Listen to the kids

I have had a lot to do with the young “antisocial” element in various parishes I have had during my ministry. In my experience, they are neither the little devils nor the little angels that your article suggested (23 July, page 24).

When I was vicar of a parish in Bootle, Merseyside, I taught one lesson of religious education a week at the local school. I asked the 15- and 16-year-olds – a class that included joy riders and other perpetrators of antisocial behaviour – what they wanted to discuss. Their reply boiled down to “Has the Church any standards we could try to live up to, as society has none?” The truancy rate for RE dropped because we were talking about something that mattered to them.

The way these youngsters saw it, their behaviour was the result of the poor standards they saw everywhere in society around them. But every time I have tried to mention this to those concerned with youth work I’ve met with the response “they have to conform to our ‘respectable’ ideas, otherwise they are beyond the pale”. I do not wear rose-coloured spectacles, but the last thing these kids need is to think society is against them or trying to make them conform to something they don’t want to conform to.