The kids are alright

It’s probably safe to bet that you haven’t heard of John Lee, Reader in Education at the University of West England in Bristol. He was in Dublin recently to speak at a conference on school attendance. Most of his paper was to do with a review of experience in school retention in the UK. But he departed from the script to comment that over the last ten years in Britain a ‘war’ has been waged ‘against young people’.
Those waging the war are, he said, the tabloid press and, in turn, the politicians they spook through big headlines and moral panics. He expressed the hope that Ireland was not on the same road.
Too late the warning. That horse has bolted, methinks. As in the UK, the tabloids here are in the saddle, but we also have the additional malign influence of phone-in radio programmes.
The barrage has hit a new peak in recent weeks following the murder of two Polish men in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh a fortnight ago.
The killings evoked horror. Universally, they were seen to be vicious and disgusting, and rightly so.
At one level, the murders triggered a discussion of violence in Ireland, and that’s fine. Casual violence seems to have increased. Now that most drinking is done at home, people are getting drunk in weapon-rich environments. And apparently a lot of people find it hard to leave home without packing some form of defence.
It could be a backwash from the brutality of gangland warfare, it could be related to cocaine. But if it’s there, then it’s right that we get a sense of it and think about what might be done.
Fine. But unfortunately, the murders also led to the usual hue and cry about young people, and not just from the obvious sources. Voices of Official Ireland, like RTÉ’s Mary Wilson, pitched in too, hassling the Minister for Justice over the fact that no anti-social behaviour orders had been served (‘not even one, Minister?’) and the anti-alcohol brigade took it as another stick with which to beat the Government.
And, as things would have it, in the same time frame a series of awful road tragedies took the lives of five young men, three in Cork and two in Dublin. Their deaths were drawn into the same discussion, with one vox pop interviewee on RTÉ specifically linking the Cork deaths with alcohol consumption – even though there was no mention of alcohol in reports and, it seems from later despatches, they weren’t travelling fast but simply took a wrong turn, as a result of which they pitched into the sea at Dunboy.
All this is but a drop in the ocean of bile and invective to which young people, especially young men, are subjected in Ireland.
Okay, adolescent males have their problems. They can be noisy, messy and awkward betimes, and they can say and do stupid things. They fight. But young men have always been like that. Right around the world, in advanced societies and backward alike, there have always been battles, there have always been problems, there have always been risks taken.
All of which, as any psychologist will tell you, is what emerging adulthood is about. Indeed, evolutionary psychologists argue that young men are dealing with four massive forces.
The first is that we humans are still basically the same critturs that first walked out of Africa. Society’s values may have moved on, but our hard-wiring hasn’t changed. We still carry the same genetic codes. Fighting and foraging are still right up there amongst core behaviours.
The second is that adolescence, which once was short and sharp, is now greatly extended. A fella gets to fourteen or fifteen, he thinks he’s a man. But nobody else does. He wants to get on with doing man stuff, with being what he feels he already is – but everybody tries to stop him, to head him off. Far from childhood being shortened, which is the cliche we all hear about, adulthood has been delayed. So, young men get frustrated…
The third is that as societies become more developed, they abandon the bonds and roles and rituals that help young men make the transition to the next level.
The fourth is that, as a result – but also because most Irish hate children (except their own) – young people are driven off street corners, out of town squares, out of pubs, so that the only place many can hang out is in open spaces away from everybody’s gaze. So, their drinking apprenticeship is served in the company of other adolescents, not as it should be, among adults.
It must be really galling, when things go horribly wrong, to hear priests and worthies gnash their teeth about how ‘we’, that is society, have lost contact with young men and how we should listen to what they’re trying to say.
The people who utter this bilge are the people who find it hardest to listen.
Some are lost boys but mostly young men are okay. Get off their case. Stop preaching. Start listening.