Shouting out for teenagers

10:41am Thursday 12th June 2008

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I'VE been thinking about these quiet zones. Noise can be a nuisance, but it is also subjective. One man's Rachmaninov is another man's racket and all that.

A bit of hush outside our house late at night when the students are carousing would be nice, especially for those of us who are busy trying to slip away from that old red-eyed devil called insomnia, with his mind-jabbing fork.

Then again, our neighbours probably feel much the same when our 16-year-old plugs in his electric guitar and sends the pigeons scattering from the roof above his attic lair.

Noise is an annoyance, but it is also part of everyday life, a consequence of people getting on with what they need to do, the sound a living, breathing community makes.

A quiet zone has been set up in York by a police community support officer, which is to say, without wishing to be rude, a member of the Government's pretend police force. Good luck to PCSO Kelly Vause, I guess, although something about this initiative worries me.

This is because it has been put in force to deal with our favourite foes, the "yobs". I am not about to deny that some young people behave in a loutish manner and cause a nuisance. That would be foolish, because they do.

The problem comes in the connection that is made between the "yobs" and young people in general. This is not the first time I have stuck up for young people, and nor will it be the last. It has long been my suspicion that we risk demonising teenagers in this country, by our constant reference to the trouble they (in reality, a tiny minority of them) cause the rest of us.

Such pro-teenager feelings are more widespread than you might think. Partly this is because fond middle-class parents look at their own mostly well-behaved offspring and wonder where the problem lies. From this, they conclude - with a degree of self-delusion - that there isn't much of a problem.

Yet these are the parents who will have fussed over their children from the conception onwards, worrying about what they eat, how they sleep, the performance of the schools they might attend. Ordinary, loving, over-obsessing sometimes downright boring parents, in other words, a description which embraces most of us.

Some parents, however, appear not to concentrate on their children to such an extent, if at all. The teenage chips off such negligent blocks are left to their own devices at too young an age, and are more likely to slip into trouble. For all that, the divide between "good" teens and "bad" teens is not always a neat one, and can be crossed.

One accusation levelled at parents is that they don't know where their offspring are, or what they are up to. Our experience is probably common, in that we always know where ours are - apart from when we don't, teenagers being mobile creatures. An element of trust is involved, in that you ask and have to trust the answers you are given.

Mostly, this works fine, although teenagers will naturally push at boundaries, and may well tell you later - perhaps, say, when they reach 20 - what they got up to at 15. In short, teenagers today are as honest and straightforward with their parents as we were with ours when we were teenagers.

Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the Children's Commissioner for England, has written a report for the United Nations which, in the words of last Monday's edition of The Times, condemns "the punitive youth justice system and the vilification of teenagers as yobs".

He fears thousands of children are needlessly criminalised for misdemeanours, which is another way of saying that ASBO-branded children end up being treated as criminals from way too young an age.

Not many readers will agree, I suspect, but Sir Al has my support. I'll even shout it loudly from the rooftops - although not in a quiet zone, of course.