by Mark Easton
The assertive use of explicit American street vocabulary in the music charts pushed the boundaries in the UK. The f-word was losing its power to shock: when the mainstream romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral opened in 1994 with Hugh Grant using eleven ‘f***s’ and a ‘bugger’ in the first few minutes, it was given a 15 certificate. Instead, the most potent taboo words were those which challenged the values of tolerance and liberalism that had licensed them.
When broadcasters and watchdog groups looked at British attitudes to swearing in a 2000 report entitled ‘Delete Expletives’, they noted ‘an ever-increasing, but grudging, acceptance of the use of swearing and offensive language in daily life’, but increasing concern at words used against minorities. ‘Abuse — and especially racial abuse — is at the very top of the scale of severity and was felt to be unacceptable in today’s society,’ the report found. The c-word remained at the pinnacle of the offensiveness table, but the terms which had moved up the ranking were ‘n****r’ and ‘P**i’, ‘whore’ and ‘slag’. Racist and sexist words were assuming the potency once found in excremental and religious obscenities.
Recently, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom conducted further research into public attitudes. ‘There were mixed views on the use of the word “f***”, which was considered more acceptable by some participants (e.g. younger people and male participants) but less acceptable by others (e.g. participants aged 55–75).’ However, abusive discriminatory language was only seen as valid in an educational context and by some of the participants as ‘unacceptable in any context’.
With that exception, cursing has become almost conventional, a quality that diminishes its strength like kryptonite on Superman. All but the most offensive terms may now be heard at a country house shoot, suburban dinner party or East End knees-up. The aristocracy and the working classes never gave up swearing — it is the middle class that appears to be changing its mind about profanity. Partly that is because sensibilities have changed, but perhaps it is also a reaction against the idea of being bourgeois. Casually dropping the odd f-word is thought by some to indicate street cred or classless cool.
As that expert on middle-class manners Charlotte Brontë put it: ‘The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile.’
While I have felt compelled, with respect to the age and sensitivity of those who might stumble across this book, to disguise those words regarded as most offensive, the fashion is for exposure, to discard the camouflage granted by XXXX. To some that merely reflects the times, to others it is further proof that Britain is bound for hell in a handcart.
Y is for Youth
When the angry young man kicked me, I couldn’t help but think of the irony. His mate was busy punching my cameraman as others stamped on and smashed up his equipment. But despite the panic and the pain, the situation felt otherworldly: a curious, dramatic postscript on the story I was writing — how we have become frightened of our children.
This extract from a post on my BBC blog in 2008 prompted some, shall we say, less than sympathetic responses. The attack happened at the scene of a fatal teenage stabbing in north London, where I had gone to illustrate a television report about young people. Time magazine had just printed a front cover which read: ‘Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control — an epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young’.
As the flashing fury in my assailant’s face exploded in spittle-laden expletives, I understood the fear. I had inadvertently trespassed into a gang’s private mourning. One of the ‘crew’ had died from a blade less than twenty-four hours before. Tearful young women comforted each other beside fresh flowers laid at the spot. Brooding men sat on a wall, shock and bewilderment in their eyes. I should have realised before stumbling in. I was alien. From another world. And like the immune system fighting infection, they rose up to defend themselves.
The article attempted to unpick the often dysfunctional relationship between youth and adult society in the UK, a tension illustrated by some of the comments posted beneath it. ‘Your blog reveals you as a far too tolerant person,’ one contributor wrote. ‘What they and nearly all adolescent males need is a healthy dose of fear of retribution.’ Another concurred: ‘I was a bad kid, I was naughty, but when I got caught I got the crap beated out of me and I never did it again, oh no. Kids just have no respect because parents these days are pathetic, I mean utterly and woefully pathetic.’ One post, bemoaning the ‘bloody liberals’ who only want to ‘mollycoddle’ young people, demanded a return to caning and spanking, arguing ‘that’s what it’ll take to check today’s feral youth.’
Then, a little further down the list of comments, a response from a younger reader. ‘I’m a teenager (don’t be scared). I am sitting in my room, quietly, revising for tomorrow’s Biology AS exam,’ he wrote. ‘By all means talk about the minority of bad adolescents, but remember the majority who are kind and polite. You may say you never see them, but it’s because they are in their bedrooms, revising for the Biology exam tomorrow.’
Over the past twenty years, Britain’s generation gap has been widened and deepened by the seismic forces released when prejudice meets panic. Outsiders find our relationship with young people oddly cruel, as I discovered when I went to see how one of our European neighbours responds to delinquency and youth crime.
Standing next to a teenager who is holding a large kitchen knife, and knowing that she had previously stabbed her sister, is as good a place as any to consider Britain’s relationship with children who commit crime. I am in Finland, a country travelling down a very different philosophical road from Britain. While the UK locks up around 3,000 juvenile offenders, Finland’s criminal justice system incarcerates just three. And the girl with the kitchen knife is not one of them.
