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This book provides you with the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of youth crime and youth justice available. Keeping you abreast of contemporary debates, this fourth edition of Youth and Crime : Includes updated chapters on youth crime discourse and data, youth victimology, youth and social policy, youth justice strategies and comparative and international youth justice, providing a critical analysis of issues such as institutional abuse, child poverty, cyberbullying, child trafficking, international children's rights and transnational policy transfer.

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THE PAST fortnight has seen the publication of no fewer than three heavyweight academic studies of the causes of crime and social breakdown in Britain. They have met with very different receptions.

The first suggested that the rise in crime over the past 20 years is far more closely connected with the rise in mass unemployment than even left-wing commentators had previously believed. The work of David Dickinson, an economist writing for the Labour- leaning Institute for Public Policy Research, it examined long-term trends in great detail and, among many other things, demonstrated the simple fact that most criminals are unemployed.

The second study, by Gwyneth Boswell of the University of East Anglia, reported on the backgrounds of children who kill, rape and injure. Again the picture was grim. After looking at 250 juveniles in prison or in care for the most serious crimes, Dr Boswell found that 40 per cent had been beaten and bullied before they turned to crime and another third had been raped, buggered or otherwise sexually assaulted by a relative or family friend.

The third study was the massive Psychosocial Disorders in Young People, edited by Sir Michael Rutter of the Institute of Psychiatry at London University and Professor David Smith of Edinburgh University. Their findings were radically different. Forget about poverty and sexual abuse, they seemed to say, the real cause of social and psychological disorder was post-war freedom and individualism.

The responses to these three studies provide a good gauge of the state of the cultural war over where the blame lies for what is going wrong with Britain. Not one national newspaper reported on David Dickinson's findings. Dr Boswell was a little luckier: three national newspapers carried modest articles on her study. The Rutter-Smith report, however, was shouted from the rooftops.

"Permissive Sixties are to blame for the teenage troubles of the Nineties," proclaimed the Daily Mail. "A pioneering international study explodes the myth that youngsters can blame anti-social behaviour on unemployment, poor housing or broken homes." Crime was caused by "confused young people, growing up in a moral vacuum [who] cannot cope with the sexual freedom and licentiousness which were the watchwords of that decade."

The Daily Telegraph announced: "Rising tide of crime is blamed on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," and added an editorial admonishing deluded liberals for thinking that poverty had anything to do with it. "Children today grow up far too quickly," sighed a Guardian columnist after reading the report. "They no longer communicate but sit with their Walkmans on in front of the TV lost in the alien world of youth culture."

Sir Michael and Professor Smith are embarrassed by the coverage. They are academics, after all, and their findings are more tentative than the reports suggested, peppered with all the usual scholarly conditionals and calls for every observation to be submitted to further research for confirmation. Their underlying message, however, was not distorted.

"Psychosocial disorders", they said, may be caused by better schooling, which raises expectations that are difficult to fulfil. There was no direct connection with poverty. Parents who divorced added to the pressure, while the growth of youth culture and of youth markets for music and fashion isolated the young from the beneficial influence of adults and introduced them to sex and the heartache of broken relationships far earlier than previous generations.

"The belief that people should be free to choose their own way of life and be able to satisfy their own desires," said Professor Smith, "could be connected to the growth in crime and suicide."

It should come as no surprise that, of the three studies, it was the Rutter-Smith report that received all the attention. It was the one that challenged an idea that seems both natural and sensible to most of us: that need causes crime as well as greed. When people find that they are unable to afford necessities, or luxuries that they can see others enjoying, they are more likely to be tempted to steal.

If a study by reputable experts suggests this is wrong, then it is news - more so than a study that merely confirms something we believe we know, however depressing that knowledge may be.

But there is a heavy political weighting to this as well. Rejecting the idea that crime could have social causes has become a staple of modern Tory thought. When the Conservatives came to power unemployment was under a million and the police recorded 2.5 million crimes. In 1993, nearly 3 million were unemployed and 5.5 million crimes were recorded. When unemployment fell in 1987 and 1988, so did crime. When unemployment rose in 1990 and 1991, crime followed suit.

Margaret Thatcher and her successors in government have always denied that there is any link. "We should have no truck with trendy theories which try to explain away crime by blaming social-economic factors," Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, told an audience of Basingstoke Conservatives in 1993. "Criminals ... should be held to account for their actions. Trying to pass the buck is counterproductive and dangerous."

