According to the BBC the government in the UK recently unveiled a new 10-year youth strategy in order to tackle teenage delinquency. One of the aims is to put a youth club in every neighbourhood, which it is hoped will have an impact on the problem. Of course, according to figures published not so long ago by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Britain holds the current record in terms of youth delinquency when compared with almost anywhere else in Europe.
No one has done any surveys among young people here, but the conventional wisdom is that at the very least we have a large youth population which is functionally illiterate and therefore effectively unemployable, and that an unknown but possibly significant portion of that population will be lured into the crime and drugs sub-culture. In any event, teenagers can be seen sitting on bridges at street corners, or hanging out with their peers on any working day. With the collapse of the extended family, and the increase in single parent households where children simply do not get the attention, the supervision, the discipline or the structure in their lives that perhaps they need, it is easy for young people to gravitate to their peers for the reinforcement they seek, and then into dubious company.
The British government thinks that youth clubs will help solve their problem, so would they help here? The first thing which has to be acknowledged is that there are some excellent clubs offering activities of one kind or another to young people all over this country. The problem is that there are simply not enough of them. But that aside, are youth clubs effective in combating delinquency?
The answer apparently is, yes, if they offer structured activities. Young people are always complaining that they have nowhere to go in the evening (and that is as true here as it is in the UK). But if all that is provided is a place for them to congregate, no matter how well equipped that place might be, it will do more harm than good. A report from London University’s Institute of Education which undertook long-term research on the subject concluded that a place to hang out where there is no effective supervision or organized activities can be “corrupting.” According to the BBC, an IPPR study says that just hanging out at a club can actually make youths “more likely to smoke, drink and become teenage parents.”
There are youth workers in the field who do not need any academic study to tell them that structure is the key. One of these is the now well-known Mick Jelly, who has been running the Bury Amateur Boxing Club for four decades on a voluntary basis. He acquired his fame from training Olympic silver medal boxing champion Amir Khan. The BBC quoted him as saying, “Just providing a physical structure for kids to meet in is not enough. You need to add structure to their lives
