Teenage suicides, stabbings and babies: fashion?
Why we posted this: Teenagers are fashion-conscious. Is that what’s behind Britain’s knife crime, Wales’ teenage suicides and Massachusetts’ teenage pregnancy?
The original stories:
Patrick Jenkins (The FT) on Welsh suicides
Stefanie Marsh (The Times) on Massachusetts pregnancies
Rod Liddle (Sunday Times) on knife crime
Summary of the stories:
The first two of these stories are accounts by journalists visiting the places where teenagers are exhibiting strage behaviour (22 young suicides in rundown Bridgend, Wales; 18 teenage pregnancies in a school in a small US fishing and tourism seaside town). The third is a robustly anti-stereotypical account of the UK wave of knife killings.
All these accounts are unhysterical and serious. They have in common a decent scepticism that we know why these events have happened. Gangs, poverty, disadvantage, ignorance are all discussed, but are largely dismissed as rock-solid causes.
livingissues comment:
One oddity about human behaviour is that it is prone to fashion. That’s to say that people, and especially young people, will often do what they see their fellows do, even if it’s destructive, or self-destructive. They will also be drawn to the dark side, even if experimentally. Sometimes such experiments can get real and fatal.
This is not exactly irrational behaviour, since seeking thrills or affection or drama is often perfectly sensible or explicable.
The adult world can sometimes control teenage behaviour, by taxing such “bad” products as it controls, or punishing it. But quite often, the fashion simply moves on. After all, the one thing that we know about fashion is that it constantly changes.
It seems that knife crime is more common (more fashionable?) amongst blacks than whites. There is evidence (at least as reported in the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph and probably leaked by Scotland Yard, the UK capital’s police headquarters) that black men are implicated in about half of all knife crime in London (though they are less than ten per cent of the population). Amongst under-18s, it seems likely that more than twice as many kife crimes are committed by blacks as by whites. (It is much less clear if the victims are disproportionately white, but it seems quite possible.)
Kids carried weapons, including knives, in the 1970s, but it was mostly show. Once I was confronted by a guy with a weapon wrapped in his fist. He agreed to drop it before we fought because I was not armed (but I bet he would have agreed to “I’ll drop mine if you drop yours”). I still lost. His weapon was for show, not use.
Once I was kicked to the ground by a bunch of Chelsea fans at an underground station. However after I was defeated, helpless, and bruised, they lost interest. Fighting at my secondary modern school was a daily event. But rarely did anybody get much more than black eyes and bruised ribs as a consequence.
The things that changed constantly was skinheads, suedheads, greasers, punks and other street fashions. Where and what they fought over changed all the time. Each had their own interests, music, clothes and codes. Have things changed greatly? My take is that “gang showmanship” has got somewhat out of control. But it is rough on British streets. It was always so (but actual violence was and remains a minority sport).
Hence, criminalising all young people is dumb. The Brixton riots should have taught us that that approach backed by a clampdown can backfire. But soft policing is not the answer either. Let’s hope, as you say, the recent fashion moves on and we get back to brutality as normal soon.
The best cure for most teenage violence is growing up. For the few that don’t learn for themselves we have prisons to do it for them.