THE TEENAGERS GUIDE TO LOOTING (From News Shopper)

THE TEENAGERS GUIDE TO LOOTING

7:17am Wednesday 1st February 2012 in Opinion & Blogs

Newsflash!

We are all committing a dubious crime far worse than is on any of the papers front pages; a crime that we all commit religiously, universally. A crime that is damaging society much more than anything else we could possibly conceive.

This crime is victimising the young!

Even we, teenagers, do it, we think we are better than those we don’t know; we think the worse of ourselves. Disgusting looks are given from group to group; no one can trust anyone anymore.

Why is this?

Is this because of the huge rise in crime, the new gang culture? Is it deserved? The new surge of marauders and sinners that loot and murder, the wave of insanity and horrific dress sense. It’s in all the papers in big bold letters. “Teenagers are Evil!”

But where is there proof?

None of the papers would like to admit it but there is no proof. In fact the home office website shows that crime in the year I was born (1995) was at approximately 19,000,000, and now it is at roughly 10,000,000. Yet we still act like we are the worse generation by far.

It is only the representation and criminalisation of our generation that makes us seem the devious ghouls that we are seen to be.

This causes many problems the first problem is that we have a broken society of which adults and children are not allowed to mix, buses are a testimony to this. On a bus we do not see a mix of groups and people chatting at the bus stop but people ignoring each other out of fear created by the tabloids The more serious issue I believe is that this criminalisation is creating criminals. It has been shown that Britain has the worse reoffending rates in the EU and this because we are too authoritarian, if we were able to treat criminals socially instead of chucking them in a pit with serious offenders (who teach the petty thieves new tricks) then we could solve a lot of problem.

The rise of police power has gone against the flow of crime, shouldn’t we spend more money on habilitating youth offenders.

Now onto the riots, many newspapers urged the need for plastic bullets and water cannons. There were 12 year olds looting. There are better ways of dealing with crime than shooting 12 year olds. The papers also argued the need to send them all to prison and harden them into proper criminals which No.10 agreed with, until they realised there was no space left as we have also the biggest prison population in the EU.

In fact I believe that there wouldn’t have been riots if we had not treated the youth with such content. If certain parts of society are regarded in such a way, especially such at a fragile part of adolescence, they will conform to your expectations.

So I urge you to think that we are all young at one point in time and we have all gone through the bad stage of teenage fashion (I have seen pictures of my dad’s afro). We have all been a victim of discrimination. I also urge government to stop spending money on baby-beating-batons and insist they spend it on help dealing with social problems to stop crime in the first place.

But the most important thing I insist on is that you smile at everyone on the bus.