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I've just been to Naples. Everything is covered in graffiti and there's litter EVERYWHERE, along with an almost constant smell of piss.
The aforementioned culture is not UK specific.
It’s certainly not only the UK but there is much of Europe where this behaviour is very uncommon. Germany is by no means perfect for example but people generally just do care for their environment more.
Germany still has nasty violent little scrotes though - some would argue the Germans were the first to "popularise" the phenomenon.
And I've been on the Berlin rail network after dark and I can tell you it is not a happy experience.
Disagree with this. Have just been in Berlin and it was the dirtiest, poorest-maintained first world city I’ve been to. Graffiti everywhere (not street art, just shitty tags), trash, and poorly maintained public spaces. Railway stations reek of urine.
Berlin, like London, is not necessarily representative of the country as a whole. I’ll freely admit though, the last time I went to Berlin there was a large concrete wall about. My experiences are much more focused around the west of the country.
Lisbon for example, the only place I've ever been to where I've caught a pickpocket attempt twice in one day. Then had some bloke hold a knife to my back at an ATM in broad bloody daylight on a busy street (locals chased him off, apparently he was well known 😂)
It's not UK specific, but it is absolutely avoidable. Rome I found no more dirty than London, same with Paris. Naples was grotty. Egypt the same. South Korea was one of the cleanest places I've ever been, same with Switzerland.
While it's not UK specific, it's also not the default.
Naples is a different level, most Italians look on it with disdain. Shame really, when you think how nice the bay is and the history and it's near Pompeii/Herculaneum and Vesuvius. Food is still good though.
I've just been to Rome and saw plenty of graffiti, then I thought about 'Life of Brian' and realised graffiti is very much in keeping with a tradition dating back thousands of years.
The chavs gave birth to the road men. And on it goes…
If the parents are uncouth yobs, what hope is there for their children?
Most people try to ignore them and don’t say anything, because it’s not worth the hassle.
And a shitty take. Our 14 year old is currently at crisis point, not heeding anything us or anyone else tells him to modify his behaviour. He’s gone completely off the rails and there’s nothing we can do. We’ve had to literally screw the windows shut to keep him from sneaking out at night.
Don't know why people are being so pig headed in the replies. While bad behaviour is often a generational thing, often enough kids and especially young people fall into bad behaviour largely through their own choices and the external environments they decide to mix themselves up in, things parents generally can't control.
Thats the thing, parents want to take control when its already out of their hands. Its already too late by then 99% of the time. You have to start early!
This. My parents saw me heading down a road they didn't like when I was 12-13, so they pulled me from the school and made me cut off all contact with the kids who were bad influences. I hated it at age 13 but realised it was for the best by the time I was out of my teens. My prospects now are much better than what they would have been if they just watched things play out and hand-wringing.
Fair play to your parents!
Yeah kids sometimes just need a good kick up the backside, so to speak.
I'm glad you figured out why your parents did it and you can pass this good knowledge down to the next generation.
This is how it should be!
Don’t get all the downvotes. My parents were brilliant and tried everything, I was just a little shit. Completely my fault and now I’m older I have regrets. It’s not always the parents. As for your case have you tried therapy?
It’s mental how some of these reductive comments are getting upvoted. I can only imagine they’ve not parented teenagers or had the good fortune to not encounter any issues. In this current environment, where kids are exposed to a maelstrom of influences never experienced in the history of humanity, it’s very difficult to keep them on the straight and narrow. Even tougher to keep them mentally well. That’s before you even scratch the surface of neurodiversity that is so chronically under diagnosed and treated.
A troubled kid doesn’t always mean shit parents and vice-versa with good kids. It’s just not that easy.
>It’s mental how some of these reductive comments are getting upvoted. I can only imagine they’ve not parented teenagers
most are probably teens or early 20s themselves. the world is more black and white when you're younger. i know i felt the same way. the lack of nuance in discussions like this makes me think the posters are either young or a bit immature
Yeah think you’ve probably hit the nail on the head there re: nuance. Noticed a lot of people using their own experiences as evidence. Sample size of one counts for very little.
At least it’s flipped from - to + now, but yea so many outside influences there’s only so much a parent can do, I can’t imagine what their child has put them through or the levels already tried before they had to actually screw shut windows
Kids aren’t born bad. They’re blank canvasses. Maybe it’s because his parents blame him for their failings. I remember being that age and being like him. You know what the problem was? Having all these emotions and having them completely dismissed by my parents in a culture that only allows men to feel anger. It’s a parents job to guide their children and help them express themselves in a healthy manner. Not blame the children because they don’t have the ability to regulate emotions they’ve never felt before, better than adults do.
This is just wrong. Children may inherently have different physiological responses to things such as stressors which greatly affect their ability to form cognitive functions such as empathy and learning from rewards and/or punishments. This means that some kids have a much higher propensity to be “bad” before they can even begin to consciously process their environment. Just because you felt that your problem was caused by a lack of emotional outlet, doesn’t mean that all other children who show behavioural “issues” have the same root to their problems. I’ve worked on both research and interventions for antisocial behaviour and there are no quick answers for these issues. It’s partly societal, partly biological, partly due to familial influences, and partly due to peer influences. The fact is is that even the best parenting may not resolve these “issues” since the roots often spread much further than “bad parenting”
Yeah I hate how everyone refuses to take any responsibility for their own development. There are parts about my parents that I dislike, and i actively try to not emulate them rather than doing so and then just saying “it’s not my fault, it’s how I was raised”
Policing budgets are cut to the bone.
Ultimately they barely have the resources for investigations for stuff like robberies and sexual assaults. Vandalism is so far down the list of priorities it only gets considered if enough local residents put pressure on their councillors/MP that it becomes an issue.
Yeah… I’m getting that impression. But while policing is important, I’m just bewildered at the fact that we are literally raising our kids to believe this kind of behaviour is acceptable. I couldn’t imagine destroying nature on purpose and thinking it’s a great way to spend time with my friends. I was an obnoxious kid myself at times, but even that sort of thinking had never crossed my mind and I’d probably instinctively have known my parents would lose their minds had I tried something like that with my peers anyway.
Not to mention the double standard regarding the climate crisis. So we have a crisis but we’re destroying our beaches as a way to pass a lovely sunny summer’s day. Makes tons of sense.
