It was 2009. The lines between child and adult were getting increasingly blurred. Young people made a significant financial contribution to the economy, they drank, smoke, took drugs, had sex, gave birth. They took on adults' obsession with weight and appearance, they were stressed out, they took anti-depressants, and they also took their own lives.
Society's retort was not to listen to these teenagers but to criminalise. Yet, while we punished teenagers as adults and expected them to accept adult responsibilities, we afforded them few adult rights. Not only were they not allowed to vote, but we rarely even allowed them an adult voice.
Arguably Christmas's biggest voice is the Queen's. Quite often giving a generalised postive view that often neglects insight from our future generations.
Working with Barnardo's. The Teens' Speech project aimed to give young people a voice. Culminating in a film narrated by Kate Tempest on MySpace (just after the Queen at 3.10 pm). It listened to the hopes, fears and dreams of hundreds of teenagers over 50 days up and down the country. From Christians to Muslims, young adults with Asperger's syndrome, transgender teenagers, rich kids to poor, Britain's teenagers shown for once in their diversity rather than as a homogenous, faceless mass.
Here we see that teenagers are as afraid as anyone about the state of the world, awash in a sea of fears – of knife crime, violence, racism.