Right-wing newspapers that share this view understandably greeted the Rutter-Smith report with jubilation.

But the ecstatic coverage ignored the odd implications of the academics' findings. Education leads to expectations which cannot be met, they say ... what are we meant to do? Close schools? Youth culture and youth sex leads to crime and suicide ... should we ban both?

There may be a grain of truth in their criticism of people who look only at poverty when they discuss crime but at least men such as Mr Dickinson, whose report was so neglected, appear to offer practical solutions. Tackling unemployment may be difficult, but it would be child's play in comparison to changing the attitudes of every teenager in Britain.

To show that connections between criminality and joblessness have existed for decades, he looked at who actually commits crimes. A 1972 study of 18-year-olds in London showed that the offending rate was three times higher for the unemployed. Research by the Northumbrian police between 1975 and 1980 showed that about one-third of all offenders were unemployed men. In 1993, the National Association of Probation Officers surveyed 1,331 convicted offenders and found that 79 per cent were living on means- tested benefits.

Moving from the small to the large scale, he then looked at young men, the group most likely to be involved in crime and showed that their rate of offending was closely correlated to rises and falls in the unemployment rate. The fit could be tightly measured: every time the jobless figures went up by 1 per cent, there was a 0.4 per cent rise in burglaries.

This is not a particularly radical idea. A report from within the Home Office itself, which was leaked last April, concluded that all the evidence from Britain and abroad showed that the "single most effective form of intervention was the provision of employment to offenders".

Against this background, the Rutter-Smith findings look exposed. Paul Cavadino, chairman of the Penal Affairs Consortium, which represents civil liberties pressure groups and workers in the criminal justice system, finds very little about it to agree with.

"No one suggests that mass unemployment is the sole cause of crime, but to deny it is prominent among the reasons is absurd," he said. "The correlation between high unemployment and high crime is so obvious to most people that commentators have been forced to work hard to find more and more bizarre explanations to deny it."

Bizarre or not, three such explanations have emerged. The first is that crime and often poverty are not social and economic problems but have a genetic cause, predisposing some people towards aggression. The second is that there can be no inevitable link between unemployment and crime because in the 1930s millions were out of work but the country was peaceful. And the third is that a country's morals determine whether it is a happy and safe place to live.

Sir Michael Rutter and Professor Smith are associated with all three of these arguments. Let us look at them in turn.

First, the genetics. Earlier this year Sir Michael chaired one of the most controversial scientific conferences in recent memory. Selected speakers were invited to discuss "criminal genes" behind closed doors. At a press conference two American scientists suggested that abortion should be considered when testing indicated that a child was likely to be born with genes which allegedly predisposed it to aggressive or anti- social behaviour.

While not necessarily endorsing the call for a genes police, Sir Michael added that genetics could lead to a better "understanding of how risk factors operate, which is important for intervention and prevention".

Britain's leading geneticists reacted to the conference with anger. The whole attempt to unravel human behaviour - the result of a complex interaction between genetic predispositions and the environment in which people are brought up - and find a gene for aggression was dangerously misconceived, they said; it was like trying to unbake a cake and fit the ingredients back in their packets.

Steve Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, derided the assumptions behind the conference and noted that middle-class genetic determinists worried only about the crimes of the poor and never asked whether managers, say, had a gene for fraud.

"Violence in British society has risen dramatically over the past decade," he said. "In the US the homicide rate among young males has doubled since 1985. There is no conceivable genetic explanation - this isn't a mutant gene suddenly appearing."

An open letter signed by 15 scientists said it was "alarming" that the conference did not include "speakers with a viewpoint critical of genetic determinism. It gives the impression that genetic causes of crime are more important than social causes."

What about the 1930s? It is very difficult to compare the 1930s with the 1990s, because the way the police record crime has changed beyond recognition. But although there were undoubtedly far fewer crimes 60 years ago, the crash of 1929 still had profound affects on law and order.

The number of men found guilty of indictable offences rose by a third between 1929 and 1932 and crime rose fastest in the "depressed areas" of the North. In 1931, the Prison Commissioners for Nottingham Jail looked at their young inmates and wrote that half of them had a "difficult or even hopeless" future. "Less than 50 per cent have jobs to go to or even unemployment benefit to draw and it is difficult for them not to return to prison." The next year Sir Herbert Samuel, the Liberal politician, drew the attention of the Commons to the fact that the graph of crime was, year after year, following the unemployment graph.