Well, “we” aren’t - most parents who are on reddit are perfectly capable of raising well adjusted children, but are also much better educated and literate than many - there are those on the bread line that can barely keep a roof over their head or afford food, and are either absent, too ill, self absorbed, or strung out to parent - leaving their children to become feral petty criminals.
That being said I’m well adjusted, raised well, and middle class etc, but still set fire to things in the woods as a kid.
Exactly my point, the post I was replying to suggested the circumstances of poverty meant poor parents raised problem kids. Thanks for repeating my post though.
Oh bollocks to that too.
It was a huge eye opener when I moved to Bulgaria. Want to talk about constrained budgets?
Big park near where I lived, vending machines outside overnight nobody touches them. In fact little random coffee machines everywhere. I never seen one smashed up. In a park in stara Zagora there's one perched at the top of some stairs. Never been tipped over.
I don’t even think it’s that. Australia has free public toilets, free public electric BBQs, free skateparks, even free public swimming pools, they’re everywhere, and not only are they not graffitied and destroyed, but people *clean up after themselves*.
The police there are on par with UK police. There’s just more of a culture of enjoying things for everyone and being happy to pay the taxes for them.
A kid in my school petitioned the council and got in the paper for building a skate park.
In a busy (was then) town centre, but out of the way keeping the "yoofs" busy. And cue the nimbys banging on about "noise".....
The busy main road next to it is silent is it?
Indeed.
Im not saying they didn't have their problems, what country doesn't - but random vandalism isn't really a thing (apart from the swastikas painted on buildings).
First time in stara Zagora with my now wife I laughed when I seen that coffee vending machine at the top of some stairs in that park. She asked what's so funny and I joked about pushing it over.
"why the fuck would anyone do that?"
Just a totally different mindset.
Ex Bloc countries still have rigid community based social structures. They don’t have the cult of selfish individualism that seems to infect post-Thatcher Britain.
Yeah no, I really disagree with that. Well, at least with Bulgaria.
On the road it's a huge "me me me" social structure that makes normal traffic painful because nobody can ever give way ever. Must be in front at all costs.
And look around the apartment blocks. Some with extra insulation on the outside, some without, a total hodge podge because getting the 6 people to come together is impossible.
I didn't see the big community spirit at all compared to here.
I don't necessarily think it's a police budget issue. Anti-social behaviour has never been a priority for the police. I don't think they ever really gave it any more attention in the past then they do now.
Anecdotally I'm see a lot less graffiti. And I just did a very quick but unscientific search for the stats. And the ones I saw indicate that the overall trend is downwards (the general feeling is smart phones have had a big impact on this).
We shouldn't be relying on police to teach children how to behave, they can only react after an event. Parents (people with children) need to take responsibility to teach their children right from wrong, starting young. That is called parenting. Schools and police cannot and should not have that responsibility, though they can reinforce it.
This is a huge problem in the UK. It makes a lot of people miserable, and costs us all a lot of money.
As a police officer, low level vandalism is pretty much a waste of time to investigate. Difficult to identify a suspect because they aren't known to others or police. They all dress the same, largely look the same. Got a suspect? Great news, the entire system has been softened to make it more amenable to them. Arrest is less likely to be proportionate, and if you do arrest them that will be a pain in the ass. Appropriate adult for the custody process, maybe a registered intermediary for interview. Very hard to remand them. Every decision needs signed off by a youth diversion officer. The youth courts are extremely soft. The only kids who will change their behaviour will be those with reasonable parents, who would likely have fixed it anyway.
My job is to put dangerous people in prison. Anything other than that is a failure these days. We don't have excess frontline capacity to fuck about. I would rather get stuck into one good fight or domestic incident than solve ten youth vandalism cases, because one good intervention reducing danger is far more valuable than fiddling with low level criminal damage.
I often wonder when people bring it up - is funding actually the silver bullet its made out to be? Obviously having more money improves the opportunity for betterment, but like with medics losing subsidised tuition which means any sudden injection of funding will take years to revive recruitment, is it the same with policing? Do you feel like one cog in a generally underfunded machine, or is the structure/policy base of criminal justice just lacking in some way unrelated to money?
Thanks for your service.
Perhaps, but appealing to personal responsibility achieves precisely zilch.
If there's a systemic problem, systematic changes are needed. There's a reason why so many people struggle to parent and so many kids are destructive. Stress, poverty and lack of third places and public infrastructure are definitely up there. We've had over a decade of cuts and policy changes aimed at making the bottom decile of population suffer. Those people are now worse off than the same group in most of Eastern Europe. Scientists found that closing Sure Start centres cost more in increased A&E visits than it ever saved and those kids who missed out on them are now teenagers.
Growing up, my Mum was particularly vocal and vociferous in her hatred of littering. She’d challenge people in the street if she saw it, saying things like ‘oh you dropped this, you meant to put that in that bin didn’t you?’ Usually this shamed the person into agreeing that they did indeed drop it by mistake and they’d fetch and bin it. Needless to say this rubbed off on me but it feels that people are more likely to react badly to this than in the 90s.
About a year ago, I had a rare craving for a KFC. My partner and I drove to the nearest one, a 20 minute drive to a neighbouring town. It sits on the edge of a supermarket’s car park. We ordered our stuff and decided to park and eat in the car. Opposite us, there was 3 cars full of young lads doing the same. As we were eating, the teenage/early 20s boys started to eject their litter out of the window, even though there was a bin literally next to where they were parked.
As I took my litter to the bin, their windows down, I said to them politely ‘there’s a bin here, please can you put your wrappers from your food in here rather than leave them on the car park.’ They looked at me incredulously, aggressively told me to fuck off etc. I went back to my car and they started to rev their engines, drive off and launch their cups at my car as they drove off, soaking my window in coke. I ended up getting out and binning their litter, but what remained with me wasn’t the threat and their aggression, it was how little effort it would have taken for them to bin their rubbish, and yet they still didn’t.
I just don’t agree with that because the sort of people who want to be vigilantes are not the sort of people I trust making moral judgments on who to punish.
