Media And Teenage Boys

Over the past year, there were more newspaper stories about young people and crime than about all other stories on teenagers put together. The media refer to teenagers are yobs, feral, as sick, as scum. Unsurprisingly, research commissioned by "Women in Journalism" has found that 85% of teenage boys say newspapers portray them in a bad light. They think adults are more wary of them now than they were a year ago.

Fiona Bawdon, a committee member for WIJ: "When a photo of a group of perfectly ordinary lads standing around wearing hooded tops [is] visual shorthand for urban menace or even the breakdown of society, it is clear that teenage boys have a serious problem ... our research shows that the media is helping make teenage boys fearful of each other."

I wish that half of the media's attention was devoted to young people trying to access mental health services than this endless focus on feral youth. One in ten young adults (aged 16-25) believe "life is not worth living." Fully 95% of imprisoned young offenders have one or more mental health disorder.

We're so obsessed with being afraid of youth that we can't see their problems anymore.

"Let's Get Tested" Video Competition

The deadline for entries is 31st March!

Power Shift - Youth Conference on Climate Crisis

You can find more information at: http://powershift09.wordpress.com/

If you would like to apply for any roles (descriptions on website), send an email (max 500 words) and your CV to: kate@ukycc.org by 5pm on FRIDAY 13th February (spooky!).

Please mark the position you wish to apply for and don’t forget your name, email and phone number. Explain why you would like the role and why you would suit the position using examples from your past experience.

Consultation On Voting At 16

The Votes at 16 Coalition is encouraging people to contribute to the Youth Citizenship Commission consultation on lowering the voting age.

The deadline is Tuesday, the 20th of January.

Young people (aged 16 and 17) can pay tax, but they cannot elect the government that spends their taxes. 16 and 17-year-olds can join the armed forces, but they cannot elect the government that sends them to war. 16 and 17-year olds are real citizens and deserve the vote.

You can visit the Youth Citizenship Commission website here. Tell them why the voting age should be lowered.

A briefing sheet on the consultation, how to respond, and why the voting age should be lowered to 16 can be read here.

If you are from an organisation and would like to respond or join the Votes at 16 Coalition, contact Tom Burke on tburke@crae.org.uk. He can provide further information to help you make a response.

Also read: Coventry looking for delegates to Youth Parliament

Pilot Projects For Free School Meals

Green councillors in Brighton have won a vote to ask the Government for funding for a pilot scheme to provide all young people at the city's primary and secondary schools with free school meals. It would be a big help for low income families facing rising food prices.

Coventry Green Party Meetings

- This Friday, the Warwick Young Greens are having their first meeting proper of the year. They had a two-day freshers fair table on Mon/Tue of this week, and they had 40 people express interest. The meeting today is at 530pm on the campus, but if you want more info on future meetings/activities, you can contact John Walton on 07816 604 484.

- Next Tuesday, we'll be having our monthly Coventry Green Party meeting. It's at 730pm, at the Coventry Peace House, on Stoney Stanton Road. We'll be talking about Coventry Peace Month activities, our upcoming newsletter distribution in Cheylesmore, and putting ourselves on a more secure financial footing! If you want more information, give me a call on 07906 316 726.

"World Day For Decent Work"

The World Day For Decent Work is on the 7th of October. The TUC will be holding a day of activities at Congress House in London which will focus on rights at work and ending inequality in the workplace.

Only 2% of state schools in Britain have introduced some form of restorative justice into discipline codes. A successful pilot project that has led to a 45% reduction in rates of exclusion may change all of that.

US election: the Vice-Presidential debate was last night, but this story on the iPhone was interesting. John McCain has also pulled out of Michigan, which makes the "electoral math" harder for him.

You wait for stories on electric cars, and then two come along at once: "Renault sees demand for as many as 50,000 electric vehicles in 2011, the year the carmaker will begin selling such zero emission cars in Denmark, Israel and Portugal."

Full Steam Ahead For ID Cards

Labour is pushing ahead with its plans for national ID cards. Suppliers for the design and production of ID cards could be shortlisted in the next few months.

You can read about some of the problems behind the entire idea of ID cards here.

And Meg Hillier, a Home Office minister, said today that children as young as 14 could be required to carry one. Referring to the entire scheme, Hillier said: "It is full steam ahead ... In fact, the prime minister wanted me to do it quicker than it was possible."

See also: Youth revolt against ID card propaganda website

Curriculum Packs And Nutritional Advice

£151 million for food technology" areas, a free cookbook for students to tackle obesity, and compulsory cooking lessons for all 11- to 14-year olds by 2011.

It sounds great.

But what Labour giveth on one hand, it letteth in the private sector on the other.

Labour hasn't taken action on a "range of potentially misleading claims and poor nutritional advice" contained in so-called curriculum packs sent to schools by food companies and trade associations ... advice such as bakers saying pupils should eat six slices of bread a day ... or the British Soft Drinks Association telling pupils that refilling water bottles was unsafe and "can lead to contamination."

