by Richard Frankland

Created on: March 12, 2007   Last Updated: May 13, 2007

For the past eleven years I have worked as a professional youth worker working with young people from all social and ethnic backgrounds.
For the last three years my focus has been with disaffected young people in North London. These young people the police call no hoper's! These young are the hoodies that David Cameron says we should hug. These are the young people who are given ABC contracts or ASBOS.

These young people have little or no education a high percentage cannot read, have little or no stable family input. Many have parents or relations in prison, many have parents who are addicts. These young people are trying to cope in the best way they can.
With very limited chances of employment all that is left is to hang around, drinking, smoking skunk or sniffing coke, dealing and getting involved in petty crime and anti social behavior.
There is little affordable resources they can access, so often this behavior is a response to their frustration and boredom.
It is very easy to criticize and say I never behaved in such a way just because I was bored, without looking deeper than the surface. The stories that many of these young lives and what they have experienced from such an early age has to be taken into consideration. My experience of people who make these comments normally had very comfortable stable upbringings as I myself did.
Boredom does cause such responses although evil is a very strong word that I would use for the causes rather than the people.
I have found that when you find ways to engage with these young people the anti social behavior drops, they crime rate goes down. But take the projects away and the problems arise.
There is a need for funding to be given to grass roots organizations so they can work with long term objectives instead of eight weeks at a time. Then these young people can learn skills to help them become responsible members of their communities. They can start to realize their potential and change. This is not just idle dreaming or wishful thinking but a method that has been proven again and again.
One estate had massive problems with anti social behavior and the organization I was working for got funding for twelve weeks dedicated work. This included detached youth workers on the estate three evenings a week, one organized activity or trip and month and two eight week workshops, one based on music and the other on art. It was a huge success and the police told us that during that period the complaints that normally mounted to ten or more a night dropped to within a few weeks, no complaints at all. With results like that the answer is surely give more funding so this positive work can continue. At the end of the twelve weeks it took a further three months to gain any more funding and in that time the boredom had kicked in and the old habits returned.
We can not expect to solve ingrained problems in a few weeks it takes time, trust and relationships.
So my conclusion to this question is, boredom causes evil but we need to look at the reasons and start to tackle them with long term solutions.

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