On the bus we always get dirty looks,” says the 13-year-old boy outside the
cinema in Haringey, North London. Then he snorts. “People would rather stand
up than sit next to me.”
“I've had that,” agrees his friend. “I sat on this bench, yeah? And this woman
got up and moved.” Behind them, a young mum is hovering with a pram.
They are blocking the pavement and she wants to get past. So she waits,
fretting.
Society's greatest fear is a nebulous, shifting thing. Sometimes it is war,
poverty or disease. Thirty years ago, quite possibly it was sharks. Now
there is a strong case for saying that it is children. Not your children.
Everybody else's.
This month The Children was released. In the festive horror flick, a pair of
young, stylish, George Michael Christmasjumper-wearing couples have their
snowy holiday retreat transformed into a bloodfest when their Gap-ad kids
contract some sort of 28 Days Later-style virus and go on a killing spree.
The tag-line is “You brought them into this world. They will take you out”.
Subtle, no?
But timely. The Children seems to represent the peak in a trend of similar-ish
films in which the general hideousness of youth is seen not just as
something that makes it hideous to be young yourself (Kids, Kidulthood, even
Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but something that threatens adults, too.
In Donkey Punch (2008) a gang of youths led by the teen icon Jaime Winstone
disembowelled each other on a boat. Eden Lake went a stage further. Jenny
(Kelly Reilly) and Steve (Michael Fassbender) are a young, likeable couple,
whose rural idyll is overrun by a mob of youths with BMXs and a rottweiler.
At the film's climax, Reilly ploughs down an urchin with a delivery van.
In another controversial piece of film released last month, three men describe
children as “vermin”, “parasites” and “feral, cruel
and ruthless” before loading up shotguns, piling into their car and cruising
around town with the window open, picking a few off. This last example,
however, was an online advertisement from the children's charity Barnardo's.
“What's really frightening,” says the voice-over, afterwards, “is that every
line of dialogue in this film was a comment made by the public on UK
newspaper websites about children. Join our campaign against the
demonisation of children...”
Those same comments were used in an accompanying poll by YouGov, which
declared that “just under half (49 per cent) of people agree that children
are increasingly a danger to each other and adults”; “more than a third (35
per cent) agree that “nowadays it feels as if the streets are infested with
children”; and that “43 per cent agree that something has to be done to
protect us from children”.
So, leaving our valuables at home, The Times went to hang out with the hoodies
to see if they noticed this, or minded, or thought that it was perfectly
fair. It was 4.30pm on a cold winter afternoon and there were about 20 of
them infesting the pavement outside a cinema in Muswell Hill, North London.
“Are you the police?” asked one boy, as soon as the notebook came out. “Is
he being arrested?”
There will be a lot of “one boy” and “one girl” in what follows, because, such
were our nerves, The Times did not always manage to put names to quotes.
Plus, well, have you ever tried to interview 20 children simultaneously, in
the dark? Not quite a horror film but not necessarily far off.
They were mainly 13 but occasionally 14, most of them wrote down their names
in our notebook. Thus we can tell you that they included, in no particular
order, Lyle, Abigail, Samantha, Saffron, Tom (“the good-lookin' one”),
Steffan, Millie, Charles, Louis, Oskar, Joe, Patrick, Dilhelissa, Soyon,
drawing of something that looks like an upside-down spaceman, and Jovan
(surnames all supplied). These names may suggest a rather posher brand of
hoody than the national norm, but it's worth bearing in mind that we were in
North London.
“If people come up and say you're being a bit loud, we'll keep it down,”
shouts a girl. “But when people just go round giving us dirty looks...”
“We were sat over there,” shouts a boy. “A woman called the police. Five
minutes later we were all moved.”
“Old people are the worst,” says somebody else. “But they're not as bad as
middle-aged people. Or young people. Mothers with buggies. They, like, stand
there for five minutes and don't even say ‘excuse me'. They don't move out
the way or nothing. You don't realise they're behind you. Then you turn
round and realise and they give you a dirty look.”
“We always get kicked out of shops. Then they let other people go in front of
us.”
“That shop there. The guy actually kicked somebody.”
“You weren't even there. It was me.”
