The Kids Aren't Alright

Anyone remember the good old days? You know, those sepia-tinged days where children acted their age and respected their elders? No? Oh.

According to Dave - the opposition leader, not the re-branded light entertainment channel and home of witty banter - society is broken. Without citing anything more specific than the recent spate of knife offences among young people, Dave was able to plausibly argue that the country, under twelve years of Labour misrule, has gone to pot.

Knife crime is a worrying phenomenon among the youths of today and, although murder rates from knives have stayed more or less the same, in recent years the ages of its victims has dramatically plummeted. But don't take my word for it, listen instead to the muse of our time and all-round media scrubber Lily Allen for her uniquely subtle take on the media sensationalisation of knife crime in the UK.

Knives aside, children in the UK are now less employable, more pregnant and more depressed than ever in recent memory.

But to say that such worrying trends are completely unprecedented is untrue, no matter how tempting it may be.

We read more about knife crime and social dislocation because newspapers and TV have shifted from the information posts of the upper and middle classes to be inclusive of every facet of society. Publications such as the Guardian (who put the artisan in partisan) now launch impressively researched social trend campaigns, interviewing members of gangs and parents who fear for their lives amid the apparent glamorisation of violence in which they feel immersed.

Differing social classes have always had differing views on the world; this is logical as environment, to a lesser or greater extent, hews the individual and their opinions.

To say society is broken is, aside from being a rather apt political catalyst for governmental upheaval, too simplistic. It views 'society' as one homogeneous mass which is fundamentally fissured. At the very least, it assumes an uncomfortable intermingling of different social groups, as if they should all just be tolerant of each other.

This hasn't happened historically, and doesn't happen in any major city on earth today. There are always tensions, conflicts of interests and subsequent trouble.

What reporting teams such as the Guardian's are attempting to do is give voices to those people who have been traditionally omitted from previous institutionalised debates on social cohesion.

All voices need to have a platform for themselves to be heard. If not you get jingoistic and ill-informed cross-class presumptions such as this or this. (It is possible that MPs find it difficult to talk to young knife offenders; a conviction of murder is sleaze that is likely to rear its head at least once during their time at Westminster. What I'd really like to know is how Rowenna Davis can understand them. She is either displaying unspeakably champagne-socialist arrogance or has previously stabbed someone. In which case I don't really want to listen.)

I am fed up with commentators and MPs blaming social mechanisms for teenage disaffection and discontent. Blame the government, blame peer-pressure, blame your absent father-figure. Blame anyone but yourself.

The world may have forgotten about these disaffected youths, but that doesn't mean society is broken. What it means is that social norms of civility, respect and mutual tolerance are not being adequately outlined to permeate the grottiest high rises in Elephant and Castle.

It doesn't require a broken social message to foster adolescent ill-feeling and anger, it just takes people to either not be able to, or not want to hear it.

Speaking of messages, Jacqui Smith marauded into the debate with a plan that appeared to have been hurriedly scribbled on the back of a packet of pork scratchings. A plan, incidentally that was hastily withdrawn after universal derision:

Show young offenders the consequences of their actions. Show them other stab victims struggling to survive on hospital beds. Show them how the big kid with a gangsta drawl on their estate turns into a weeping girl crying out for his Mum when he's stabbed. Show them that knives actually do hurt people. That'll teach them.

Young people are not idiots, no matter how many times they choose to show themselves in such a light with childish bouts of fitful aggression and violence. They know that when they stab/mug/intimidate someone it will hurt them. That's precisely why they do it.

It could be argued that one way in which society has altered in the last generation is the age at which children 'grow up'. With more absent families and unorthodox parental situations, many children who haven't received the right to loving support from a close group are forced to grow up quicker than they would like. This happens in all social strata - for example when a parent needs caring for - but it happens far more in lower classes.

Many children grow up fast and start acting like adults. They take on adult personas of gangsters or dealers and perpetrate adult issues such as respect, loyalty and retribution. Carrying a weapon, either with intent or self defence is the action of an adult. Problem being, it often has the mental motivation of childish emotions such as anger, intolerance and selfishness.

Another overwhelmingly adult issue, depression, should never happen to a child or young person. (Do you remember the good old days, when you'd come home crying and shouting at your parents because they didn't understand you - no one did!)

