Thugs, victims or celebrities
(From Alison Mitchell, children's editor of The Good Book Company, UK.)
If you're a youth or children's leader, stop for a moment and think of three words that sum up your group.
Now compare those words with the ways young people are increasingly represented in the news:
A study published recently by Brunel University analysed how youngsters appeared in more than 2,000 television news programmes over a month and found a very bizarre picture. In 82% of news stories featuring young people, they appeared either as the perpetrators or the victims of crime, usually involving violence. For the non-crime stories, the most typical reason for showing a young person was as a celebrity.
I wonder if you came up with the words ‘thug’, ‘victim’ or ‘celebrity’. No? But that's how most young people are portrayed these days.
The quote above comes from a BBC News report which goes on to say:
The author and social commentator, Frank Furedi, sees this anxiety-ridden depiction of teenagers as a sign of deeper fault lines in society ...
When all other adults and other people's children are seen as a threat, he says it means that the adult generation withdraws from any contact with young people—and bringing up children is “privatised” to the parents. Without any communication between the generations, adults become fearful and distant towards the youngsters hanging around, he says. In return, young people grow up starved of the influence of adults.
“It means that adults are leaving the life of children. It's completely unnatural.”
If young people are increasingly growing up “starved of the influence of adults”, our roles as youth and children's leaders are all the more important. I see two challenges here: to ‘influence’ the young people under our care responsibly and well, and to introduce other adults in our church or neighbourhood to these young people we know and love so that they can see that they're not all thugs, victims or celebrities!