“None of us do bad stuff. Some people do bad stuff but we never do. Some
people throw mud and stuff.”
“We don't do it at them. We do it at each other.”
“But sometimes it hits one of them.”
“Like yesterday. When it hit her by accident. Everyone was throwing mud.
Someone walked past and she was like shouting at us.”
“We're safe here. We go down the hill, we might get mugged.”
It's only when you start cruising around town looking for children (not
something your correspondents have done before) that you start to realise
how marginalised they are. They can't go into pubs. They get kicked out of
shopping centres. In the summer they can hang out in parks, but in winter it
is a rare parent who would want all 20 of them in their front room. Thus
they loiter, and not always with intent.
“I saw a statistic,” says one boy, “that says people think that people our age
are responsible for 50 per cent of crime. And it's not that. It's a lot
less.”
Smart kid, whoever he was. For this 13-year-old hoody is quoting the British
Crime Survey 2006, in which it was reported that the public assumes that
half of all crimes are committed by young people, whereas the real figure is
closer to 12 per cent. Moreover, according to the Ministry of Justice and
the Department for Children, Schools and Families, youth crime is falling.
They say that 93,601 people between the ages of 10 and 17 entered the
criminal justice system in the past year, down from 103,955 the year before.
The 13-year-olds tell us that they are frequently moved on by the police, and
that the boys are often searched.
“We always get searched,” says one. “Every five minutes. A lot.”
“They never find anything,” says a girl. “It's just for the sake of seeing if
they have anything on them.” She sounds rather wiser and wearier than
instinct tells you a 13-year-old ought to be.
Dr Stuart Waiton is a director of the group Generation Youth Issues and the
author of Scared of the Kids: curfews, crime and the regulation of young
people. He feels that Barnardo's is taking the wrong approach. “There are
real issues here to do with how adults relate to kids,” he says. “It's a
breakdown of adult solidarity. We're less inclined to back each other up.
The Barnardo's campaign encourages us to intervene with kids less.”
A Barnardo's spokesman points out that this was not the intention. “It was
about the negative language used,” she says, adding that Barnardo's has no
policy on whether adults should tackle unruly kids.
Waiton says that we are becoming increasingly obsessed with our own children
and increasingly likely to ignore other people's. Hence our inclination to
be frightened of them and, if only through the medium of film, to wish them
harm.
Dr Dorothy Rowe, another psychologist and the author of What Should I
Believe?, thinks that adults being scared of children is nothing new, even
in film. “We spoke about this when The Bad Seed came out in the 1950s,” she
says. “It goes back to our mythology that we are born in sin, that children
are born intrinsically bad. Teenagers will behave like teenagers.
Fifteen-year-old girls will make a lot of noise and be oblivious to all
other human beings. It can be quite intimidating, if you are not one.”
Nonetheless, while Rowe reckons that children and teenagers have always been
prone to solipsism and aggression, she accepts that older generations may
feel more disconnected from their young than ever before. “I'm 77,” she
says. “I was a teenager before teenagers were invented. We had to dress like
our mothers. We were middle-aged from about 12.”
Today, Facebooking and Twittering and stealing each other's lunch money via
the medium of an MMS ringtone, 12-year-olds exist in worlds that even a
25-year-old wouldn't necessarily understand.
Today's child-based horror-flicks are quite unlike The Bad Seed (1956) and The
Omen (1976) in which the otherness of children was used as a short cut
towards the paranormal. In the current spate the terror is rooted entirely
in social, rather than supernatural, forces.
What are we to make of this now, as Britain wrings its collective hands about
Baby P, Shannon Matthews and yet another abused child, it seems, every other
week? Perhaps we should conclude that Barnardo's has a point: that our views
of children are a mess and make little sense. As individuals they are
something precious to be protected. As a group, a mob, they are something to
be feared.
“A lot of adults are quite scared of children,” muses one of our mob in
Muswell Hill. “But I don't think we're a very scary lot.”
“Yeah,” agrees another. “They should, like, think of the percentage of
children that have actually done something wrong. You might as well say we
should all be scared of adults, because a lot of adults commit crime. It
doesn't make sense.”
Bravo. They've got it all figured out. So why haven't we?
