A study in Hungary, called 'Latent youth deviance', concluded that a lot of teenagers believe that "aggression is somehow a way of having fun" and was reported in an online magazine article titled 'Troubling findings in study on teen crime'. This conclusion may be the result of research – but what if you were to substitute either the word ‘youth’ in the title, or the word ‘teenagers’, with ‘black’, ‘female’ or ‘gay’? Would we even question the discriminatory and negative nature of such an article?
The article 'CCTV cameras to assist police in identifying youth crime', from a local US newspaper highlights how reports often depict youths as a ‘nuisance’, with little or no balanced view from, say, a young person or perhaps a local youth group.
The Sun newspaper in the UK, among others, has conducted a long-running campaign against ‘hoodies’ - these are teenagers, or even younger children, who wear hooded tops. In the article 'Hoody ban shop boost', the paper reports how visitor numbers at a shopping centre have apparently risen following a ban on hoodies – although there appears to be little proven correlation.
Bahrain's Gulf Daily News reported on the 'Invasion of dwarfs and ankle-biters' over a summer period. The article reads: "Children were everywhere this August, screaming in restaurants, running around in cafes, messing up shop shelves."