“Youth is disintegrating. The youngsters of the land have a disrespect for their elders and a contempt for authority in every form. Vandalism is rife, and crime of all kinds is rampant among our young people. The nation is in peril.”
Quote from an Egyptian Priest, circa 2000 BC
It is all too easy to find out negative stats about young people in the UK – from unemployment to crime to teenage pregnancies. But why is it so hard to find positive stats that highlight how amazing, wonderful and talented our young people are?
Some recent research has shown that over 75% of media stories about young people are negative, and there is all sorts of evidence that public perception of young people is very negative and that this has a significant impact on young people themselves and on adults’ experience of young people (eg. if you see a group of young people and assume they are a “gang” rather than a group of friends, it is predictable that you might feel anxious and fearful).
Kaizen are mid process on a consultation with young people and youth professionals on behalf of a large national company who are wanting to make an impact with youth. We have conducted one on one interviews with over 400 young people and 93 professionals have also been a part of the research. The data (both quantitative and qualitative) is depressing – especially in answer to the question “how are young people seen and treated in your community”.
A few days ago I started looking for some positive stats about young people in the country, and pretty quickly it became clear that while they may be there, they are not at all easily found. I believe this is a significant issue and one that can actually easily be addressed (in contrast to all the other significant issues in the youth sector that can’t be solved so easily).
So what would be the benefits of having clear positive stats and data? There would be many including:
- It will help us to redress the balance of negative information and mis-information about young people
- We can use positive reinforcement to encourage wanted behaviour, attitudes and attributes
- We can actually be more representative of the true nature of young people
- We can celebrate the difference they (and we) make
Just to be clear I am talking about the following types of things (these are just examples):
- How many young people are employed (we know there are 1m unemployed, but how many are in employment or training)?
- How many young people volunteer, how many hours of volunteering does it represent, and what do they do?
- How many young people are carers?
- How many young people set up businesses and how much income/impact do they generate?
- How many young people are part of shaping local or national strategy, from school youth council members, to youth trustees of charities?
- What % of young people are law abiding (rather than what % commit crimes)?
- What is the gap between what adults think about young people (on all sorts of metrics) and what is actually the case?
One possible route would be to take every easily available negative stat and find the positive reflection of it. But I think it would require a deeper dive to really pull together a comprehensive set of positive stats that could potentially help to reshape how we think about the youth of the country, and how they think of themselves.
We should be very proud of our young people – they are wonderful and talented – and I would love to be able to back this belief up with stats….
I am sure that there must be a funder out there who would commission such a piece of research……any thoughts on moving this idea forward, anyone???
There’s a real challenge for those of us who work in and around this field – we often find ourselves accentuating the negative to ‘prove’ that our services are needed.
In my area of specialism – drug and alcohol prevention – there’s been a decade or more of sustained good news, with the proportions of young people and young adults who say they smoke, drink or take other drugs falling quite substantially. Here’s a briefing I put together on this a couple of years ago https://bit.ly/18PQ6W0.
That story is starting to be reflected in the way that the media report the annual surveys, but there’s a real lag in that message being believed by adults and young people themselves.