All adolescents experience moments of emotional isolation; they feel that the world doesn't get them and doesn't care for them. This is part of growing up. You learn to temper your aggression or loathing and realise that you have the strength of character to overcome such fleeting moments of despair.

Depression should only exist in adults for whom their is no gloss left on life's facade. They have truly seen (or foreboding anticipate) life's rock bottom and cannot find a way back from it. Children and adolescents who feel premature pangs of this debilitating condition should attempt to remember how old they are. They should not concern themselves with issues of adulthood before they are emotionally ready. If they do, then take responsibility.

Adulthood is about empowerment, freedom of choice and, most crucially, the responsibility that comes from having these. Children cannot claim to be able to look after themselves, to meet out justice in their own way and then proceed to not be accountable.

Young people who are not inherently bad can destroy lives with one moment of utter short-sightedness. They can destroy themselves and those around them with an immediacy of emotion. They may dress these up as the trials and tribulations of adulthood, when they are, in fact petty but escalated situations that an adult brain should be able to deal with from a distance.

This goes for all youths; from the poor kid in Peckham who is angry at life stabbing a rival gang member, to the rich white girl in Hampstead who turns to self-harm because her parents don't understand her. These result from a hot-headedness which is dissipated the older we get. These are the actions of children, and should be treated as such, at least emotionally speaking.

As I've already said, all voices, including the young, should have a platform on which to be heard. But that doesn't mean we need to listen.

Many programmes now, including a recent Question Time offer young people the opportunity to say what they think. OK. But is what they think and apply to general life informed by social trends, elongated education and balanced viewpoints derived from cumulative experience? Of course not. They are either self-orientated or idealistic.

Niether of these motivations are necessarily bad, but they offer little help for us as adults who are having to live with the consquences of there actions.

Too often we allow children to talk as if they are adults, to offer insight into their lives and to suggest to us how we can make them better or more comfortable. Do we need to do this, for fear of offending and segregating youngsters? No.

We can ill afford to listen to these views without following them to their logical conclusion. You want to speak with the grown-ups? You want to be treated like a grown-up? Good, then act like one. This inculdes taking responsibility for your actions.

Adults more than ever need to tell children what to do. We need to be forceful. We need to be sympathetic to young people's perception of their worlds, but we don't need to accommodate them. We were young once. We know what it feels like to be disenchanted and scared. (I admit that the little I went through as a youngster pales into total insignificance compared to the problems some young people today have to deal with. But there are adults now who have experienced similar hardship when young.)

We (the adults) have been rash and acted stupidly, they (the young) have not seen their actions and situations at a distance, in perspective. We have been young and naive, they have not been old and worldly-wise.

We don't need to patronise them by suggesting that what they say matters to us. This wrongly empowers them; it lets the children feel like adults when they are not. They already selectively act like adults - verbally, physically and illegally.

What many young people fail to reconcile is that respect needs to be earned, knowledge needs to be acquired and loyalty needs to be proven. These ideas are often cited as motivation for impetuous fits of violence and disobedience among the young. But true respect, knowledge and loyalty are adult states and need to be meditated upon, built up over time and developed
through experience.

We don't need to listen to children more about their problems. We need to speak to them and let them know that we know what they are going through. We understand how they feel, how they want to be treated as adults, how they want to feel safe and how they see the world through quick and judgemental eyes.

But we also need to tell them that they should act their age. Be a child and learn to be an adult. Learn that stabbing/cutting/mugging and stealing have consquences.

Increased punitive measures for young offenders should be introduced to encourage one of the justice system's cruxes: time to reflect and deal with consequences.

Be a child but learn that being treated like an adult is scary and as far from glamourous as is possible. Discipline needs to be available and administered by adults, not by other children.

Be a child and learn that acting like an adult doesn't mean dishing out violence and disception, free from consequence.

Be a child and learn responsibility. Be afraid of becoming an adult.

Growing up consists of a series of moral choices, directly dependent on circumstance. Some circumstances are harder than others and these circumscribe choice to a certain extent. But there are still choices young people can take to show that they are still learning. Acceptance and tolerance shows a patience beyond their years. Not being too proud to ask for help is another way of being adult, but still maintaining the less pressurized state of the young.

Getting angry, depressed and disruptive is not mature - it's the epitome of childishness.