The argument about historical contrasts does not end here. It is suggested that, for whatever reason, modern youth suffers more "psychosocial" stresses and depressions than their predecessors. Crime comparisons across the decades may be hard to make, but the troubles they bring are minute in comparison with the task of working out the relationships between the states of mind of people today and in the past.

But Sir Michael and Professor Smith assert that the evidence from across Europe shows that young people born before the Second World War had far fewer "psychosocial" problems than young people born afterwards. This approach can have peculiar consequences. In the case of Germany, from where last week's study drew data on mental disorders of different generations, it raised the prospect that we should think of the generation which, on the whole, supported Hitler and waged war across Europe as well-adjusted, while regarding the post-war generations who built the modern German democracy as deeply disturbed.

It may be tempting to dismiss Sir Michael and Professor Smith as ideologically- driven reactionaries, but that would be unfair. Their 800-page study is rigorous, detailed and cautious. The professor said last week that he regarded the imputation that he was a conservative as completely wrong. "In the past 15 to 20 years high unemployment and growth in inequality has led to crime," he said. "My biggest worry is the existence of a group of young people permanently disenfranchised who don't participate as citizens. We've yet to see the full consequences of the creation of this class, but I fear them."

He added, however, that you could not get away from the fact that crime started to rise in the "golden era" of low unemployment and high living standards which began after the war and ended in the oil crisis of 1973. So, too, did the growths in drug-taking, alcoholism and suicide.

This brings us to the third non-economic explanation for social breakdown -changes in morals. Here the ideological battle-lines begin to blur. The real 20th-century revolution in most Western countries is the collapse in traditional family structures and the ending of sexual and social taboos. Few believe that increased freedom has not brought some unhappy consequences.

Robert Reiner, professor of criminology at the London School of Economics, who has argued with Professor Smith in the past, says that culturally repressive societies had the advantage that citizens did not need to be coerced into behaving themselves. They had "a policeman in their heads" which kept them out of trouble.

That policeman seems to have gone, but we are not about to set aside our personal freedoms to bring him back. The question is, can we restore a more morally responsible culture without loss of civil liberty? Professor Smith is optimistic. There is nothing inevitable about bad parenting, he said, and couples can be taught and encouraged to spend more time with their children.

Professor Reiner disagrees. Permissiveness by itself does not bring crime, he insists. Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries are very permissive, but law and order is not a great problem there because the market is strictly controlled by Keynesian policies and social democratic intervention. In other words, its cultural climate is permissive, but its economic climate is more controlled.

"The difficulty for Britain is that we have the worst of both worlds," he says. "We have the free economic market and permissiveness at the same time - economic and moral laissez-faire, if you like. There's no point in telling the young to be responsible if you won't intervene on social democratic lines and offer them the reward of a job or a place in society. You can try to preach, but they won't listen."

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THE PAST fortnight has seen the publication of no fewer than three heavyweight academic studies of the causes of crime and social breakdown in Britain. They have met with very different receptions. The first suggested that the rise in crime over the past 20 years is far more closely connected with the rise in mass unemployment than even left-wing commentators had previously believed.

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Are these problems social or private problems? Do young people have them or be them? How has this changed in the last 100 to 150 years:

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Are these problems social or private problems? Do young people have them or be them? How has this changed in the last 100 to 150 years:

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•Domestic violence against children

•Cigarette smoking amongst teenagers

•Youth unemployment

•Football hooliganism

•Youth crime

Providing education and training for disadvantaged young people

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Quick Answer

There are many causes of juvenile delinquency, including poor parenting, peer pressure, aggressive pre-disposition, neighborhood, school life or performance and mistreatment. The issue of nature versus nurture has been widely debated in relation to juvenile crime for a decades. A study by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention determined that both innate characteristics and outside influence equally influence juvenile crime.
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There are many causes of juvenile delinquency, including poor parenting, peer pressure, aggressive pre-disposition, neighborhood, school life or performance and mistreatment. The issue of nature versus nurture has been widely debated in relation to juvenile crime for a decades. A study by the U.S.

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Our ultimate aim is for Wales to become a smokefree nation. This is generally defined as a smoking prevalence rate of 5% or less.

