Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

Freedom’s Orphans: Raising youth in a changing world by Julia Margo and Mike Dixon  is a research report from the IPPR due to be published next Monday (6 November, 2006).
It is this report that was discussed extensively in yesterday’s news, with its findings that young people in the UK are more likely than those elsewhere in Europe to commit anti-social behaviour, to try drugs and to have sex at a young age.  The report links this to a dislocation of relationships between adults and young people, saying that adolescents are essentially left alone to make the transition into adulthood, relying on their peer groups rather than being helped by strong relationships with adult role-models at home and in wider society.
This raises a host of interesting issues about youth culture, crime and deviance, the family and education in the contemporary UK:

1. Is the report (and/or the media response to it) an indication of an existing moral panic in the UK surrounding youth cultures? - ie when we look for problems we tend to find evidence of them.
2. It raises once again the question of what is anti-social behaviour? and the fact that the definition and therefore the proscription of such behaviour is relative and subject to shifting norms and values in society.
3. This report could be taken as supporting evidence for the New Right view which supports traditional family structures and close family relationships, arguing that these lead to greater social order.  The report seems to suggest that the continuance of traditional family forms and significant leisure time spent within the family, as found in countries such as Italy and Spain is associated with lower levels of anti-social behaviour by young people.  Although at the same time the implication seems to be that it is the amount of time shared by adults with young people that is important and that traditional family structures tend to facilitate this.
4. The report’s evidence may well be read with interest by those involved in education, particularly the home-education movement.  Numerous advocates of home education have argued that home educated children benefit from greater interactions with adults than their conventionally educated peers, and that home education removes children from an artificial environment at school in which their socialisation is restricted to their age-mates (Dowty, 2000).  Up until now, one of the key arguments against home education is that it could negatively affect a child’s socialisation by removing that child from its peers (see for example the case of Leuffen v. Germany discussed by Monk (2003)).  The suggestion of Margo and Dixon’s report would seem to be, however, that young people benefit from interaction with adults and that assuming that a child’s main socialisation will be carried out by their peer group has negative effects on their tendency to anti-social behaviour.  (All this of course rests on the assumption that home education does give children more interaction and close relationship with adults than they would receive in school)

BBC NEWS | UK | UK youths ‘among worst in Europe’

I’m sure there are many other possible analyses of this report and the discussions surrounding it - please let me know if you have other relevant points to add (or just add a comment to the post!).