How the Young Poor Measure Poverty in Britain: Drink, Drugs and Their Time in Jail

Chris Loufte for The New York Times Bands of youths rove many British towns. A group in Wythenshawe includes, from left, MC Blendz, Moe, Jeremy Taylor, Sid and David Williams. Twitter Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Single Page Reprints ShareClose Linkedin Digg Facebook Mixx MySpace Permalink

By SARAH LYALL Published: March 10, 2007 Correction Appended WYTHENSHAWE, England Wandering the streets after dusk in this endless housing project, the five teenagers said they were not troubled by the turns their lives had taken so far. Not by the absent fathers, the mothers on welfare, the drugs, the arrests, the incarcerations, the wearying inevitability of it all.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Chris Loufte for The New York Times One resident, Jane Leach, says the police are reluctant to apprehend some youths when they start drinking near the homes in the housing project. When you live in Wythenshawe, you dont expect any better, said David Williams, a 17-year-old who says he dropped out of school at 14, is high much of the time, steals when he can and has been arrested too many times to count. He was not posturing. He is not a gang member or a hardened criminal seeking street cred he was simply giving the unsentimental facts. The housing projects in Wythenshawe (pronounced WITH-en-shah) represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation. But the problems here a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality are common across Britain. And while Prime Minister Tony Blair has made addressing poverty and so-called antisocial behavior one of his main priorities, his critics say there is little to show after 10 years in office and a blizzard of new programs. In February, Britain scored at the bottom among 21 industrialized countries in a Unicef report that used 40 indicators, like relative poverty, health and family relationships, to measure childrens wellbeing. (The United States was next to last.) Last year a paper published by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive study group, concluded that Britains young people were the worst-behaved in Europe, spending less time with their parents, drinking and fighting more, and trying drugs and sex earlier than their counterparts across the Continent. Sociologists, politicians and childrens advocates have argued endlessly about why Britains youths are so troubled. Drinking is part of it: consumption among youths who drink has been rising steadily for 20 years. British youths are ranked the third-worst binge drinkers in Europe, behind those in Denmark and Ireland. In a survey last year, 25 percent of British 15-year-olds said they had been drunk more than 20 times in the previous 12 months. The Institute for Public Policy Research report said, too, that young Britons tendency to spend time with their peers rather than with adults was robbing them of even basic social skills. In Britain, 45 percent of 15-year-old boys spend most of their evenings out with friends; in France, the figure is 17 percent. Because they dont have that structured interaction with adults, it damages their life chances, said Nick Pearce, the institutes director. They are not learning how to behave, how to get on in life, as they need to. A third factor is the growing gulf between rich and poor in an increasingly affluent society. According to the advocacy group Save the Children, although Britain has the worlds fourth-largest economy, it also has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialized world, with 3.4 million children, more than one in four, living in poverty, and about a million, or nearly 10 percent, living in severe poverty. With poverty comes crime and violence, much of it committed by youths against youths. In 2003, the public policy report said, 35 percent of British children aged 10 to 15 were victims of crime; the figure increased to 59 percent the next year for children from deprived areas. Defending his record, Mr. Blair said recently that 700,000 children had been raised out of poverty since he took office in 1997. I do not believe there is a general social breakdown, he said.

He acknowledged, however, the existence of a persistent underclass of severely dysfunctional families who are shut out of societys mainstream. These people, he said, are neither helped by the extra money the government has invested in social programs, nor affected by new law-enforcement measures intended to address the antisocial behavior that people across Britain identify as one of their biggest concerns. Mr. Blairs government has introduced a bevy of directives aimed at stopping activity that disrupts neighborhoods vandalism, petty thievery, harassment, even persistently loud music but does not necessarily warrant criminal prosecution. The orders forbid youths, say, from going into certain neighborhoods, meeting with certain people, going into town without their parents, staying out past a certain time, harassing their neighbors. But Wythenshawe has its share of residents seemingly immune to government intervention.