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Child abuse - which has dominated the headlines over the past year as a result of the Savile inquiry and other high-profile child-cruelty cases, and which is often presented as one of the country's most intractable problems - could be reduced by 70% by the year 2030, delegates to a Guardian debate were told.

Plenty of research exists, and more work is being carried out, that shows what could and would lead to a dramatic reduction in the incidence of maltreatment of children. The biggest difficulty is persuading not only decision-makers, but also the public, that preventing child abuse is possible, given the right steps.
But what's needed first, participants at the roundtable debate - sponsored by the NSPCC - heard, is a shift in the way the media perceives the problem: too often, one participant remarked, tabloid-newspaper coverage focuses on a witch-hunt and not on the issues that create a culture in which abuse is allowed to continue.

The debate focused on the fact that children who are abused are much more likely to become adults who abuse (between 30% and 40% of people who are abused as children go on to become abusers themselves) - so it is vital to concentrate efforts on families that could be identified as being at greater risk of abuse. Supporting those families would pay huge dividends in the long term because reducing the incidence of abuse in the short term would have the knock-on effect of reducing the number of adults likely to become abusers in the decades ahead.

Surprising evidence

"When you look at the evidence, what comes as a big surprise is that it's the very start of a child's life that matters most," said one participant. "By the age of three, nurses can identify those children who will go on to become violent offenders. By three, these children are 10-times more aggressive than the most peaceful children.

"As well as being able to identify the children, we can also identify their home circumstances. We know problems stem directly from not having a secure parental attachment; 15% of children in this country have disorganised attachment and they are on a pathway to being disruptive at school and going on to live lives with high levels of aggression."

These children would go on to become society's abusers, so taking the right action now would make a significant difference to levels of abuse in the future.
The problem, delegates were told, was that while Savile and individual, shocking cases of abuse, such as that of murdered four-year-old Daniel Pelka, had led to high levels of public anger about child abuse - the thrust of the reaction was still punitive. "What we're seeing is a great deal of moral outrage, but not so much interest in the targeted work that would make a real difference," one participant noted.

Stoking the flames of this reaction is a lot of the media coverage. "All the tabloids want to do is see offenders crucified," said one contributor. "So the focus of decision-makers gets drawn towards that." Another participant agreed, adding: "The great fear politicians have is of newspapers pointing their fingers [at initiatives designed to ameliorate the problems] and saying 'nanny state'." But the good news, said another participant, was that research was well on the way to identifying which initiatives could be successful at tackling the root causes of abuse - and a £165m Big Lottery project was about to begin, aimed at pinpointing exactly which early-life interventions could be transformative.

"We don't yet have a blueprint, but we do know a lot more than many people realise about how to make a difference and how to identify people most at risk [of becoming abusers]. We're in a very good place to start working; we're on a learning path," said one contributor.

The NSPCC, which has experienced a huge surge in demand for its services in the wake of the Savile investigation, is also expanding its work in response to the increased awareness of child abuse. Its £20m Now I Know campaign to build a ChildLine Schools Service, will train volunteers to visit primary schools throughout Britain to teach children about abuse. It's about giving children the confidence to talk about abuse and equipping them to protect themselves through simple advice.

What the Savile inquiry has shown is that "stranger danger", on which past campaigns had concentrated, doesn't target the biggest problem, which is people who are trusted and known to children, and who find ways and opportunities to access them (in more than 90% of cases, children are sexually abused by someone known to them). The problem with this message, several delegates pointed out, was that by alerting children to the fact that trusted adults could be abusers, it raised the question of who could a child trust?
One positive reaction to Savile is that many parents have contacted the NSPCC to ask what they ought to tell their children to equip them with the knowledge they need. Parents are certainly looking to play their part - six in 10 report trying to have a conversation with their children about the risks of sexual abuse, although most concentrate on stranger danger, despite knowing that the real risk is closer to home. The NSPCC's response has been its current campaign on "the underwear rule", which gives parents simple guidelines to explain to children that the parts of their body covered by their underwear are private, and no one should be asking to touch or look at those places.

There was also discussion about what adults who suspected another adult of abuse could do about it: who could they trust with their fears and what assurances could they be given to enable them to disclose their concerns?
"The worry at the moment is that people dismiss their anxieties because no one wants to think it of a trusted colleague or friend," said one participant. "There's a big fear around getting involved: people think, if I give information what will happen next? Do I have to follow it through? And we need to get the message across: 'just tell us'."

