Over dry white wine and gin and tonic, we are debating whether we are a “Yob Nation” – again. Pass the Tyrrells organic vegetable chips! Condemn the ASBO! Blame binge-drinking on Amy Winehouse! Love these Jasper Morrison-designed pink chairs here at the Dana Centre in the Science Museum! Raise the underclass!

Yet again, academics, media types and that sub-species known as “do-gooders” are indulging in the most important and possibly the most hopeleless debate around. Tonight, before a sizeable crowd, are lined up heavyweight forensic psychiatrists and psychologists, charting the rise and rise of bad behaviour in young people, and wringing their hands.

It’s both fascinating and frustrating. What’s wrong: broken families, poverty, low self-esteem, too much tech’n’telly, too little exercise, drugs, materialism, gangs… Duh. What’s weird is that the people engaged in scientifically measuring anti-social behaviour – and not just politicians hugging hoodies – say that it’s doubled, if not tripled, since the Seventies.

Britain’s teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe, according to the experts – or perhaps they are just the most studied. Certainly, there is plenty of stabbing and shooting, and we can feel pride that we are the only country that has given someone an ASBO for consistently attempting suicide in public places, which “could cause distress to others”.

But what was new to me about the Dana debate was the scientific element: that huge studies are being funded to examine whether yobbism is innate, whether you are “born criminal”. As Dr Ilina Singh of the London School of Economics pointed out, however, if when we find children whose brains look like those of adult psychopaths, whom do we tell? Schools? Hospitals? Parents? And how does a child consent in any proper way to such investigation? For the moment these studies are general, with nameless data, but what if they become personalised?

There were “disorders” I’d never heard of which would have come in useful as labels when I still had toddlers. You can have a contrary child with oppositional defiant disorder; and there is also intermittent explosive disorder, something I can now self-diagnose when I throw crockery across the kitchen under stress.

Then there is the old chestnut of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But as Dr Singh says, all these baby-yob disorders have the “problem of diagnostic validity – there are no biological markers”.

As a punter, and a parent, you wonder if labelling children as mini-yobs is taking off at the same rate as full-sized yobs wear labels: Prada and Nike and Burberry. Indeed, when institutions like schools and the military are having teen trouble, they love a label. The US Navy, for instance, is in a teenage strop because it’s having difficulty recruiting “millennials”, youngsters aged 17 to 24. (“It’s the war, stupid,” is not considered a valid explanation of this decline.)

Worse, the Navy says school leavers are “coddled” and “narcissistic praise-junkies”. They are so comfortable with technology that talking to them is like “dealing with a somewhat alien life force” – though obviously this means they’d be fine handling the computer coordinates for a surface-to-air missile.

It’s the “alien life force” comment that is the most telling. So much of this debate is about the assumptions that we as adults make about teenagers – the dreaded hoody, for instance, is an outdated concept following the wholesale adoption of the garment by English public schoolboys.

Scary Goths are all looks, apparently, and no action, according to psychologist Kathy Charles. She studied 700 Glasgow teenagers and found dressing as a Goth was not a predictor of criminality at all. To her surprise, the kids likeliest to become involved in crime were competitive alpha males or females, the leaders of the pack.

Those bemoaning “youth nowadays” have short, selective memories. According to Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter, whose teen years must have been unpleasantly in the spotlight), adults forget their own puberty because teenage experience is so filled with “pain, trauma and turmoil that our conscious minds suppress it”. So now is the time to begin recovering those memories and empathising with the kids. Start by buying yourself a black hoody, printed in white with the legend “ASBO YOB”, £22.95 on the web.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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