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[20 February 2008] - Children and young adults are the last minority in Britain routinely discriminated against, a major study has claimed. While prejudice based on gender, race or religion has become widely unacceptable, simply being young is enough to deprive a person of basic human rights.
Despite the UK signing up to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1991, the Dunfermline-based Carnegie UK Trust believes attitudes to younger people have barely changed and that radical steps are needed to correct the balance. In Empowering Young People, to be published on 20 February, the Carnegie UK Trust calls on the government to consider establishing a new professional class to work with young people to integrate them with the rest of society - a process at which schools and traditional family structures have largely already failed. 'Signs saying, "Only two schoolchildren at a time" or "No children after 7pm" are a common sight in the windows of shops across the country,' the report points out. 'We rarely question the rights and wrongs of such diktats or pause to think that children are now the only group against whom such naked discrimination is still acceptable. 'This is creating a world in which far too many young people are still alienated from their local community, distanced from society at large and disconnected from decisions made for and about them by adults.' Charlie McConnell, chief executive of the Carnegie UK Trust and one of the report's authors, told The Observer he believed a significant change in approach was necessary if young people were to win their fundamental human rights. 'It will cost a lot of money, but a considerable amount of training has to be given to people working in the front line, whether they are in the health service, the welfare state, education or architects and designers,' he said. 'People have to learn how to deal with young people and to give them an opportunity to be involved in the decision-making process. Creating a new professional cadre to do this specific task would be one way of doing it, though we'd anticipate it would be easier to have people in existing roles retrained with a view to the needs of children.' The Carnegie UK Trust is also highly critical of the way children are perceived and blames negative media portrayals for demonising youngsters. References to 'Asbos', 'hordes of children' and to 'youth crime', it says, create a false impression and generate fear among older people. The report highlights findings that in 2007, 'Britons were three times more likely to cite young people hanging around as a problem than they were to complain about noisy neighbours. In 1992 it was just 1.75 times more likely.' Meanwhile, the number of children and young people being sentenced to custody has almost doubled in 10 years, while participation in mainstream politics has gone down. 'I'm not saying problems with youth crime don't exist,' said McConnell. 'Of course they do - but not nearly to the extent that people believe they are. There is a lot of mythologising going on about this subject. For instance, people are far more frightened of youths than they need to be when going out at night.' John Loughton, 20, the Stirling University student and chair of the Scottish Youth Parliament who rose to prominence last month when he won E4's Big Brother Celebrity Hijack, agreed with Carnegie UK Trust's general findings. He claimed attitudes towards young people represented little more than a form of apartheid. 'We have to change our language and the way we think of young people in this country,' he said. 'People think Asbos, for instance, are for youths, when they are actually a general crime measure. You can't get banned from a shopping mall for being black, or for your religion, but they will ban you if you are young and wearing a hoodie. 'It is a form of apartheid. If someone is young they are treated differently to someone who is old. It is about time we woke up to this and changed our attitude.' Further information
pdf: http://www.crin.org/docs/carn.pdf