Internet safety

Alongside the importance of tackling child abuse at its roots - ie in families with problems that can be easily identified - the roundtable participants heard about a number of key areas and stakeholders who could make a difference in the battle to reduce the problem. These include GPs, especially given the recent changes in the way services are commissioned.

"GPs don't want responsibility for this, so there's a huge cultural job to be done with them to get them to take on the issue," said one participant. "But it would make a huge difference."

Internet companies must also be persuaded to police themselves, so that when a new product or service is developed that is likely to be used by children and young people, it has a safety check to ensure it cannot be misappropriated by an abuser.

The onus has so far been on parents, teachers and law-enforcement agents to ensure that internet products are not abused in this way. But, said one participant, recent investigations into the number of individuals (overwhelmingly men) who were suspected of internet misuse illustrates that society cannot effectively tackle the problem from that end.

"No police force in the country can cope with the number of abuse suspects who have come to their attention via the internet," said one participant. "We're going to have to accept that high-tech companies will have to up their game where child protection is concerned."

At the table

David Brindle (chair) public services editor, Guardian News & Media

Peter Wanless chief executive, NSPCC

Emma Thomas chief executive, Youthnet

Mark Williams-Thomas TV presenter, criminologist and child protection expert

George Hoskin founder, chief executive and research co-ordinator, Wave Trust

Michael Little co-director, Dartington social research unit

John Carr chair, Coalition on Internet Safety

John Page director of family services projects, Tri-borough

Leon Feinstein director of evidence, Early Intervention Foundation

Roundtable report commissioned and controlled by the Guardian. Discussion hosted to a brief agreed with the NSPCC. Funded by the NSPCC. Contact Wendy Miller on 020-3353 3443, wendy.miller@theguardian.com. For information on roundtables visit guardian.com/sponsored-content
Topics

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Child abuse - which has dominated the headlines over the past year as a result of the Savile inquiry and other high-profile child-cruelty cases, and which is often presented as one of the country's most intractable problems - could be reduced by 70% by the year 2030, delegates to a Guardian debate were told.

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We don't know exactly how many children in the UK are victims of child abuse. Child abuse is usually hidden from view and children may be too young, too scared or too ashamed to tell anyone about what is happening to them.

However, there are a number of different sources of information, including official government statistics and academic research. These give us an indication of the number of children who are affected by abuse.

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We don't know exactly how many children in the UK are victims of child abuse. Child abuse is usually hidden from view and children may be too young, too scared or too ashamed to tell anyone about what is happening to them.

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Read "Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice" at NAP.edu

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Read chapter Patterns and Trends in Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice: Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and po...

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Jason Sylvester's Gangs and Violence Presentation

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Jason Sylvester's Gangs and Violence Presentation

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Around 100 yrs ago any sort of domestic violence was classed as a 'Private problem' as time wore on and studies and research found a cycle being made, the abused becoming the abuser. This included children who both experience and witness domestic violence.

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Providing education and training for disadvantaged young people.

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Providing education and training for disadvantaged young people.

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The responsibility for providing education and training for disadvantaged young people has shifted from something that was seen as their problem and their responsibility to a problem that is now a social problem.  The onus for the provision now falls with the Government, who have failed to provide adequate opportunities for the young people in the past. What was seen as a private problem  100/150 years ago with the opportunity for education and training being very much class related, has now become a much debated social one.  The Government have pledged to provide adequate support and assistance for those who are NEET (not in employment education or training) to enable them to access education opportunities and to ensure that all young people  have the tools and opportunities to fulfill their potential, regardless of their background or life circumstances.
The social problem and awareness of NEET is reflected in the UK office for National Statistics in 2016 confirming that 826,000 young people aged between 16-24 were NEET in the United Kingdom in October to December 2016, a decrease of 31,000 from July to September 2016.

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The cost of unemployment for young people and wider society.

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The cost of unemployment for young people and wider society.

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The economic and social costs of unemployment include

Personal costs to unemployed (lost income, loss of sense of value, lower on-the-job training)

Costs to government (lost tax revenue and higher benefit spending)

Costs to society in general (social problems, alienation, lost GDP).

Personal Costs of unemployment

Loss of earnings to the unemployed. Unemployment is one of the biggest causes of poverty in the UK. Prolonged periods of unemployment can push households into debt and increase rates of relative poverty.