The Department of Health, dieticians, and the Food Standards Agency have dismissed many of the statements as not based on independent evidence, as highly selective, or plain ol' misleading.

Christine Blower, acting general secretary, the National Union of Teachers: "We are concerned that children are not exploited or misled by marketing of food products which make claims that are at best ambiguous or open to interpretation."

Stall At LMHR Event In Kenilworth

I spent four hours yesterday at an anti-racism music festival in Kenilworth. Myself, Ken and Tom staffed a stall for the Green Party. It was organised by sixth formers at Castle Sixth Form in Kenilworth. We were lucky enough to borrow a table and two wooden fold-up chairs from a nearby church hall, and just walk across Abbey Fields to the festival site. About 200 young people attended over the 4 hours we were there.

It was good chatting with other attendees, notably the folks from "v" -- about seed funding for volunteering projects in Warwickshire, and how the "v" team in Coventry may be able to help us find volunteers (newsletter editorial assistants, newsletter ad sales people, fundraising event assistants?).

Currently, there are a variety of opportunities for 16-24 year olds through "v" in Coventry:

- helping with an allotment at Henley College
- being an admin volunteer for the "Young Leaders" project at Terrence Higgins Trust
- doing events and fundraising work with the RSPB
- being a befriender at Coventry Refugee Centre
- or being part of Nature Force at Warwickshire Wildlife Trust.

Children At Yarl's Wood

A report from the Prisons Inspector, Anne Owers, has raised "serious concerns" about the treatment of children at the Yarl's Wood detention centre for immigrants. Completed in November 2001, Yarl’s Wood is located on MOD land, and it's a "prohibited place" under the Official Secrets Act. The centre is monitored by hundreds of CCTV cameras, and it's surrounded by a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. In a recent four-month period, 83 children had been detained for over 28 days.

- They've wrongly detained disabled children.
- They've had no specialist health services for children, no registered sick children's nurse, no "easily accessible" mental health services for children, and no children's counsellor.
- There was inadequate education and after-school facilities.
- They've kept inaccurate records.
- Some families had been transported to and from the centre in caged vans.

A spokesperson for the UK Border Agency described the entire situation as "necessary [as part of maintaining] a robust but fair asylum system."

It's interesting that the Rudd government in Australia has changed its policy in the last month. No more asylum-seeking children would be detained by Australia, and all asylum seekers will now have access to lawyers at the Australian government's expense.

The alternative for Britain was outlined back in July by the Independent Asylum Commission.

They called for an end to the detention of all child asylum seekers by the government. They found that detention was not necessary for the majority of asylum seekers, and that it should never be used for children or pregnant women. "Guardianship schemes for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children" could take the place of detention -- with the appointment of named individuals to safeguard their best interests.

"Building Bridges"

A study called "Building Bridges" will be launched next week at a conference in London.

Whilst focused on London (it was a two-year study, by Londoners aged 16-25, and supported by the Race on the Agenda think-tank), it probably has lessons for communities spread across the country.

One of its conclusions is that the emphasis on knife crime meant that the focus was on how violence is inflicted rather than why. The report will call for:

"a greater focus on prevention by tackling problems such as a lack of aspiration, a culture of individualism, fear, poverty and a lack of educational opportunities for young people. It will also back the introduction of youth-led projects to address the issues, since these work because "young people trust other young people". The report will also call for improvements in black history education, since this was feeding into a feeling of exclusion among black teenagers."

10 Reasons To Cheer Teenagers

Mark Easton, the BBC Home Affairs reporter, has a "top 10" list to counteract all the "binge-drinking, drug-addled, knife-wielding thugs ready to leap out and stab a granny for a fiver" stories about teens. Among his points:

1. Teenagers are more likely to do voluntary work than people from any other generation. In fact, they are 10 times more likely to be volunteering in our communities than regularly being antisocial in them.
2. More teenagers than ever before are staying on at school after 16 to study.
3. And more than ever are going on to further and higher education.
7. Nearly two-thirds of 10-to-15-year-olds have helped raise money for charity.
8. According to English schools inspectors, bad behaviour in comprehensives is at its lowest level for at least a decade.
9. 175,000 under 18-year-olds are unpaid carers in the UK with some 13,000 providing more care than a full-time job (50+ hours).

Number 9 says a great deal about how our social care/eldercare system is broken, but it demonstrates selflessness.

One of the comments in response was from Andy Hamflett, Chief Executive of the UK Youth Parliament:

"Dear Mark,

I think I love you.

So great to read a (rare) balanced perspective on this issue. I'll make sure I dsitribute this throughout our UK-wide networks. It will certainly be well received by young people.

As we engage every day with the ever-burgeoning youth participation network which supports young people to be active citizens everywhere, I can tell you that young people are sick and tired of being demonised.