My research had led me to a ‘reform school’ just outside Helsinki where troubled young people are helped through to adulthood. The girl with the knife was cutting onions in a cookery class. ‘We do not think the proper way to take care of a child is by punishing the child,’ the school director Kurt Kylloinen told me. ‘You must believe in childhood and not let the child’s misbehaviour deceive you. You must believe in the child and that’s what we try to do in Finland, whatever the child does.’
Young people cannot be prosecuted until they are at least fifteen in Finland, although in practice very few youngsters under the age of twenty-one are dealt with by the justice system. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the age of criminal responsibility is ten, among the lowest in the world. Scotland recently raised its minimum age from eight to twelve. When I explained that 10-year-olds are dealt with under the penal code in Britain, the reform school’s psychologist Merja Ikalainen looked aghast.
MI: I don’t have words for that. It sounds so horrible.
ME: You think it’s immoral?
MI: It is.
ME: Why, if a young person knowingly commits a crime?
MI: That’s not a young person. That’s a child. They need care.
ME: But shouldn’t a child have to suffer the consequences of their actions?
MI: Suffer! You use words that sound really horrible. A child shouldn’t be suffering. The word ‘suffer’ sounds really sad.
Over 60 per cent of the roughly 3,000 young people locked up at any one time in the UK are known to have mental health problems. In Finland such youngsters are more likely to be patients in well-funded psychiatric units. Children who break the law are seen primarily as welfare cases. When I went to Helsinki’s main mall, I could not find a single shopper who thought the state was ‘too soft’ on juvenile offenders. One man, unshaven and heavily tattooed, gave me this response to the idea that badly behaved teenagers need punishment: ‘That would be useless,’ he said, shrugging.
It is not just the Finns with their tradition of pedagogy (from the ancient Greek paidagogeo, ‘to lead the
child’) who find British attitudes to young people irrational and disturbing. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed its concern at ‘the general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children, especially adolescents, which appears to exist in the UK, including in the media, and may be often the underlying cause of further infringements of their rights’.
The international criticism came after a period in which alarm at the depiction of teenagers had led some influential British voices to speak out. Senior police chiefs in England and Wales warned that the demonisation of young people had become a national problem. One chief constable said his force received hundreds of thousands of complaints about young people every year, most of whom were doing nothing more than ‘simply existing or walking down the street’. The man in charge of Scotland Yard’s youth crime division, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, told the press that activity that would have been called youthful exuberance twenty years earlier was increasingly being described as antisocial behaviour. A generational divide was opening up, driven by fear.
In the spring of 2005, the giant Bluewater shopping centre in Kent announced it would evict young people wearing hooded tops and baseball caps because ‘some of our guests don’t feel at all comfortable’. A few months later, an inventor from Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales unveiled his ‘mosquito’, a sonic weapon which could be used by shops to repel ‘rowdy teenage ne’er-do-wells’ without being heard by ‘law-abiding forty-somethings and septuagenarian war heroes’. Howard Stapleton came up with the device after his daughter had apparently been harassed by youths at the local shopping parade. He tested it in a grocery store in Barry; the screeching noise, unbearable to adolescent ears, could not be heard by mature adults. Sales of the mosquito flourished.
Newspapers were stuffed with stories illustrating the apparent threat from ‘hooded gangs of teenage yobs’. The Daily Express advised its readers that ‘gun-toting 8-year-olds are roaming the streets of Britain’ and that ‘Britain faces raising a generation of “urban child soldiers”.’ Research found that in other European countries most citizens said they would intervene if they saw youngsters vandalising a bus shelter. In Britain barely a third agreed.
Britain was exhibiting all the symptoms of paedophobia, the irrational fear of children, routinely describing young people as feral animals or vermin. When the Conservative leader David Cameron suggested the problem might be more complicated, he was ridiculed. ‘Cameron faces backlash for hoodie love-in,’ screamed one tabloid. ‘Extraordinary defence of hoodie-wearing yob teenagers,’ said another. It is worth reminding ourselves what the Tory leader actually said.
Imagine a housing estate with a little park next to it. The estate has ‘no ballgames’ and ‘no skateboarding’ notices all over it. The park is just an empty space. And then imagine you are fourteen years old, and you live in a flat four storeys up. It’s the summer holidays and you don’t have any pocket money. That’s your life. What will you get up to today? Take in a concert, perhaps? Go to a football game? Go to the seaside? No — you’re talking £30 or £50 to do any of that. You can’t kick a ball around on your own doorstep. So what do you do? You hang around in the streets, and you are bored, bored, bored. And you look around you. Who isn’t bored? Who isn’t hanging around because they don’t have any money? Who has the cars, the clothes, the power?
It was a thoughtful and sympathetic view of the teenager, suggesting that the ‘hoodie’ was not the aggressive uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters but, for many youngsters, a way to stay invisible in the hostile environment of the street. Labour politicians, sensing that Cameron had taken the political risk of challenging widespread prejudice, branded his speech a ‘hug-a-hoodie’ plan. The Daily Mail noted that this ‘breath-taking Tory u-turn on law and order’ made no mention of punishing children and instead ‘stresses the role of “compassion and kindness”.’