Potential homelessness. Loss of income can leave people without sufficient income to meet housing costs. Rises in unemployment often exacerbate the rates of homelessness. (BBC)

Harms future prospects. Those who are unemployed will find it more difficult to get work in the future (this is known as the hysteresis effect)

Lost human capital. If people are out of work, they miss out on 'on the job training' This is a vital component of human capital and labour skills; high rates of unemployment can reduce labour productivity. If someone is out of work for two years, they miss out on the latest working practices and trends. Being unemployed can also affect the confidence of the unemployed and they become less employable in the future.

Unemployment and depression/mental health

Stress and health problems of being unemployed. Amongst studies of unemployed men, signs of depression, mental anxiety, and health problems are noticeably higher. (Effects of unemployment on health (US Library of Health) According to a study by Gallup, "About one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression - almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less."

Another study found that common outcomes of unemployment include depression, substance abuse, admissions to psychiatric hospitals, death by suicide, and violence. (1)

Cost of unemployment to Government

Increased government borrowing. Higher unemployment will cause a fall in tax revenue because there are fewer people paying income tax and also spending less (hence lower VAT). Also, the government will have to spend more on unemployment and related benefits. The government doesn't just pay unemployment benefit, but a family who has unemployment will be more likely to receive housing benefit and income support. One study shows that the cost to the Exchequer for one person being unemployed is £6,243 a year in benefits and lost tax revenue. (Independent)

Costs of unemployment to society

Lower GDP for the economy. High unemployment indicates the economy is operating below full capacity and is inefficient; this will lead to lower output and incomes. The unemployed are also unable to purchase as many goods, so will contribute to lower spending and lower output. A rise in unemployment can cause a negative multiplier effect.

Increase in social problems. Areas of high unemployment (especially youth unemployment) tend to have more crime and vandalism. It can lead to alienation and difficulties in integrating young unemployed people into society.

Political instability. The period of mass unemployment in the 1930s led to social unrest. In Germany, an unemployment rate of 6 million was an important factor in the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.
Unemployment in the UK
Periods of high unemployment in the UK exacerbated problems of poverty, alienation, and levels of inequality.
Related

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Economic costs of unemployment - Economics Help

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Economic and social costs of unemployment include lost income, costs to government, and costs to society in general - alienation, increased crime, relative poverty.

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https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=football+hooligans+youtube&view=detail&mid=2BB74BC9BE7D77DCBC7F2BB74BC9BE7D77DCBC7F&FORM=VIRE

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This shows that youth unemployment is now a social issue and it is happening to young people.

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This shows that youth unemployment is now a social issue and it is happening to young people.

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Youth Unemployment
The youth unemployment landscape in the UK remains a growing problem for UK employers, educators and our young people.

Youth unemployment has been an escalating problem in the UK since 2005, with the most recent rises directly attributable to issues of the economy

Persistent youth unemployment has been embedded in our system over decades

Unemployment while young is linked to long-term reductions in wages, increased chances of subsequent periods of unemployment, and poorer health outcomes.

High levels of youth unemployment also have wider social and economic costs. The cost of youth unemployment over the next decade has been estimated at £28 billion

"With youth unemployment nearing 1 million, supporting young people into jobs - and sustainable jobs in particular - must be a foremost priority if the UK is to avoid a lost generation." CBI

UK businesses tell us they struggle to recruit young, work-ready staff

A generation of young people lost to unemployment means an inadequate talent pool for the needs of our businesses as the economy recovers

What causes youth unemployment?

As mentioned youth unemployment has been growing since 2005 so the recession and economy bear only some of the blame for high youth unemployment levels.

Other causes such as those listed below have been cited in reports such as; Youth Unemployment: cyclical and structural concerns (CPS), Youth unemployment: the crisis we cannot afford (ACEVO), The Youth Unemployment Challenge (UKCES) to name a few.

Lack of jobs

Gaps between education and employment

Young people lack skills needed for work

Employers prefer to work with experienced staff

Credentialism

Young people's expectations

Lack of qualifications or appropriate qualifications

Lack of accurate and engaging careers information

Rise in retirement age

Employment legislation

Recruitment Methods

Employers perceptions of young people

Poor vocational options

Lack of quality vocational pathways

Why do we care?