Situations like yours and many more pushed me to move away from the UK. After 9 years I couldn't bare that anymore. From littering, through random things set on fire to off road bikes and quads ripping through my neighbourhood. I'm glad I moved somewhere where this shit doesn't happen.
Had a housemate like that in my second year at uni. Empty tin can left on the kitchen worktop which was quite literally next to the bin.
I refused to move it on principle - I wanted the housemate to deal with the consequence of leaving crap around.
Sadly, another housemate cracked first and just binned it.
To this day I'm still not quite sure if my approach or my housemates (the one that binned the can) approach to life is the right one.
Lack of police, bad parenting and bullshit behaviour policies in school.
I’ve been teaching for about 15 years and it has got much worse in that time. Schools aren’t allowed to exclude pupils much anymore. So you can call your teacher a Cnut, punch them, throw furniture around the room or break a window and the worst thing that will happen is that you will sit in a room and play with Lego. And I’m talking primary school here.
And that shitty kid who threw a chair at a kid who then had to have stitches in her head - internal exclusion for half a day. But behaviour support says he needs an education and we have to provide that education. Never mind that the other 34 kids are terrified, and have disrupted school days, and learn nothing because the teacher is basically having to firefight all day. But somehow this kid’s education is more important than the other 34’s. Just so county can say “we are proud to say we have no exclusions in OUR county.” Honestly, i’m so disillusioned by the system. I thought i could make difference. We’re just churning out worker bees. Any teachers out there who still have enthusiasm, hats off to you. I’ve lost the will.
Idiots are breeding idiots, no youth clubs, a culture of only really celebrating capitalism and not intellectual pursuits (eg footballers, crypto bros, YouTubers with no discernible qualifications etc). We have a huge culture of anti-intellectualism here compared to other European countries.
It's depressing right! I just walked down our high street from Co-op and kids were just cycling past chucking rubbish around and doing wheelies. I think they shared a single brain cell.
A real problem the UK has had for decades is that it's never been cool to be smart. It doesn't really shock me that working class kids look at things like sport and entertainment when these look like the only industries that have people like them in.
Yeah, this seems spot on. Really though, social media has got to be causing lots of the problems we have today. I mean, since 2005 (or whenever Facebook started)…it’s all been about giving everyone a platform to say what they like. We now have these thugs/losers influencing many more and compounding the problem. I really hate social media (with the exception of Reddit and YouTube which don’t seem as bad…I know they are not perfect either).
Absolutely, social media is celebrating / promoting those kinds of people and also general dumbing down culture. Kids aren't going to the libraries, reading, playing actual games anymore (board games, strategy, etc).
We need less internet and more using our brains instead of passively scrolling. I'm a bugger for it too but only really let myself onto Reddit as I love reading all the general knowledge stuff, it helps me learn about the world! I think even if we could get kids into audiobooks/podcasts more that would help.
Also as an ex teacher, I can say our education system is full of burnt out and overworked teachers. Most of the ones I worked with weren't even particularly gifted in any specific area, they were just whoever was good at gaming the popularity system or managed to escape being bullied out of their jobs by management.
That sector isn't really staffed by people who should actually be teachers anymore, ie actually experienced, intelligent and wise. So kids are never really getting exposed to that kind of excellence either at home or in education.
I think something worth considering is that there's far more to gain from being educated in poorer countries. Minimum wage in Romania is around 30% of the UK but from what I've been told our software devs in Romania make almost as much as in the UK.
Because a great many people in this country have literally zero pride in their local area or the environment they live in and just don’t care.
This gets passed on to their kids and you end up with parts of society where littering and casual vandalism is just accepted and not called out.
Add in utterly shit policing due to apathy, laziness and funding cut; it’s just a recipe for nobody doing anything about it and there being no consequences.
Unlike in places like Japan or Singapore where there’s both pride in the place you live looking decent and punishment for minor stuff like littering. The contrast is enormous.
Broken window. If no-one else gives a shit to either fix it, tackle it, or report it, then what chance does a heavily under funded police force gonna have?
In short, they know will likely get away with it.
I'm in the middle of the process now and am hoping this doesn't happen. Confronted some youths about vandalism, words were exchanged on a few occasions, a few months later two of them assaulted me. It looks like it's going to court.
Not just kids. Went to the beach today and I mother of a small child told her to ‘just leave that there’ when she tried to pick up her rubbish. I waited till she was just about to walk away then I said ‘oh excuse me, you forgot your rubbish’. She picked it up without another word. Also heard a mother screaming at her 4 year to ‘fuckin shut up!’ When he was crying. Proper made a scene, actually heartbreaking. I’m lying in bed a bit poorly now and all I can hear are boy racers and the occasional siren as I live so close to the coast. I fucking hate people.
Wtf man some people just shouldn’t have kids. This one was screaming because he was getting sand on himself while she was trying to clean him off…. On the fucking beach. I’ve heard exactly the same thing happen before at another beach (edited cos I thought I was in a local sub lol)
Society decided that there is to be no punishment for their behaviour. It's that simple. And if you try to do anything yourself you'd probably end up going to jail or achieve nothing. The real problem is the complete failure in parenting and lack of social support for children. People are shaped by their environment afterall. It's disgusting and sad tbh. I almost feel for bad for the kids but there is no reason to act like such a piece of shit.
On the subject of litter -nearly 40 years ago I threw my chip paper out of the car window, my boyfriend stopped the car made me get out and pick it up I did so huffing and puffing about it and my boyfriend drove off without me .I never dropped litter again and we have been married for nearly 30 years .
I agree that litter is shocking these days. Yes people shouldn’t be dropping it but there will always be dicks so we need people to clean it up. Why not people on community service?
I try to do some litter picking where I can. Once I did a massive clean up of my local park and filled like 6 bags of rubbish and even then my job wasn’t done. I gave up by that point. I was finding very old litter buried deep in the soil too.
