London Riots – Fear and failure with rioting

Published: August 11, 2011

AS someone who has worked with young people all my life, like everyone else I am struggling to make sense of the events of the last four days.

Yet, sad to say, we have been expecting this. Young people have been subject to a series of messages over the last year that tell them adults don’t care and that peaceful protest doesn’t get you heard.

Increase in university fees, loss of education maintenance allowance (EMA), fear that the changes to benefit may mean your family moving at a crucial point in your life, fear that you will never get a job however hard you work – all these issues, whether they directly affect a young person or not, make them feel helpless, powerless and without hope for a future.

They also feel that the treatment they receive in a range of situations is response simply to their age and takes no account of their character.

More than two in a local shop and you are asked to leave, when the police kettled Queen’s Crescent last month every young person was stopped and searched, this week young people were prevented from travelling home on the tube as it was assumed they were looking for trouble and so were stranded, frightened and then angry.

We were advised on Tuesday by the police to close our music and film projects for teenagers and make sure they left the building by 3.30pm.

All were upset that their day was cut short but also were frightened.

Frightened that they would encounter rioting on their way home but also frightened that if they were in a group people would assume they were part of the problem.

Young people need to be angry if they feel injustice – it’s part of the process of growing up and is vital to developing a moral framework by which as adults they will live.

Our job as adults is to help them discover safe and productive ways to challenge their anger and teach them how to contribute constructively to making change. We have let them down.

By describing them as feral and animals, by driving the vans to the shop doors to be filled with stolen goods, by telling them its OK to fiddle expenses – “everyone does it” – as long as you don’t get caught, by taking hope of a real and productive future away so that many feel they have nothing to lose – we have failed.

And as adults we urgently need to review how we change our behaviour if we want these young people to contribute instead of destroy.
Celia Greenwood
InterChange CEO
Hampstead Town Hall Centre, NW3