Skip to main content

Second chance is the perfect Christmas gift

Image
By
It really is surprisingly easy to dismiss young people as rowdy, obnoxious, ill-mannered, illiterate, innumerate, violent, and everything that is bad about modern society.

I bet you’ve done it. Little hooligans!

You’re walking through a shopping centre, and there’s a bunch of them in their cool trainers, baggy trousers and a hoodie, giving it some serious att-e-chood, and leaving you with the distinct feeling they’d happily kick your head in. If they could be “bovvered”.

I work for a charity, and recently had the opportunity to meet some young people who really were scary – a lad who had been dealing drugs since he was 12, another chased down the motorway by six police cars, and a teenage girl who hadn’t been to school for 2 years and beat up another girl because she annoyed her.

I was filming them and listening to what they had to say. I wasn’t prepared for what I heard. All of these young people were so far into the room with the word “trouble” on the door, you’d have needed a torch, sturdy walking shoes and a packed lunch to find them.

All had rampaged into the world of youth offending, and as an alternative to custody, were referred to us to see if our expertise could help to turn them around.

All of them came from families where relationships had broken down – divorce, absent parents, drug abuse, criminal activity, and a dozen other sad and depressing situations. One had been through so many care homes and temporary foster families they’d lost count. Let down by their families, and let down by society.

Something remarkable had happened to them though. Something miraculous and resolutely positive, bursting out of the cloud of negativity like a bolt of lightning. Given the opportunity and help, they were turning their lives around. With encouragement and assistance, they were taking the positive decisions and direction they had been needing, in some cases, all their lives.

Deciding to return to education, learning new skills, getting help with their CVs, helping out doing-up the crumbling building the help came from, doing positive community work, realising what they were good at doing. Understanding the benefits of their new paths, and that they could actually build themselves a future. Hope and ambition, for possibly the first time, instead of anger and destruction.

Yes, there are young people out there who have done (and are doing) very bad things, and I’m not asking you to pop up the High Street and “hug a hoodie”. Not all of them can, will, or have the desire to change. But some do.

It’s Christmas – time for the kids, right? Maybe the most important gift we can give some of them is a very simple one - A second chance.

Have a wonderful festive season. And count your blessings.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 21st December 2012. This is the unedited version - unfortunately, it hasn't made it on to their website this week for some reason. Happily, they retained my title though.

(Tunes today from Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - "Anthology, Through The Years".)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more