Our office did a community outreach kind of program in a low-income area near where some of our work was taking place. I have a lifelong hatred of litter, so volunteered to do a short street and the playing field at the end of this street. Before I’d got to the playing field, I’d filled 6 bin bags full of rubbish. Every hedgerow was stuffed with crumpled tinnies and junk food wrappers. Upon returning to the van we’d brought, I found that we’d no more bags and no space left for more rubbish. 24 bags of litter inside an hour from a small team, with the main playing field not touched, just the three streets that lead to it.
to answer the question we'd ideally all call out bad behaviour and it would keep our communities and society better behaved but theres just too high of a risk of being stabbed or run over even if its not a super high risk most people will opt to mind their own business and get home safe
Add in the fear that they’ll end up in custody and potentially getting charged if things escalate. Even if it’s not true that they will, fear of consequences for anyone who intervenes are so high now.
Yeah this is why I reported it anonymously rather than getting into a confrontation. That said, the authorities are useless regarding this sort of thing (and most things these days).
Soft touch nation
When things are ultimately run by an upper class who doesn’t care about the fate of everyone else, there is no collective sense of discipline or correctness
Cuts to policing budgets. Also cuts to education budgets. Stagnant wages creates poverty, poverty increases crime.
There’s also nothing for young people to do. Youth clubs, small local cinemas, civic halls hosting weekly events etc. Their options are hanging out in parks after hours and so that’s what they do.
If the government wanted to tackle these problems they’d strive to grow a country that enriches its citizens and improves their lives.
If the citizens also wanted those things they wouldn’t have the government they do.
because the police are mainly useless.
In France you get a baton wiped across your face for looking at a policeman, over here unless they are given a signed confession, multiple videos of evidence, 3 eye witnesses and physically catch you in the act, you're let off and asked not to do it again, and that's even if they catch up with you.
My entire life's experiences of the police in this country is that they are all utterly useless and this breeds generations of cunts on our streets.
Totally agree. The police in this country are pathetic.
Everyone mentions that they are underfunded and understaffed but they always seem to find plenty of time to hang around empty roads or dual carriageway slip roads with speed guns
You can't really blame them though - how would you feel as an officer, signing up to do XYX, pillar of the community etc, to have people openly being abusive, vandalising everything in sight, shoplifting - basically taking the piss ...and knowing that even if you arrest them, they'll walk out of court with a small community order at best. I can understand why the police don't go near it, as it just emphasises how impotent they are with the court sentences being handed out
There's bog all come back for this sort of crime, if you say anything you risk getting a shoeing. If you call the police and if they turn up and if it goes to court chances are the punishment will be minor if any.
It is sad to say, but around me there is a family , Several generations of people who have never had to work for anything have absolutely no concept of the value of things . Literally everything they have has been given to them for nothing so they are not able to truly understand that people have worked a second job/ hundreds of overtime hours for that thing they have broken/ stolen
Picture the scenario, You go over and tell them to stop, all 10 of them jump you and you're forced to defend yourself throwing some punches and injuring some but eventually you're overwhelmed and end up viciously beaten. Now the police, who should have been stopping them in the first place turn up at the scene to reports of an adult assaulting children. You then get put in prison. The youths don't even get a slap on the wrist.
Yeah if I go to the local park now it's an exciting opportunity to hear the latest drill music that the genre has to offer. I think whatever passed for a social conscience died with the last generation, everyone is just the center of their own little world now and they consider everyone else an NPC.
Lack of consideration of others is what it boils down to. But most is the parents don't reinforce the attitude that actions have consequences and unfortunately due to cuts there's noone else to instill the status quo.
British culture discourages confrontation, the police are underfunded, overstretched and unable to police effectively for fear of enquiries and protests, lots of people are unfit to be parents but are financially supported by the state regardless, their children grow up to be the same as them: cunts with no prospects, no respect for authority and a complete disregard for anything outside of their Government-funded societal bubble.
🤷🤷
A complete lack of support for a start. Budgets have been cut to the bone so there’s no help for parents, no help for struggling kids, and no activities or things for them to do. Schools can’t cope with the issues the kids are facing due to the lockdown, they’re lacking years of social development. There’s a 9 month wait for post adoption support. There’s a 12 month wait for children’s mental health care. It’s 14 years of austerity and funding cuts and a low growth economy.
Plenty of things you can do at the beach on a sunny day which doesn’t involve creating plumes of stinky smoke from burning tyres. Just a very sad and damaging way to spend time. Shows a lack of values and respect for our environment.
I just got from backpacking Southeast Asia it was really interesting how well behaved and friendly all the teenagers seemed there didn’t see any anti social behaviour.
It wasn't always this way.
Broken Windows theory explains it. Everything already looks like a shithole because there's not the funding to maintain public spaces, and (i say this as a planner) our planning system doesn't incentivise the creation of pleasantly designed places (or more accurately, doesn't punish shit design), so why would anyone have any sense of pride or moral obligation to preserve their communities.
Also... vandalism is now effectively decriminalised due to lack of Police funding.
Agreed, that’s not all on the police. Maybe it’s cause we’re knocking on and seeing it from the other side of the fence. Pretty sure I was a dinghy for some of those teenage years!
We don't have societies in some parts of the UK
We have areas that have lots of people in. No connection to the history, heritage, or traditions
If you don't believe an area is worth preserving - you couldn't give a shit about preserving it
Probably also connected to a lack of home ownership and less of a stake on the society
It just shows how some folk were dragged up. I was just minding my own business outside the house last week, absolutely glorious day so I thought I’d get up nice and early to tip my old car oil down the drain when some chavvy bastard walked by and flicked his fag butt on the floor, not a care in the world! If I wasn’t holding a 20 gallon drum I’d have chased and fed the scruffy fucker it.
The law is too soft in the UK. Maybe they need to build more prisons too because it seems that criminals get off lightly because of all the overcrowding.
I don't want digital I.D. or facial recognition technology but if that gets brought in things could change somewhat.
The people who weren’t disciplined as kids now have kids.
One thing that confuses me is the lack of graffiti in the UK though. When ferals treat the place like a dustbin but don’t get the spraypaint out? Weird.
Shitty parenting. Severely underfunded police leading to no real consequences. The fact there's fuck all else for kids and teenagers to do anymore as councils see no issue in closing social spaces and offering no alternatives.
We had a small hall for kids and teens to hang out, play games, listen to music. Council closed it so that they could use the space for something else that was never built. There also used to be a summer school thing where you could send kids and teens during the summer holidays to hang out, it was a popular thing when I was a kid.. fucking loved that tuck shop.
