Homeward-bound commuters hurry past the gaggle of teens sprawling and skateboarding at dusk on a London street. Hooded and raucous, they're an image familiar from a thousand newspaper scare stories.
Almost daily in the media, Britain's young people are treated as a threat. To the tabloids, they're "hoodies" or "chavs" -- feral youths bent on binge-drinking and delinquency. The government has its own lexicon for dealing with troubled teens, from NEETS -- young people "not in employment, education or training" -- to ASBOs, or "anti-social behavior orders," used to control the wayward. A spate of recent gun and knife murders involving London teenagers has kept youth and crime together in the headlines.
With such an attitude, children's advocates say, it's no surprise Britain placed dead last in a recent UNICEF survey of children's well-being in 21 developed countries.
A British think tank has a catchy term for it -- pedophobia.
"There has always been a culture in Britain that's a bit anti-children," said Julia Margo, one of the authors of a report on British youth for the Institute for Public Policy Research, a center-left think tank. "In the newspaper letters pages, you see constant debates about noisy children on trains."
"There are [also] a great number of children on the streets without anything to do," she said. "This is what's contributing to pedophobia."
The institute's research found that British adults, more than those in other European countries, view teenagers as a menace. Britons were much less likely to intervene than those in neighboring countries if they saw teenagers vandalizing a bus shelter -- 34 percent said they would try to stop it, compared with 65 percent of Germans and 52 percent of Spaniards.
The UNICEF report, released last month, claimed Britain's young people were the unhappiest in the developed world. While Britain sat mid-table for health and safety, it came second from bottom -- just above the US -- for child poverty, and last in the category called "family and peer relationships," which measured indicators like single-parent families and time spent with friends and family.
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