoy their elders. But all say they have been the victims of muggings, assaults and harassment by other teenagers. They can see why adults do not want to get involved.

"It's the gang culture," said Lewis Heapy, 17. "In the past, the worst fights would get to was 'I'm going to get my big brother on you.' Now it's 'My gang's going to come and stab you up.'"

The Unicef report, released in February, said Britain's young people were the unhappiest in the developed world. While Britain scored in the middle of the table for health and safety, the country was ranked second from bottom — just above the United States — for child poverty. Britain also rated last in "family and peer relationships," which measured indicators like single-parent families and time spent with friends and family.

In the Unicef study, only 40 percent of British respondents said they found their peers "kind and helpful," compared with more than 80 percent in Switzerland. British youth scored on top for risky behavior like drinking, drug use and sex. Almost a third of 11- to 15-year-olds reported having been drunk twice or more, the highest level of any country surveyed.

The report said a country's wealth was not a sufficient guarantee of happy children, saying there was "no strong or consistent relationship between per- capita GDP and child well-being."

Britain's poor performance may be one of the downsides of the country's embrace of American-style free-market competition, a move that has unleashed enormous economic energy since the 1980s but has also widened inequalities and left many without a safety net.

The countries that scored highest — the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland — displayed relatively low poverty rates with supportive networks of family and friends and low levels of risky behavior by teenagers.

The British government said that the data used by Unicef was compiled from 2001 to 2003 and that progress had been made in many areas.

Alan Duncan, a senior Conservative lawmaker, asserted that an erosion of authority was leading to a society "living out in real life the disturbing plot of William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'" — in which a group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island revert to barbarism.

Experts say the causes of the problem are complex. Some are specifically British — like the gray weather that leads adults to socialize in pubs, rather than at outdoor cafés where children are welcome. Britain's high divorce rate and a long- hours work culture mean that many children spend less time with parents than their European counterparts. Declining birth rates and an aging society may also be creating less tolerance for boisterous youthful behavior.

"We've become a chronically offended nation," said Stuart Waiton of Generation Youth Issues, a research group. "Anti-social behavior is less to do with the behavior than with the presumed reaction of adults. Adults can't cope with children being noisy on their street anymore."

Barbara Ellen, a newspaper columnist and rare adult voice in support of teenagers, said the rebelliousness of British youths, which has spawned subcultures from punk to Britpop, was worth celebrating. "British teenagers are, have always been, by nature, rebellious, stroppy and a lot less interested in being fair than they are in being interesting," she wrote in The Observer.

Jill Lawless
20 March 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/20/news/london.php