The threat of a "lost generation" for some is quite real although according to Prof. Paul Gregg this is an exaggerated term, what we do know is that there are significant consequences.

Experiencing unemployment in youth can lead to emotional problems and can also reduce a person's life long earning/career potential, it creates further inequalities particularly between communities, and the financial costs of supporting unemployment; welfare and medical support reach into billions.

Then consider the cost to business and to the prosperity of the UK, imagine trying to recruit from a large pool of applicants with little or no work experience, where will the next generation of leaders and innovators come from? To compete in the ever changing world economy we need to have a bright, educated and skilled workforce.

Finally with nearly 1 million young people unemployed, that is approximately 1 in 5 young people it is likely that we will all know someone in our network who will be affected by this problem, not least those still in education yet to try to gain employment.

Can youth unemployment be fixed?

Yes, we believe so. Already there are thousands of brilliant youth engagement activities and initiatives happening across the UK. 1 in 4 employers are very engaged with youth activities from talking in schools through to taking on apprentices and employing graduates.

But there is more that can be done; we believe the solutions to youth unemployment are:

Increase employer support

Reduce employment legislation that creates a barrier for employers to work with young people

Help employers to recognise the value of skills and behaviours as well as academic criteria

Ensure education prioritises employability skills and careers learning for young people as well as quality academia

Improve the quality and relevance of vocational routes and qualifications

Ensure Careers Education is aligned with the needs of the economy, local labour market information and is motivating and inspirational

Help young people to value work of all entry levels (raising aspirations is important but there are many jobs that then get overlooked)

Create a welfare system that supports young people to find employment or training opportunities

Improve the coordination of all of the youth engagement activities so that information can be shared, and so that young people will benefit from collaboration/improved signposting

So what benefits to an individual or organisation are there to supporting young people into employment?

Investment now in youth employment and engagement will support the needs of a competitive and successful UK economy for years to come

Companies that are seen to respond to the challenge of youth unemployment will gain a competitive edge as consumers exercise choices in favour of companies with positive social values

Corporate Social Responsibility

Building own talent pool & knowledge transfer from ageing workforce

Young people bring creativity, innovation, flexibility, high energy and an understanding of new and emerging technologies

There is evidence that by recruiting and investing in young people encourages loyalty and reduces attrition

Workforce diversity

Reduced cost - lower recruitment and wage costs

Existing staff training and development - utilising existing staff to train, mentor, develop and support new younger staff

We have provided a list of reports and research documents around youth unemployment for your further research into this topic. If however, you would like to talk to us in more detail please contact info@youthemployment.org.uk

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Youth Unemployment - Youth Employment UK

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The youth unemployment landscape in the UK remains a growing problem for UK employers, educators and our young people. Youth unemployment has been an escalating problem in the UK since 2005, with the most recent rises directly attributable to issues of the economy Persistent youth unemployment has been embedded in our system over decades Unemployment while young is linked to long-term reductions in wages, increased chances of subsequent periods of unemployment, and poorer health outcomes.

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It is now seen as a social problem. Those who smoke are made to feel morally condemned in contemporary society. It is seen as deviant behaviour.  100 years ago it was a private problem (if a problem at all) Adults would smoke in their homes and around there children, mum's would smoke while pregnant but this was not viewed as a social problem. Now it is illegal to smoke in a car with anybody under the age of 18, cigarettes are stored behind shutters and the packaging is extremely graphic as a deterrent to young people.
Young people who smoke have the problem although it is their choice to start smoking, peer pressure and social learning theory can play a huge part in this decision.

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youth crime is viewed very much as a social problem in today's society. going back 100 years ago it was viewed as a private problem because it was the disadvantaged youths who were the ones committing the crimes so it was seen as a private problem to the families of these youths.
They were the problem because of their family circumstances but now they are viewed as having the problem because of research into learned behaviours, primary and secondary socialisation. Also with being marginalised based on economic, education or cultural backgrounds - not getting equal or fair access to something- makes them feel different. They can have no feeling of love and belonging which is why they end up in gangs. they feel self actualisation - maslows theory-

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Football Hooliganism is viewed as a Private problem ,violent destructive behaviour perpetrated at football events .
It was defined differently in 1920, 1934, and 1950 .In the 1990's the label Football hooliganism began to appear .Leading to increased media interest. This created a moral panic out of proportion of the actual problem .