I was so shocked then to be asked for all my details and as I peered over and read why my details had been taken down I read the letters ‘ASB’ with a tick next to it, anti-social behaviour! Ive never done anything criminal in my life and now I was being cautioned for talking to my friends in a public street! The police seem to think if you are young, you are in a group of more than 3, and you are walking around in a public place, you are definitely going to cause trouble.
Is this an example of why there are so many ‘ASBO’s’ being handed out? If I was being cautioned for such a trivial tings then god knows what they’d do if I accidentally dropped some litter on the floor.
It seems that nowadays everybody seems to take things to extremes and in the case of youths this is quite prominent.
Is The Media The One To Blame?
Whenever we read any articles about youths, the negative ones seem to be made a lot more prominent than the good ones.
For example, I recently read a newspaper and there was a big article about a man complaining about graffiti that had been done by ‘yobs’.
It showed a big picture of him not looking very pleased and a big heading saying that a village is to ‘get tough on youths causing misery’.
I then delved deeper into the paper to try and find any other articles that might be positive. After trawling through the paper I came to a miniscule article about two youths helping the charity OXFAM by raising money for them.
Also a recent report on 603 articles about youths, 71% of them were negative and only 14% was positive. This is a very good example of how the media affects our personal views on youths today.
For every bad report about youths there is somewhere (if you can find it) a good report but it is more than often missed out as the media seems to think that the bad portrayal is much more interesting to read and important.
If this wasn’t the case then we would be having good reports about youths thrown in our faces just like the bad ones are. But is this really what we want? Maybe we just like to think that youths are all hooligans just because we are not young anymore and we don’t have the freedom?
Is There Anything WE can Do About It?
Most youths who have ‘ASBO’s’ are from deprived areas and have nothing better to do than to experiment with things such as alcohol because they are bored.
If there were more youth clubs still about then these youths would have somewhere to go and there would be no need for them to misbehave.
The government should spend more money on clubs for youths to go to and ask the youths themselves what they want in these clubs so that they actually want to go and then they will.
Us ourselves could take time out to get more involved with youths as there seems to be a barrier between the two segregations of youths and adults.
If we were to just talk to them then the youths would see that adults are friendly, they would build more of a sense of respect for them, and with respect there will be no need for rebelliousness such as graffiti or destroying people’s property.
Overall I think what we need to do is to just get more involved. It would solve a lot of problems, but there is still the question would the two groups be willing to do this? We will never know until it happens!