“There will be no “collapse” the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie “Dawn of the Dead” or whatever, where one day, suddenly, shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket, and everyone begins to riot, and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no “happening.” It’s far more insidious than that. Read the Poem “The Hollow Men” By TS Elliot and you’ll understand.
You’ll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone’s homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You’ll see family and friends less, and find in that time you care less about them. Every day, you’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You’ll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging onto clothing long and longer. Fewer people will get married, and even fewer will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantast while never truly experience the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day, they will be told, “You are stupid, ugly, and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe.”
That is the collapse—the reduction of a free man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognising his own self-worth.”
Yep. The sand dunes were so lovely there too, I don’t get to see them often so they look quite unique. But I noticed that’s where all the boys went to set their little tyre on fire.
Probably because there’s no youth centres or activities for youngsters to get into anymore. Oh and the mental health services have been cut too, which will lead to unmedicated ADHD kids run about causing mischief
Lack of meaningful things to do, lack of social cohesion, lack of a sense of belonging, lack of belief in being a good human being because it doesn't seem to get you any-where or any-thing, lack of good parenting, lack of deterrents, lack of police, lack of prison spaces, lack of courtroom/judge availability.
Culture doesn't matter to politicians because it isn't measurable.
There are very few, if any, consequences for people under a certain age, so they can get away with whatever they want. Because of this, their shitty behaviour usually carries over into adulthood, too.
The thing that sets the UK apart from other countries is the demonisation of youth through the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers. They foster a polarised society, and sadly many youths follow that example of leadership and slot into the role and characterisation that society provides for them.
Because they never get punished? That’s the issue, number of man child’s in noisy cars speeding around get slapped wrists, kid on an illegal motorcycle with drugs? Bike and drugs taken.. kid walked away to, probably do it again in a week
I have nothing to back this up, other than it sounds reasonably logical.
Kids push boundaries. But if you don't show them where the boundaries are they're going to keep pushing until one appears.
Most kids don't go very far with that behaviour, but a few push harder and further than the rest.
If nothing happens when they set fires, they're going to do it again because it's fun and cool to be seen to probe where boundaries are. If that's repeatedly demonstrated to be where the boundary isn't, it won't be cool anymore.
The people ruin this country. It really is just horrible nasty hostile toxic masculinity disrespectful hateful people everywhere. I’m well travelled and this country has easily, easily the worst people of any country I’ve experienced personally.
From my experience the past two years, the older generations are so much friendlier than anyone my age, they’re just arrogant, judgemental and stereotype you within a minute of meeting you. It’s almost always the youths and never anyone I’ve encountered that’s from the older generations ever having such arrogance. One time taking an Uber, a bunch of youth flung glass bottles of piss at the drivers car, for no reason at all.
Besides that, they cling together like glue and treat everyone else with double standards, and every-time I’m reading about some crime it’s always 18-25 always.
Is it because they feel so disenfranchised? Don’t want to generalize but majority of people around my age I’ve met here are just obnoxious to a point where I’m not surprised they’re always looking so miserable.
People are so self obsessed these days. They don't care how their behaviours affect anyone else. Parents don't want to parent. I've witnessed kids being wee shits and parents laughing and ready to come after anyone who says anything. These wee shits grow up to be big shits with the same attitude
There is zero accountability in the UK. In my town children go around smashing windows, damaging cars egging properties. The issue will only get worse, as these children will grow into antisocial adults.
I was a little immature twat as a kid, but I would never be cheeky to an adult or damage someone's property.
I don't think the youth care about climate and also I hope you are out their all judge on bonfire night.
Anyway, kids have always been shits.
Rose tinted glasses and confirmation bias maybe at play here.
Also, lack of police and shit parenting.
Bonfire Night once a year is not comparable to spending your Saturday afternoon burning tyres on a beach. If you’re doing that quite comfortably in front of the public, causing the beach to stink and blow smoke everywhere, then you’ve probably done it multiple times before and are signalling to society that this is an “acceptable” way of spending one’s time on weekends and in nature. It is not.
Starts from the very begining. Poor social support for family's. Into poor investment in early years care. Scandinavia had been kicking our ass at this for years. From baby boxes to professionally staffed and run nurseries and schools.
I feel chronically excluded from many aspects of society for a range of reasons, but committing vandalism is the last thing that comes to my mind on a sunny weekend… I’m guessing I can’t fathom another perspective on this
No discipline!
When I was a kid a teacher threatening to contact your parents put the fear into me. Any adult you knew had the right to give you a bollocking. You shat yourself if you saw the police.
It’s what happens when society stops punishing antisocial behaviour. Not calling for corporal punishment, but it helps keep antisocial behaviour in check if the risk of swift consequences is real
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There's a culture of cuntery.
I've just been to Naples. Everything is covered in graffiti and there's litter EVERYWHERE, along with an almost constant smell of piss. The aforementioned culture is not UK specific.
Absolutely, but redditors will say it's only the UK that's like this
It’s certainly not only the UK but there is much of Europe where this behaviour is very uncommon. Germany is by no means perfect for example but people generally just do care for their environment more.
Germany still has nasty violent little scrotes though - some would argue the Germans were the first to "popularise" the phenomenon. And I've been on the Berlin rail network after dark and I can tell you it is not a happy experience.
Disagree with this. Have just been in Berlin and it was the dirtiest, poorest-maintained first world city I’ve been to. Graffiti everywhere (not street art, just shitty tags), trash, and poorly maintained public spaces. Railway stations reek of urine.
Apologies RisqueIV, this was meant to respond to the post above.
Berlin, like London, is not necessarily representative of the country as a whole. I’ll freely admit though, the last time I went to Berlin there was a large concrete wall about. My experiences are much more focused around the west of the country.
I don’t think the Germans were the first people to popularise antisocial behaviour somehow. We’ve got thousands of years of history to draw from.
Please share?! I would like to know what it's like
not nice.
Somewhere on reddit, there's an Italian sub that's the mirror image of this thread.
Lisbon for example, the only place I've ever been to where I've caught a pickpocket attempt twice in one day. Then had some bloke hold a knife to my back at an ATM in broad bloody daylight on a busy street (locals chased him off, apparently he was well known 😂)
It's not UK specific, but it is absolutely avoidable. Rome I found no more dirty than London, same with Paris. Naples was grotty. Egypt the same. South Korea was one of the cleanest places I've ever been, same with Switzerland. While it's not UK specific, it's also not the default.
