What Would Jesus Wear?

I’m a bit confused about the current rumpus about hoodies and caps and people who wear them in shopping centres.
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Bluewater banned them from being worn in the centre to help with their campaign against crime and anti-social behaviour because the people doing all of this tend to wear hoods and caps to obscure their faces from the CCTV cameras. I think that, as a principle, is quite sensible. The media gets hold of this story and mysteriously, the words youth, children, young people/thugs etc begin appearing in headlines. Even The Children’s Society got involved and said it was "blatant discrimination based on stereotypes and prejudices".

I find this, above all, is the most confusing thing of it all. There was no mention of an age-range being targeted in all of this until the story was grabbed by the media.

There is an issue of respect which still needs addressing, and not the way round people seem to think it should be – if adults want respect from young people, then they have to give respect. The stereotypes the Children’s Society refer to come from people not bothering to find out either why some of the young people behave the way they do and see if there’s a way to help change that, or even just to talk to some young people and realise that a hoodie and a cap doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll beat you up or shout at you across the street.

Tony Blair has been talking about “fostering a culture of respect” in the country, and immediately people jumped on it and turned it all towards young people. Hypocrisy will do nothing to raise respect.

Listening to Radio 5 Live last week during my lunch break meant I got to hear an interview Simon Mayo did with a couple of teenagers in Birmingham, I think it was. They pointed straight at one of the problems (just as young people always seem to be able to), and said that they don’t really feel like they should have respect for teachers, because they have no respect for the kids.

I would like to believe that the majority of people would rather give others the benefit of the doubt when they see how they look and assume they were good people rather than “yobs” (for example). But I think the culture of fear that has been so carefully nurtured in Western Countries – the same culture which has some spouting a lot of things they don’t really understand about refugees and immigrants, and supporting the war in Iraq, just to quote a couple of examples – has ended up with us turning in on “our own”, as it were, and now the younger generations are a feared group in our society. It’s far too easy to scapegoat young people and not bother looking for the real roots and causes of the problems.

I took the Bluewater ban to be a rather practical measure – and if the only inconvenience it will make to people’s lives is that they have to wear another jumper when they go shopping, then I really can’t understand what the fuss is all about.

“Fostering a culture of respect” is great soundbite politics. But where the media lets down its readers/viewers most times – at least in the publications and programmes which don’t go into great depth about a lot of the issues – is that there is a meaning behind all of this. One big problem with politics in this country (there are many others), is that the soundbites are outweighing the substance. It’s easier to quote a nice, succinct sentence in headlines, news reports and so on than it is to go a bit deeper and report what the soundbite means.

There are young people who give others a bad name. I think everyone accepts this. But simple faith in humankind should tell us that there are others out there who aren’t so bad. Every generation has “black sheep”, and the young generations are no different at all. But where they are different is the treatment they get.

I would far rather see youth workers and activities aimed at the young people visiting the centre being what the money is spent on rather than having more police based there or imposing dress codes which, let’s face it, only antagonise and aggravate. Why does the solution always have to be negative? It may prove to be effective, and it may not – that remains to be seen, but until then a larger wedge is pushed into the generation gaps in a bid to halt crime (and if you look at statistics, crimes committed by children between the ages of 10 and 17 went down by nearly 40,000 – or about 26% between 1992 and 2002).

It is depressing that the media can add just one or two words, and a lot of work done by good youth workers trying to put together links between generations can be lost in one go.

Come to think of it, it’s depressing that the media can get away with it all.

And for the record, I think Jesus would probably be wearing a hoodie too.