Who would want to be a teenager right now? The collective CV has seldom looked bleaker. British youth are the most yobbish in Europe. They drink more, take more drugs, have sex at an earlier age and are more violent, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

Antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs), designed to shame young people into behaving, have apparently had the opposite effect and have become badges of pride. “Happy-slapping” gangs terrorise their communities, joyriders laugh at the police and young hoodies evoke so much fear that they are banned from shopping centres. The phrase “teenagers from hell” has seldom seemed so pertinent.

Something is clearly going horribly wrong. Or was it in fact ever thus? Could we be overreacting to problems that have always accompanied youth behaviour?

In Manchester, known as the “ASBO capital of Britain” for the number of orders dished out there (816 between 1999 and 2005), you might expect the answer to be a resounding “no”.

Gangs are a serious problem in certain areas of the city. Manchester may have as many as 500 gang members. They are concentrated in a strip south of the city centre stretching from Hulme to Longsight and passing through Moss Side, the hub of the city’s black community. In September a 15-year-old schoolboy, Jesse James, was shot dead in Moss Side as he rode home on his BMX bike. The park where he was found dying is flanked by Great Western Road — dubbed Wild Western Road because of the number of shootings there.

The city’s modern gang culture began in the 1970s in deprived areas where it was often hard to make money through legitimate means so some turned to drug-dealing, mainly in cannabis. A Home Office study of south Manchester revealed that in 150 shooting incidents over a three-year period, only one witness came forward to testify.

Last year a 16-year-old boy from Manchester became the first person to be banned under ASBO powers from wearing a hoodie. Dale Carroll would face prison if he wore a hoodie or cap in public for a five-year period. He was a member of a gang of youths who ran amok in his neighbourhood for nearly three years. He tried to cut down a CCTV lamppost with a chainsaw, threw fireworks at cyclists and threatened someone with an axe.

Yet experts do not believe that youth behaviour in Manchester or anywhere else in the UK is significantly worse than it was several years ago. Dr Juanjo Medina, a criminologist based at the University of Manchester, says that other data suggests that, if anything, “English kids are better behaved than kids in other European countries”.

He points to a MORI survey which indicates that there has been virtually no rise in criminal activity among school pupils in England and Wales between 1999 and 2004. The survey concludes that “there is very little data to support the idea that young people in England and Wales are much worse now than they were 15 years ago”. Indeed, the most recent International Self-Report Delinquency Study reports that the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland all have higher overall delinquency rates than England and Wales, though drug use is higher here than elsewhere.

Dr Medina says that the number of ASBOs issued in Manchester tells us little, but what has changed is the increased use of firearms and the drug economy: 20 years ago it consisted predominantly of young black men selling drugs on the streets, but that has changed. Not only have white people realised how much money can be made from drugs and moved in on the industry, but drugs are bought and sold via mobile phones and through friends. Many middle-class professionals have their own dealers.

The IPPR report found that in Britain children spend less time with their parents than in other European countries, though the ISRD study found that English parents were better at establishing where their children were and who they were with than parents in other countries, which might explain the overall lower delinquency levels.

What stands out in Britain is a greater fear of crime among adults. “In England and Wales people are afraid when they see teenagers in groups. There is more of a climate of fear,” says Dr Medina, who claims that the Government and the media have helped to create that fear.

As Professor George Rousseau, of the Centre for the History of Childhood, says: “Violence among youth cultures is very, very old. There are examples from Ancient Greece and the Roman provinces through to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th century and beyond.”

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