I've had quite a few conversations over the last few weeks about young people getting bad press. First there was the FYT report "Labels are for jars not people", concluding that adults overestimate, amongst other things, the amount of crime committed by young people. And that their opinions of young people are formed by large not by direct contact with young people but by negative media coverage.
Then there has been the youth club I run for my placement churches. The young people who come along are rowdy, not from church backgrounds, noisy, and have put huge walls in place to protect them from hurt and disappointment. But the church congregations don't see this - they see the light that got broken by a football, or the locks that had to be taken off to stop the young people shutting themselves in the toilet block, or the mural that they planned and painted which was 'an eyesore'. All everyone hears is bad stuff, they don't seem to focus on the fact that these young people have made such leaps emotionally and socially that you'd barely recognize some of them by their behavior, they don't focus on the two who couldn't be in the same room as each other without fighting but last week offered to help set out the refreshments together.
And then there's Germaine Greer's comment today on the Guardian website about graffiti. She bemoans the zero tolerance policy that this government has towards graffiti, arguing that amongst the random and not very inspiring majority you can find not only real works of art but real emotion conveyed on the closest available blank canvas. Some of the comments to her article, however, are shocking in their narrow-mindedness and middle-England mentality - seeming to believe that young people are just trying to instill fear of crime or something.
What about the idea that young people are trying to find their identity in an increasingly unstable society, and that one way of doing this is through creativity and self-expression? Instead of spending thousands of pounds clearing up walls and houses, why not plough the same amount into programs that encourage creativity in young people, even through graffiti? Or develop graffiti walls and spaces in communities?
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that demonizing a large section of our society and their activities is not a constructive solution.