At Home with John and Debbie

Nice-but-broken neighbour Steve wrote entertainingly the other week about how he woke up hungover, to find his computer keyboard surrounded by Tiger beer bottles (and what’s wrong with Chang, Steve?) and a reply from the office of the Prime Minister in his email inbox:

“Thanks very much for your email, the Prime Ministers Office will read the email and get a reply to you, and if of interest, will be placed on the PM’s monthly discussion list”

“Turns out,” writes Steve, “I got fed up of the chav element around town and the increase of yobs taking over the streets, that I emailed the PM.”

Of course, it’s more of a question for councillors, or maybe our constituency MP James Plaskitt — but even then, what are you going to do? The clusters of youths that cause offence are generally doing nothing more than gathering in groups of 5 or more (kids do that), being pimply and glowering (kids do that), dressing in a uniform of trackies, hoodies, caps etc. (kids do that) and so forth. I don’t want laws against any of these (nor the Criminal Justice Act’s clauses on “unlawful assembly” enforced in such cases).

Remember Grampa Simpson and his fellow old folks’ home inmates: “The snow has melted! We’re free! … I don’t like the looks of those teenagers”, as he turns around and goes back inside.
So I raised my eyebrows when I stumbled on a piece for the Social Affairs Unit by Lincoln Allison — an academic — entitled “In (partial) defence of yobs” (via Bloglines, because it mentions Leamington in passing).

I dimly remember a couple of events from my childhood. In the first, a group of around five of us were roaming around the estate (see, sounds frightening already: it isn’t and we weren’t). My bicycle chain had snapped, so one of us was pushing the bike, and I was swinging the oily chain in my hand. I would have been about ten. A neighbour came rushing out to yell “You stay away from my car with that thing”. Of course, we had no intention of going anywhere near his car. I, as an adult, am at risk of perceiving youths in the same frightened way has my neighbour 20 years ago. I try to be more rational.

The second incident was a couple of years later. Maybe I was 14 or 15. We were allowed out of school during lunchtime, and were walking back. There were three of us, wearing school uniform modified within the bounds of acceptability. Some of us probably had the thin end of the tie to the front. Strands were probably pulled out of the ties to add extra stripes. One of us might have been wearing leather braids around his wrist — inspired by Morton Harket of A-Ha.

As I walked, my toe caught a small pebble which skittered along the pavement. A woman in her thirties walking in front of us span around and said “If that hit me I’d have reported you to the school!”. The sensible response might have been “I’m sorry, I didn’t kick it on purpose”. A less tactful, but tempting response, might have been “If I’d wanted it to hit you, it would have done.” What we actually did was grunt and avoid eye contact, because we were kids and we didn’t really know how to react — in hindsight exactly the kind of surly, thuggish response that might scare her further.

Again, she saw us as yobs, she was scared of us, but we were just minding our own business. Nothing changes: I have to remind myself that the threatening looking cluster of lads in hoodies are probably just kids minding their own business, rather than “taking over our streets”, as the Daily Express has had it since the 60s.

Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no thuggery around: some kids put a rock through our window — but that was a one-off. We hear of beatings and knifings, but you would have to find some authoritative statistics to demonstrate to me that things were any worse now than they’ve ever been. You know, there were beatings and knifings in Dickens’ time. As Allison says: “Yobbery is a real phenomenon, but it is dwarfed in scale by yobbophobia.”

We make the error of letting our perceptions overtake the facts: because a recent outrage is fresher in our minds than one last decade, because we see scary youths today, and don’t recall youths being scary ten or twenty years ago (because we were those youths), we perceive that things have got worse, when it’s more likely that they’ve stayed about the same.

Lincoln Allison, while mostly right, makes the opposite mistake. “I still teach in two universities and I find the students polite, punctual and sociable”, he writes. This is anecdotal evidence based on a privileged environment. Maybe his perception would be different if he worked in a sink school — but it would remain just that; a perception.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 10:22 and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.