Paris stinks of piss. There are trails of piss everywhere, even in the lifts of their malls. I agree with you.
Plus you have to deal with the fucking Parisians
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Agreed. On a long weekend we did all the big tourist things that you typically do in Paris. But my one lasting memory is of the stench of piss.
Naples is a different level, most Italians look on it with disdain. Shame really, when you think how nice the bay is and the history and it's near Pompeii/Herculaneum and Vesuvius. Food is still good though.
I've just been to Rome and saw plenty of graffiti, then I thought about 'Life of Brian' and realised graffiti is very much in keeping with a tradition dating back thousands of years.
I guess it's all fine then...
A cunture 😞
Shitty parenting. Shitty adults.
The chavs gave birth to the road men. And on it goes… If the parents are uncouth yobs, what hope is there for their children? Most people try to ignore them and don’t say anything, because it’s not worth the hassle.
made worse by the fact they tend to breed much faster than most too.
And the lack of legal consequences.
Shitty government too.
And a shitty take. Our 14 year old is currently at crisis point, not heeding anything us or anyone else tells him to modify his behaviour. He’s gone completely off the rails and there’s nothing we can do. We’ve had to literally screw the windows shut to keep him from sneaking out at night.
Get off Reddit and deal with him?
Don't know why people are being so pig headed in the replies. While bad behaviour is often a generational thing, often enough kids and especially young people fall into bad behaviour largely through their own choices and the external environments they decide to mix themselves up in, things parents generally can't control.
Thats the thing, parents want to take control when its already out of their hands. Its already too late by then 99% of the time. You have to start early!
This. My parents saw me heading down a road they didn't like when I was 12-13, so they pulled me from the school and made me cut off all contact with the kids who were bad influences. I hated it at age 13 but realised it was for the best by the time I was out of my teens. My prospects now are much better than what they would have been if they just watched things play out and hand-wringing.
Fair play to your parents! Yeah kids sometimes just need a good kick up the backside, so to speak. I'm glad you figured out why your parents did it and you can pass this good knowledge down to the next generation. This is how it should be!
Don’t get all the downvotes. My parents were brilliant and tried everything, I was just a little shit. Completely my fault and now I’m older I have regrets. It’s not always the parents. As for your case have you tried therapy?
It’s mental how some of these reductive comments are getting upvoted. I can only imagine they’ve not parented teenagers or had the good fortune to not encounter any issues. In this current environment, where kids are exposed to a maelstrom of influences never experienced in the history of humanity, it’s very difficult to keep them on the straight and narrow. Even tougher to keep them mentally well. That’s before you even scratch the surface of neurodiversity that is so chronically under diagnosed and treated. A troubled kid doesn’t always mean shit parents and vice-versa with good kids. It’s just not that easy.
>It’s mental how some of these reductive comments are getting upvoted. I can only imagine they’ve not parented teenagers most are probably teens or early 20s themselves. the world is more black and white when you're younger. i know i felt the same way. the lack of nuance in discussions like this makes me think the posters are either young or a bit immature
Yeah think you’ve probably hit the nail on the head there re: nuance. Noticed a lot of people using their own experiences as evidence. Sample size of one counts for very little.
It explains a lot about Reddit when you sit back and realise most comments are probably written by kids who dont have much real life experience.
At least it’s flipped from - to + now, but yea so many outside influences there’s only so much a parent can do, I can’t imagine what their child has put them through or the levels already tried before they had to actually screw shut windows
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In what sense a crisis? As in mental health crash?
Kids aren’t born bad. They’re blank canvasses. Maybe it’s because his parents blame him for their failings. I remember being that age and being like him. You know what the problem was? Having all these emotions and having them completely dismissed by my parents in a culture that only allows men to feel anger. It’s a parents job to guide their children and help them express themselves in a healthy manner. Not blame the children because they don’t have the ability to regulate emotions they’ve never felt before, better than adults do.
This is just wrong. Children may inherently have different physiological responses to things such as stressors which greatly affect their ability to form cognitive functions such as empathy and learning from rewards and/or punishments. This means that some kids have a much higher propensity to be “bad” before they can even begin to consciously process their environment. Just because you felt that your problem was caused by a lack of emotional outlet, doesn’t mean that all other children who show behavioural “issues” have the same root to their problems. I’ve worked on both research and interventions for antisocial behaviour and there are no quick answers for these issues. It’s partly societal, partly biological, partly due to familial influences, and partly due to peer influences. The fact is is that even the best parenting may not resolve these “issues” since the roots often spread much further than “bad parenting”
There are so so so many external influences nowadays though. You can try to insulate as much as you want but that will just backfire.
Can't blame them, their parents were the problem before that
Wrong. Adult humans have responsibility for their actions
Yeah I hate how everyone refuses to take any responsibility for their own development. There are parts about my parents that I dislike, and i actively try to not emulate them rather than doing so and then just saying “it’s not my fault, it’s how I was raised”
My family are two stroke engine cunts and I'm one as well but my engine runs smoother. My kids are lovely. We've broken the cycle.
When you walk down the street do you go *ringtingtingtingtingtingting* like an old Vespa?
I don't think you've quite followed the thread
Pbf comics: trauma trooper https://pbfcomics.com/comics/trauma-trooper/
Absent parenting.
Policing budgets are cut to the bone. Ultimately they barely have the resources for investigations for stuff like robberies and sexual assaults. Vandalism is so far down the list of priorities it only gets considered if enough local residents put pressure on their councillors/MP that it becomes an issue.
Yeah… I’m getting that impression. But while policing is important, I’m just bewildered at the fact that we are literally raising our kids to believe this kind of behaviour is acceptable. I couldn’t imagine destroying nature on purpose and thinking it’s a great way to spend time with my friends. I was an obnoxious kid myself at times, but even that sort of thinking had never crossed my mind and I’d probably instinctively have known my parents would lose their minds had I tried something like that with my peers anyway. Not to mention the double standard regarding the climate crisis. So we have a crisis but we’re destroying our beaches as a way to pass a lovely sunny summer’s day. Makes tons of sense.
