Besides, she argues, the ban on wearing 'hoodies' imposed last week by the local Bluewater shopping centre, triggering a national debate over behaviour, is illogical. 'I wouldn't mind, but they sell all these tops in Bluewater. Why don't they stop selling them before they ban them?'

And the 'minister for yobs' Hazel Blears today targets what amounts to a fundamental coarsening of public life: swearing, spitting, drinking and neglectful parenting which, she argues, reflect a wider breakdown of community ties and the abandonment of formerly accepted 'norms of behaviour'. Snapshots of a man openly smoking hard drugs on a London bus, published this week, appear to prove her point. The tabloids are littered with 'real life Vicky Pollards' - named after the TV comedy Little Britain's teenage slattern - terrorising neighbours.

Amid echoes of John Major's ill-fated 'Back to Basics' campaign, a moral panic is in full swing. As one politician put it, 'the morals of children are ten times worse than formerly.'

Those words, however, were spoken by Lord Ashley in 1823, suggesting the demonisation of youth by their elders is nothing new.

As Blair unveils a Queen's Speech this week stuffed with measures to 'restore respect' the question remains: has he picked up on a genuine erosion of civilised values? Or is a Government that once entertained Noel Gallagher at Downing Street just getting old and square, as its members hit their fifties and sixties?

Jan Berry, chair of the Police Federation and mother of teenage children, says the debate raises genuine issues: 'It seems to me that there's a lot of people who don't have any respect for anything other than themselves, and as a society we have to deal with that.'

None the less, while some lives are genuinely wrecked by intimidation, there are many who are simply unreasonably intolerant of teenagers. 'If they raise their voice and are having a laugh they are criticised for being yobs. There's a vast difference between young people growing up, finding their way in the world, trying different things - hopefully lawfully - and those who really go out to intimidate others.'

Evidence on whether antisocial behaviour is rising is scant: there are no specific Government figures. But the British Crime Survey, which tests perception of seven types of disorder from noisy neighbours to public drug dealing, found reports of all seven actually fell between 2002 and 2004.

Mike Hough, Profesor of Criminology at King's College, London, has found that fear of youth crime far outstrips its reality. Known young offenders commit around a tenth of all crime, according to statistics, but nearly two-thirds of the public thinks young people are responsible for four times that much crime.

There is no real agreement either on what constitutes antisocial behaviour, defined by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 as acts likely to cause 'harassment, alarm, or distress to one or more persons not in the same household'.

The Home Office suggests it covers offences from criminal damage and intimidation to kerb crawling: but its snapshot of reported antisocial behaviour - which logged 66,000 incidents in just one day in September 2003 - found people counted illegally parked cars and people sleeping rough as 'antisocial'. The line between gritty urban reality and thuggishness is, it seems, blurred.

Yet Victim Support says those on the receiving end of antisocial behaviour show symptoms from anxiety to depression, insomnia and relationship problems. During the election, doorstepping MPs were bombarded with complaints about public order, from children openly smoking cannabis on the street to litter and graffiti, indicating a fundamental loosening of the ties that bind. The fear, at least, is real.

Last autumn, the Home Office minister Hazel Blears published a slim pamphlet entitled the Politics of Decency, urging the revival of old-fashioned Labour values of community. It grabbed no headlines, but Tony Blair was impressed enough to help launch it. In his acceptance speech the morning after the election, he spoke of halting the march of 'disrespect'.

Respect is a charged word in politics, since the independent MP George Galloway named his anti-war party after it. But Labour politicians noticed the wider resonance of the word to Muslims, who interpreted it to mean respect for their values and way of life. Labour is now trying to reclaim that concept for a wider audience.

Hours after Blair's speech, Blears was handed a new portfolio of antisocial behaviour, citizenship and community values. Her talk of 'proper' behaviour and 'decent' people indicate she is talking about much, much more than crime.

Blears, who grew up in two-up two-down terrace in a rundown part of Manchester, tells of how she was struck by one house she visited on the campaign trail. 'At the bedroom window there was a duvet covering it - there were no curtains,' she says. 'Downstairs, as far as I could see through the window, there was no furniture. But there was a 42-inch plasma television. Now I'm not passing judgment on that particular family but if you are going to bring up children in that environment ...'

Restoring respect means, she says, not just punishing unruly teenagers, but changing their parents' lifestyles. But she insists it is not about finding scapegoats: 'It's seeing how we get order and structure and work and relationships back into people's lives.'

It is, she concedes, hard to generalise about causes of poor behaviour, but she believes families now spend less time together than previous generations did, and she worries about the lack of male role models in single-parent families.

Straying on to such grounds is, however, risky, as the Tory ministers sacked over sexual indiscretions during Back to Basics showed: criticising others' parenting risks drawing attention to Labour politicians' own family lives.

During a press conference on disrespect, Blair was clearly discomfited to be asked whether his own teenage sons - one of whom was famously found drunk in Leicester Square - wore hoodies. The next day, the husband of Labour MP Claire Curtis-Thomas received a fixed penalty fine for defacing her Tory rival's election posters.

An inquiry by the Commons home affairs select committee last year concluded that the threat from antisocial behaviour was not exaggerated by Government. Even minor offences could, it said, have a 'huge and disproportionate impact' on people's lives.

Blears admits children have always hung out noisily or got drunk in parks, although their behaviour is now, she says, on a different scale.

Critics retort, however, that Labour's plans for round-the-clock drinking will only fuel the behaviour it disdains. The Queen's Speech will include crackdowns on alcohol-related violence, with pledges of alcohol disorder zones - under which pubs that do not curb unruly customers will pay a levy towards policing - and banning orders on problem drinkers.