One might imagine that all this animosity was a consequence of an increase in teenage delinquency or youth crime. Certainly, there were plenty of press reports claiming there had been a steep rise in juvenile offending after 2003. But, as so often, the stories were based on questionable use of statistics — assuming that because police were arresting more young people, they must be committing more crimes.
When experts looked at what was really happening they uncovered ‘net widening’: children drawn into the youth justice system in circumstances that would previously have been dealt with outside it. Police, under public and political pressure to respond more aggressively to the perceived youth problem, had been set targets to make more arrests. Surprise, surprise, that is exactly what they did; handcuffing kids for activities that would once have prompted no more than a bit of avuncular advice from the local constable.
Up until the point that police forces in England and Wales were told to improve their ‘offenders brought to justice’ rate, recorded youth crime had been falling rapidly — down a quarter between 1992 and 2003. As soon as officers were told their performance would be measured by how many children they nicked, it started rising again. Official surveys of people’s experience of crime did not suggest any increase — in fact, they showed the chances of being a victim falling throughout this period. It wasn’t youth crime that was rising, but the criminalisation of the young.
The incidents of rioting that flared up like bush fires across England’s inner cities in the summer of 2011 were swiftly blamed on gangs of youths, even though official records would show 75 per cent of those charged were over eighteen and only 13 per cent were members of gangs. The government found itself under pressure to deal aggressively with what the press had characterised as juvenile anarchy and responded with a promise to ‘name and shame’ children found guilty of involvement. Of those youngsters dealt with by the courts, two thirds were classed as having special educational needs. The chief constable of the West Midlands, Chris Sims, was so concerned at the vilification of Britain’s youth that he took the politically risky step of arguing, ‘We must not at this time abandon all compassion for some of our very damaged young people who have been caught up in these incidents.’
How had twenty-first-century Britain reached this point, so hostile to its young that it had won an international reputation for callousness and cruelty? The answers are buried across the previous two centuries — the period in which the phrases ‘juvenile delinquent’, ‘troubled adolescent’ and ‘problem teenager’ were first coined.
In 1659, Samuel Pepys recorded how soldiers and a ‘meeting of the youth’, apprentices wishing to present a petition, squared up in the City of London. ‘The boys flung stones, tiles, turnips etc. at [them] with all the affronts they could give them,’ he wrote to a friend. A number of the young protestors were shot dead.
Despite such incidents, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that youth came to be regarded as a distinctively threatening or subversive problem in Britain. With urbanisation and industrialisation, the job prospects for working-class boys had worsened: traditional craft apprenticeships disappeared while domestic service increasingly became the province of women. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw demobilisation of thousands of soldiers, adding to the army of bored and troubled young men wandering city streets.
Britain suffered its first moral panic about youth crime at around this time. In London in 1815, the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis was set up. The committee identified ‘the improper conduct of parents, the want of education, the want of suitable employment, the violation of the sabbath and habits of gambling in the public streets’ as explanations for the youth problem, ‘causes of crime’ that in revised form are still trotted out today. Amid the social turmoil of the early nineteenth century, young men came to be associated with the anxieties of rapid change. British youth was to blame for drunkenness, vice, insubordination and rising crime.
It was the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall who introduced t
he concept of ‘adolescence’ in the 1900s, arguing that the biological changes associated with puberty drove problematic behaviour that was different from younger children and adults. He described it as a period of ‘storm and stress’, when young people demanded freedom but needed discipline. In Britain, Hall’s theories were embraced as a scientific justification for an ever tougher line against the juveniles who threatened the established order. As it was, two world wars removed and then decimated the adolescent population, delaying the next round of moral panics until the 1950s.
Battered, bruised and broke, Britain surveyed the rubble-strewn post-war landscape and worried. There was particular concern that the damage had exposed national identity to contamination from foreign, particularly American, influence. Along with exotic clothes and loud music, a new word had crossed the Atlantic — teenager. It was a term that reawakened Establishment fears of the juvenile threat but, with the economy expanding, also inspired the development of a new financially independent subculture: simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
Over the next four decades, Teddy Boys, Bikers, Mods, Rockers, Hippies, Punks, Ravers and Grungers put two pubescent fingers up at authority in their own fashion and took delight in watching the staid grown-ups flinch and frown. Young people could cock a snook at their elders, confident that their consumer spending power gave them licence. Adults fretted at the collapse of deference and looked to the criminal justice system to restore order without damaging economic growth.
Wave after wave of youthful rebellion confirmed the cultural idea that teenagers equal trouble. Since younger people were either unable or unwilling to vote, getting tough with out-of-control juveniles was an easy political promise to make. Other countries were facing similar challenges, but in Britain the generational battle lines were scored into the social landscape as deeply as anywhere, and a storm was gathering.