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If teens are willing to speak out on crime, we should be ready to act
IT’S not often teenagers feel comfortable enough to tell the world: “I was robbed” –
or to use their term, “jacked”.
But where there might once have been a stigma attached to admitting falling victim to a petty bus stop robbery (one teenager tells how he was jumped on for a measly half a carton of juice) there is now a stoical expectation that it’s going to happen to you at some time or another while you’re growing up.
Confidential police statistics that we have uncovered this week seem to back up the anecdotal evidence with hard figures. More than a third of robbery victims in Camden are teenagers, and 14-year-olds are more likely to be “jacked” than anybody else. “It’s a way of life” is the cry.
Islington’s Labour MP Emily Thornberry recently said that in her neck of the woods it was almost expected for teenagers to get mugged. She held her breath as the opposition seized on her comments to bash her party as losers on crime.
Spin doctors quickly tried to sweep her comments under the carpet as if it could not be spoken about. The opposite is what’s needed.
Conservative councillor Keith Sedgwick can’t be accused of holding back. He has been outspoken in his critique of the way youth disorder is handled in Camden. He has, after all, seen problems first hand. He’s been beaten on his doorstep; he’s had his flat graffitied.
Nobody could fail to sympathise with him when he lists the crimes his family has suffered in the past year.
But would the ‘Wanted’-style posters he would like to see in Gospel Oak be the answer? We don’t think so.
Instead, Camden’s Liberal Democrat and Conservative alliance should be trying to get to the core of the problem. And refusing youth centres’ requests for grants in our most deprived areas – where jackings are rife – doesn’t seem to be a very good place to start.
The Castlehaven Community Centre has done some splendid work. We’ve sung their praises in the New Journal because we’ve seen how teenage heads can be positively influenced without the hectoring heavy-handed approach.
Now Castlehaven’s spending plans are in tatters. Little wonder some of the coalition’s backbenchers have broken with party line.
The council says it is already listening and has set up a Youth Council in a bid to seek the views of the borough’s teenagers.
That’s good as far as it goes, but we should be reaching out to all teenagers.
The Town Hall should go further and make contact with the kids who won’t turn up at Judd Street when invited to wear rosettes in the Youth Council chamber. Part of the democratic ideal is that ALL citizens are included.
Our elected MPs and councillors should reflect every section of our society. There’s a clear deficit of the Castlehaven Community Centre tendency right now.
Let’s invest in ALL of our young people.
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