VANISHING YOUTH

He was sitting on the pavement, in the gathering dusk and sleet, two
minutes' walk northward from Broadcasting House. Most of the street
sleepers congregate to the south of the old BBC battleship, on the
steps of All Saints or further down where the pavement artist works.
There are broad sheltering doorways there and a constant flow of
office workers too young to refuse a plea for "spare change".

Some of the pleaders are opportunists, and in the late evening when
the pickings get thin they roll up their sleeping-bags and sneak off
to bed. A few are so patently on hard drugs that your hand hesitates,
knowing which trade the money will support. Some sell The Big Issue,
which creates a soothingly sanitised commercial relationship between
seller and buyer. But generally speaking, London walkers develop a
strategy for dealing with the new beggars: avoid eye contact, stifle
personal pity or assuage it with a coin. A curious, shaming convention
has grown up where one citizen is free to huddle in a doorway and
another to walk past pretending this is not happening.

This boy was alone, in a street with less pedestrian traffic; he had
not sought a doorway and made no attempt to beg, but sat against a
bleak wall with his head on his arms. I would probably have passed by
- - you cannot stop for every sorrowful sight - but I was the last of a
gaggle of walkers, and there was suddenly something unbearable about
the rhythm of well-shod feet clacking past his awful resigned
stillness. I saw him draw up his feet slightly so as not to
inconvenience a hastening couple, and that was it. I paused. He
glanced up. He cannot have been more than sixteen. Awkwardly I asked:
"Are you all right? Why are you here?"

He spoke with difficulty, like somebody who has not had a conversation
for a while. "I was in care," he said. "It's a bit of a mess." I asked
whether he knew the nearest Centrepoint shelter. "I don't like those
places," he said. "There's druggies, and they scare me." After a brief
pause he added: "I ought to get back in the system. I know I should."
I said the first thing that came to mind: "We want you back. Honestly.
All of us, walking past, it isn't that we don't care."

He was silent, as a child is silent when it does not believe you. In
the end I gave him some money and, a bossy mother, told him to go to
the cafe and eat something hot and then think carefully about going to
a shelter to ask for real help in getting "back in". Remembering the
phenomenal pizza consumption of my own son's peers I gave him another
note and told him to have a hot breakfast too. " You'll feel braver."
He nodded. "Awright."

And, of course, that was it. I have no idea what has become of him.
Most of us are selfish except within our families and know ourselves
to be untrained for the complex of problems a street-sleeping kid
brings to the pavement. I hope an outreach worker found him before he
got much colder or sadder. But I thought of him as I read yesterday's
report from Demos, Destination Unknown. Linked to the "Real Deal"
project, run by a consortium of charities to express the views of
under-25s, it paints a
sobering picture of how easy and how dangerous it is for a 16-year-old
to slip beyond the margins.

Since 1988, under-18s have had no entitlement to benefit, nor are they
part of the Government's New Deal initiative. They easily fall into
limbo, thence into crime, addiction, or prostitution. Surveying
624,000 people inder 24 who are neither working nor in education nor
on the unemployment register, Demos found not only the single parents
and the part-time students, but tens of thousands who have virtually
disappeared altogether - without qualifications, occupations, or the
ability to try to find either. Under-18s in particular were vanishing
into limbo. They are nowhere. For government to fret about the dole
queue is not enough, then, because some never make it as far as the
queue. Nor is there comfort in the conventional wisdom that youth
unemployment is brief: down at the bottom the cycle of unemployment
and brief casual exploitation goes on year after year, especially
among those who were in limbo before they were 18.

The important thing is that adults from an earlier age, who are now
running the country, should understand how tough it is to be 16 today.
There are fewer unskilled jobs and pickier employers. With ever more
GCSE passes, 75 per cent staying on beyond that and a third doing
higher education, the competition is intense. Exclusions from schools
have rocketed since league tables, so a bad behavioural wobble at
fourteen can put you on a slope to lifelong failure. Moreover, such
wobbles are all the more likely in an age of broken families and the
bitter stress in families affected by long-term adult
unemployment.

So conflict makes 16-year-olds leave home with poignant Dick
Whittington bravado. When benefits were removed from this young age
group, the idea was that it would discourage them from leaving home.
The Demos report drily notes that the assumption that "young people's
choices would be guided by economic rationality . . . does not seem to
be true for large numbers". Well, of course it doesn't. Look at your
own teenager: economic rationality is one of the last qualities to
develop. All but the most depressive teens are perennially convinced
that Something will Turn Up. So they walk out of a home that has
become unbearable, without a GCSE or a contact or much of a clue.
Meanwhile children already in council care suddenly find themselves
unsupported at 16 (a third of young homeless have been in care).

Yet the world they walk into is very complicated: signs no longer say
"Smart Boy Wanted", and even casual employment is fraught with
regulation. As Demos points out, it actually takes longer these days
to reach independent maturity. Adult life can be richer, but it is
also more complex, and requires more investment and longer
preparation. These changes have helped to create a life stage which is
profoundly different from the adolescence of the postwar generation.

It is an overdue analysis. Underlying a great deal of official
provision is still the illusion of a simpler world, in which a willing
lad could muddle through to adult life with casualmentoring, and
cuffs, from a network of adults. Some fell through the
net, but it used to be easier to climb back in - not least because the
only drug readily available was beer.

Today we need better ladders and lifelines; yet instead, privatisation
and a market ethos in the most unlikely places - schools, the Careers
Service, purchaser-provider local government - has torn big holes in
the net. "Very often," say the authors, "the onus is on the young
person to make sense of it all . . . the patchwork of entitlements and
rules, the tangled complexity of information about services and support."

There are excellent projects, not least Centrepoint, to lure
the damaged and the disaffected back into the dull safe
happy mainstream. Some use peers or unthreatening
mentors, some art or music or sport. But even these suffer
from the Age of Individualism: the report cites an audit of
three northeastern housing estates which found more than
30 professionals from ten agencies all claiming to be
working with disadvantaged youth, but most of them not
knowing about the others.

So never mind the minutiae of school citizenship lessons. More
important is to put the bottom rung of citizenship within reach of
those who need it. The last word goes to one of the Real Deal
speakers: "I've managed to get into the system . . . I've spent a
couple of years completely outside it all, didn't exist as far as
anybody else was concerned. And now I'm on the road to getting where I
want to go. Once you get into the services and you find out and
connect to one thing, you can connect to everything. But if you never
connect to the first part then you never ever reach any of that."