Police, however, are unconvinced. 'If you look at what some of our young people do when they go to Ibiza, you can't tell me that 24/7 drinking makes them better people,' says Berry.

Undeterred ministers will keep pushing the 'respect' issue, with initiatives on school discipline - and a youth green paper promising constructive activities for bored teens.

Blears wants to target the vast majority of well-behaved teens disgruntled that their delinquent colleagues get all the attention: 'I went to a school and talked to young people in Crosby, and they said: "Why is it the bad kids who get the trips out, the football, the coaching, whereas the good kids end up sitting in their bedrooms?"' A more interesting debate is developing about the responsibilities that adults owe to children, as well as vice versa.

Anne Longfield, director of the charity 4Children which organises out-of-school activities, was swimming in her local south London pool recently when a bunch of children began hurling cans into the water. Longfield was struck by the swimmers' response. 'The pool was full of middle class people, who were all desperately ignoring the fact that there were these containers flying over their heads,' she says.

'There is this dreadful mass mentality - that feeling that it is too embarrassing, too difficult to confront them. But unless adults take their responsibility seriously - assert their role in maintaining some kind of order - almost these kids are laughing at them.'

Longfield is used to confronting bullying or unruly teens and automatically did so, but says many adults are now too frightened of other people's children to set boundaries.

And it is often children who suffer as a result: soaring street robbery figures during the last parliament were largely fuelled by teens stealing other teens' mobile phones. Longfield says when her seven-year-old described a friend being 'jacked' - slang for robbed - she realised how many city children now view violence as a fact of life. Antisocial crazes like 'happy slapping' - hitting someone round the head and photographing it on a cameraphone - spread fast in an era of internet and picture messaging.

Longfield argues that adults must respect children's need for things to do, rather than demonising them. But she concedes that 40 years ago, when people knew their neighbours and children were disciplined by any familiar adult, public space was easier to defend.

Blears too believes that the respect agenda demands re-engagement in the neighbourhood. Asked what she would do finding herself alongside the drugtaker on the bus, Blears thinks she would have avoided confronting him, but alerted a bus conductor or driver. 'I like to think, if there were decent people on the bus, we would have talked together (about what to do).' The law-abiding majority forget, she says, that there is 'strength in numbers'.

Back in Kent, however, the teenagers are unconvinced. Lewis Effing, 17, sporting a hooded jacket and jumper plus cap, admits he wears it to create an effect. 'It's like we're saying, "Don't come at us". It's got more attitude.'

But he does take it down if he's going to talk to someone, he says: 'I know it can look bad.'

And his friends talk indignantly of being pulled over by the police simply for the way they dress. Respect, it seems, takes many forms.

Figures behind the beliefs

· Eleven per cent of known offenders are under 18, although one third of people believe that this age group is responsible for the majority of crime.

· The number of 10- to 17-year-olds convicted or cautioned fell from 143,600 to 105,700 between 1992 and 2002, a drop of nearly 26 per cent.

· However, the Crime and Justice survey of households in England, published earlier this year, suggested that as many as one in four teenagers is an active offender. That includes those who may commit a serious offence, or something more trivial such as not paying a bus fare.

· Surveys suggest that people are ill-informed about trends in youth crime. The number of young offenders has actually decreased over the past three years, but three-quarters of the people asked believe that the numbers have gone up.

· Seven out of 10 people feel that the youth justice system, which was overhauled in 1998, is too soft on young offenders. When given details of specific cases, however, most people support restorative or rehabilitative approaches rather than the imposition of custodial sentence.

· Antisocial behaviour orders are predominantly handed out to the young. Between 1999 and 2004, a total of 2,455 Asbos were reported to the Home Office, with Greater Manchester issuing the greater number in the country.

· The Anti-Social Behaviour Act took effect in in 2004, widening the use of fixed penalty notices for offences, such as noise and graffiti, which could be used to punish 16- and 17-year-olds.

· One area strongly linked to anti-social behaviour is truancy. Figures suggest almost 25 per cent of secondary school pupils play truant at some stage, and truancy rates have increased by more than 6 per cent in the past year. Inner London has the worst rate in England, with up to 15,000 schoolchildren missing from lessons on any given day.

· Four reforms have been introduced by the Home Office to give more scope for dealing with youth crime:

· Electronic tagging for 12- to 16-year-olds who are on bail or remand in council accommodation.

· Action Plan Orders are part of a three-month, intensively supervised community service programme that focuses on education and involves parents or guardians.

· Reparation Orders require the young person involved to make reparations to either individual victims of crime or the community.

· Parenting Orders require parents to attend counselling and guidance sessions where they receive help in dealing with their children.
Jo Revill

fashion designer art movement|BDSM models gallery|clackers fashion art|fashion designers model portfolios|lifestyle of fashion design|Galleries of fashion photography|fashion designer industrial fashion|I-Wear fashion technology|fashion glamour model|moodring super model|orientalism fashion|facts on pet rock fashion designing|fashion gallery of play station2|portfolio supermodel|primitivism of fashion model top|punk fashion design history|scooter supermodels|scoubidou top fashion designers|tamagotchi female glamour models|troll fashion|tickle me elmo fashion supermodel|fashion on watch|xbox career fashion designer|Alexander McQueen top male model|angie everhart female model|bridget hall female teen models|carmen kass fashion designer|cindy crawford american model|valentino garavani top fashion designer

Auto transport | Wine country tours | CeMAP | Marine art | Quality area rugs | Boxing apparel | Granite kitchen countertops | California printing | Summer camp | WeightLoss programs | Team building | Property auctions | Fragrance | Vinyl windows | Mens underwear | Kids Costumes | Women Costumes | Dermalogica Products| Cordless Phone Battery | Creatine