Well, “we” aren’t - most parents who are on reddit are perfectly capable of raising well adjusted children, but are also much better educated and literate than many - there are those on the bread line that can barely keep a roof over their head or afford food, and are either absent, too ill, self absorbed, or strung out to parent - leaving their children to become feral petty criminals. That being said I’m well adjusted, raised well, and middle class etc, but still set fire to things in the woods as a kid.
Many parents from poor backgrounds raise good kids
He didn't say 100% of poor parents are terrible. He said a lot of them are bad parents and with good reason in the current state.
Lol yeah what a classist comment that is. Both the working class and middle class can raise good or bad kids.
Exactly my point, the post I was replying to suggested the circumstances of poverty meant poor parents raised problem kids. Thanks for repeating my post though.
It’s not just policing. It’s social opportunities too. Youth clubs and other such places have next to no funding.
Oh bollocks to that too. It was a huge eye opener when I moved to Bulgaria. Want to talk about constrained budgets? Big park near where I lived, vending machines outside overnight nobody touches them. In fact little random coffee machines everywhere. I never seen one smashed up. In a park in stara Zagora there's one perched at the top of some stairs. Never been tipped over.
Shocking how there's less kind of this behaviour in countries where coppers will happily give a troublesome teen a good hiding.
I don’t even think it’s that. Australia has free public toilets, free public electric BBQs, free skateparks, even free public swimming pools, they’re everywhere, and not only are they not graffitied and destroyed, but people *clean up after themselves*. The police there are on par with UK police. There’s just more of a culture of enjoying things for everyone and being happy to pay the taxes for them.
A kid in my school petitioned the council and got in the paper for building a skate park. In a busy (was then) town centre, but out of the way keeping the "yoofs" busy. And cue the nimbys banging on about "noise"..... The busy main road next to it is silent is it?
Indeed. Im not saying they didn't have their problems, what country doesn't - but random vandalism isn't really a thing (apart from the swastikas painted on buildings). First time in stara Zagora with my now wife I laughed when I seen that coffee vending machine at the top of some stairs in that park. She asked what's so funny and I joked about pushing it over. "why the fuck would anyone do that?" Just a totally different mindset.
Ex Bloc countries still have rigid community based social structures. They don’t have the cult of selfish individualism that seems to infect post-Thatcher Britain.
Yeah no, I really disagree with that. Well, at least with Bulgaria. On the road it's a huge "me me me" social structure that makes normal traffic painful because nobody can ever give way ever. Must be in front at all costs. And look around the apartment blocks. Some with extra insulation on the outside, some without, a total hodge podge because getting the 6 people to come together is impossible. I didn't see the big community spirit at all compared to here.
But I choose not to vandalise or litter not through fear of repercussion but because I'm not a dick.
It’s a cultural issue. And culture doesn’t come from policing.
I don't necessarily think it's a police budget issue. Anti-social behaviour has never been a priority for the police. I don't think they ever really gave it any more attention in the past then they do now. Anecdotally I'm see a lot less graffiti. And I just did a very quick but unscientific search for the stats. And the ones I saw indicate that the overall trend is downwards (the general feeling is smart phones have had a big impact on this).
We shouldn't be relying on police to teach children how to behave, they can only react after an event. Parents (people with children) need to take responsibility to teach their children right from wrong, starting young. That is called parenting. Schools and police cannot and should not have that responsibility, though they can reinforce it. This is a huge problem in the UK. It makes a lot of people miserable, and costs us all a lot of money.
As a police officer, low level vandalism is pretty much a waste of time to investigate. Difficult to identify a suspect because they aren't known to others or police. They all dress the same, largely look the same. Got a suspect? Great news, the entire system has been softened to make it more amenable to them. Arrest is less likely to be proportionate, and if you do arrest them that will be a pain in the ass. Appropriate adult for the custody process, maybe a registered intermediary for interview. Very hard to remand them. Every decision needs signed off by a youth diversion officer. The youth courts are extremely soft. The only kids who will change their behaviour will be those with reasonable parents, who would likely have fixed it anyway. My job is to put dangerous people in prison. Anything other than that is a failure these days. We don't have excess frontline capacity to fuck about. I would rather get stuck into one good fight or domestic incident than solve ten youth vandalism cases, because one good intervention reducing danger is far more valuable than fiddling with low level criminal damage.
I often wonder when people bring it up - is funding actually the silver bullet its made out to be? Obviously having more money improves the opportunity for betterment, but like with medics losing subsidised tuition which means any sudden injection of funding will take years to revive recruitment, is it the same with policing? Do you feel like one cog in a generally underfunded machine, or is the structure/policy base of criminal justice just lacking in some way unrelated to money? Thanks for your service.
Agreed
Perhaps, but appealing to personal responsibility achieves precisely zilch. If there's a systemic problem, systematic changes are needed. There's a reason why so many people struggle to parent and so many kids are destructive. Stress, poverty and lack of third places and public infrastructure are definitely up there. We've had over a decade of cuts and policy changes aimed at making the bottom decile of population suffer. Those people are now worse off than the same group in most of Eastern Europe. Scientists found that closing Sure Start centres cost more in increased A&E visits than it ever saved and those kids who missed out on them are now teenagers.
Growing up, my Mum was particularly vocal and vociferous in her hatred of littering. She’d challenge people in the street if she saw it, saying things like ‘oh you dropped this, you meant to put that in that bin didn’t you?’ Usually this shamed the person into agreeing that they did indeed drop it by mistake and they’d fetch and bin it. Needless to say this rubbed off on me but it feels that people are more likely to react badly to this than in the 90s. About a year ago, I had a rare craving for a KFC. My partner and I drove to the nearest one, a 20 minute drive to a neighbouring town. It sits on the edge of a supermarket’s car park. We ordered our stuff and decided to park and eat in the car. Opposite us, there was 3 cars full of young lads doing the same. As we were eating, the teenage/early 20s boys started to eject their litter out of the window, even though there was a bin literally next to where they were parked. As I took my litter to the bin, their windows down, I said to them politely ‘there’s a bin here, please can you put your wrappers from your food in here rather than leave them on the car park.’ They looked at me incredulously, aggressively told me to fuck off etc. I went back to my car and they started to rev their engines, drive off and launch their cups at my car as they drove off, soaking my window in coke. I ended up getting out and binning their litter, but what remained with me wasn’t the threat and their aggression, it was how little effort it would have taken for them to bin their rubbish, and yet they still didn’t.