We all understand that youth crime is a major issue (but as you say, most victims are young peope, too), and that bad news sells (so everyone say, anyway), but we don't feel that any other group within society could be demonised in quite the same way as young people are, and there's a groundswell to try and do something about it."

"Get Us To Feel Better About Ourselves"

A former gang member from Birmingham talking to the Archbishop of York:

"What you must do is to get us, young people, to feel better about ourselves. Help us to achieve confidence about ourselves without needing the dangerous prop of a knife. Help us not to judge ourselves in the eyes of others. Stop viewing us through the eyes of failure. Help us to overcome self-loathing. Your job is to stop the merry-go-round of our culture of immediacy by providing us with hope and long-term solutions to our longing for belonging. To us all the brave talk and actions of adults towards young people are similar to the gang culture. We are not all bad."

Children And Creativity

Arts provision for children in Britain is poor. It's so poor, it may violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, has criticised local councils and central government for cutbacks on arts activities, youth clubs and adventure playgrounds.

Rosen, in Socialist Worker, has also recently spoken out on creativity being absent in education:

We have to spend a great deal of time, thought and energy in working out how to make the meaning of what children read exciting, interesting and fun. If we want children to read, we have to work out how to make book-loving schools and book-loving homes. Schools should have the money to employ trained librarians and home-school reading liaison staff to work with parents on finding and reading interesting books.

We need to dispense with the futile system of asking children questions that teachers already know the answers to. Instead, we need to set up a space where we invite children to ask the people in a story questions that puzzle them and where other children can pretend to be those characters and try to answer the questions.

Books can also be seen as starting points for putting on shows, creating art, dance, music, film and powerpoint displays. The work that children write shouldn’t be shut away in scrappy little exercise books but should be published and performed.
This way a connection is made in the children’s minds between the world of literature and their own ability to write.

Schools Question Time - Emma Biermann

Emma Biermann, who ran for the Coventry Green Party in 2007 in Wainbody, has a chance to be on BBC's Question Time programme.

They've shortlisted 10 young people, and you can watch a short video that Emma made, and make a comment supporting her on their website.

The more comments she gets, the more we have a chance to have an environmental/social justice point of view on the panel.

Emma just got back from a voyage to the Arctic, with the WWF on climate change. You can read a blog about her trip here.

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Anti-Psychotic Drugs And Youth

Probably the most worrying story I've read this past week ...

Tranquillisers designed to treat serious conditions including schizophrenia in adults were prescribed to young people 57,000 times in 2003. But the total had risen to more than 90,000 by 2006 – a 59 per cent rise in three years.

Experts believe the increase is partly down to early detection and treatment of serious mental health problems in children, but there is also concern they are being used inappropriately to treat psychological and learning difficulties. Shortage of staff and resources are further factors. The safety and effectiveness of these drugs, which were designed for adults, have not been fully tested on children.

Paul Corry, director of public affairs for the mental health charity Rethink, said:

"It is worrying that these very powerful drugs designed for adults are being given in such high numbers to children before their brains are fully developed. If the increase is because previously undiagnosed teenagers are now getting treatment, then that is positive. But it is difficult to justify the widespread use of these drugs in younger children because it is actually unlikely they will have schizophrenia at such a young age."

Climate Change And The Planning Bill

- Will Paul Ince be the first Black manager in the Premier League, sooner rather than later?

- Emily Benn could be the youngest MP ever ...

- Cavemen being arrested in Brussels?

Finally, an amendment to the Planning Bill on Monday was defeated by 15 votes (24 Labour MPs voted for it). It would have required climate change to be taken into account in planning decisions for major projects such as roads, airports and power stations.

Friends of the Earth's Planning Campaigner Hugh Ellis, said:

"With no reference to climate change in the Planning Bill, people have no guarantees that Ministers will take climate change into account when considering major projects such as roads, airports and power stations which will lock us into the path towards climate change and environmental destruction. Government has recently made some bold statements about taking action on climate change. But yet again it has missed a vital chance to make those words a reality and create a cleaner, greener future for us all."

Youth Employment / Open Borders

Mike Davis lays out a number of key questions that we need to find answers to, the main ones for me being: how to link environmentalism with youth employment, and how to talk about open borders and human rights in an age where we will see more environmental refugees. Davis is probably best known for writing "City of Quartz" and "Planet of Slums."

"I think that every environmental demand should be linked to a social justice demand ... and I think most environmental demands should have to do with youth employment and extending the opportunities for the enjoyment of nature and participation in green politics to people in the inner cities."

"Human rights come first. Borders are essentially systems of violence imposed on landscapes and human lives. And it's very important that there's something like an abolitionist minority that reject borders per se as a way to ration rights in the world or to manage conflicts ... A lot more people die now at the borders of Europe than they did in the age of the Iron Curtain."