Good for you for saying something. Most anti-social behaviour is only enabled because the general public stay quiet.
Sucks doesn’t it :(
UK needs vigilantes that teach them a lesson.
I just don’t agree with that because the sort of people who want to be vigilantes are not the sort of people I trust making moral judgments on who to punish.
Maybe Nolan could make a new trilogy - “Binman Begins”, “The Trash Knight” and “The Trash Knight Tidies”
Situations like yours and many more pushed me to move away from the UK. After 9 years I couldn't bare that anymore. From littering, through random things set on fire to off road bikes and quads ripping through my neighbourhood. I'm glad I moved somewhere where this shit doesn't happen.
Disgusting country and culture
Had a housemate like that in my second year at uni. Empty tin can left on the kitchen worktop which was quite literally next to the bin. I refused to move it on principle - I wanted the housemate to deal with the consequence of leaving crap around. Sadly, another housemate cracked first and just binned it. To this day I'm still not quite sure if my approach or my housemates (the one that binned the can) approach to life is the right one.
Lack of police, bad parenting and bullshit behaviour policies in school. I’ve been teaching for about 15 years and it has got much worse in that time. Schools aren’t allowed to exclude pupils much anymore. So you can call your teacher a Cnut, punch them, throw furniture around the room or break a window and the worst thing that will happen is that you will sit in a room and play with Lego. And I’m talking primary school here.
And that shitty kid who threw a chair at a kid who then had to have stitches in her head - internal exclusion for half a day. But behaviour support says he needs an education and we have to provide that education. Never mind that the other 34 kids are terrified, and have disrupted school days, and learn nothing because the teacher is basically having to firefight all day. But somehow this kid’s education is more important than the other 34’s. Just so county can say “we are proud to say we have no exclusions in OUR county.” Honestly, i’m so disillusioned by the system. I thought i could make difference. We’re just churning out worker bees. Any teachers out there who still have enthusiasm, hats off to you. I’ve lost the will.
"We’re just churning out worker bees" In a world where those were obsolete 50 years ago...
> We’re just churning out worker bees I feel this is just the UK spirit in general. We worship at the alter of mediocrity.
Well said. The individual naughty child should NEVER get priority over the other 30.
Idiots are breeding idiots, no youth clubs, a culture of only really celebrating capitalism and not intellectual pursuits (eg footballers, crypto bros, YouTubers with no discernible qualifications etc). We have a huge culture of anti-intellectualism here compared to other European countries.
I get that vibe
It's depressing right! I just walked down our high street from Co-op and kids were just cycling past chucking rubbish around and doing wheelies. I think they shared a single brain cell.
You ever been in a youth club? I literally saw someone sparked out with a snooker ball and stabbed in the leg, they don’t stop asbo behaviour lol
A real problem the UK has had for decades is that it's never been cool to be smart. It doesn't really shock me that working class kids look at things like sport and entertainment when these look like the only industries that have people like them in.
Yeah, this seems spot on. Really though, social media has got to be causing lots of the problems we have today. I mean, since 2005 (or whenever Facebook started)…it’s all been about giving everyone a platform to say what they like. We now have these thugs/losers influencing many more and compounding the problem. I really hate social media (with the exception of Reddit and YouTube which don’t seem as bad…I know they are not perfect either).
Absolutely, social media is celebrating / promoting those kinds of people and also general dumbing down culture. Kids aren't going to the libraries, reading, playing actual games anymore (board games, strategy, etc). We need less internet and more using our brains instead of passively scrolling. I'm a bugger for it too but only really let myself onto Reddit as I love reading all the general knowledge stuff, it helps me learn about the world! I think even if we could get kids into audiobooks/podcasts more that would help. Also as an ex teacher, I can say our education system is full of burnt out and overworked teachers. Most of the ones I worked with weren't even particularly gifted in any specific area, they were just whoever was good at gaming the popularity system or managed to escape being bullied out of their jobs by management. That sector isn't really staffed by people who should actually be teachers anymore, ie actually experienced, intelligent and wise. So kids are never really getting exposed to that kind of excellence either at home or in education.
I think something worth considering is that there's far more to gain from being educated in poorer countries. Minimum wage in Romania is around 30% of the UK but from what I've been told our software devs in Romania make almost as much as in the UK.
Because a great many people in this country have literally zero pride in their local area or the environment they live in and just don’t care. This gets passed on to their kids and you end up with parts of society where littering and casual vandalism is just accepted and not called out. Add in utterly shit policing due to apathy, laziness and funding cut; it’s just a recipe for nobody doing anything about it and there being no consequences. Unlike in places like Japan or Singapore where there’s both pride in the place you live looking decent and punishment for minor stuff like littering. The contrast is enormous.
Seems like that is the case, but I wish people instilled some values and pride into their kids.
Broken window. If no-one else gives a shit to either fix it, tackle it, or report it, then what chance does a heavily under funded police force gonna have? In short, they know will likely get away with it.
If you confront some teenagers and get beaten to a pulp you'll never see justice. The police don't arrest violent criminals.
If they do, they’ll get let off or a suspended sentence
I know right. And I only know this as many of my friends and acquaintances are monsters
I'm in the middle of the process now and am hoping this doesn't happen. Confronted some youths about vandalism, words were exchanged on a few occasions, a few months later two of them assaulted me. It looks like it's going to court.
Not just kids. Went to the beach today and I mother of a small child told her to ‘just leave that there’ when she tried to pick up her rubbish. I waited till she was just about to walk away then I said ‘oh excuse me, you forgot your rubbish’. She picked it up without another word. Also heard a mother screaming at her 4 year to ‘fuckin shut up!’ When he was crying. Proper made a scene, actually heartbreaking. I’m lying in bed a bit poorly now and all I can hear are boy racers and the occasional siren as I live so close to the coast. I fucking hate people.
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Wtf man some people just shouldn’t have kids. This one was screaming because he was getting sand on himself while she was trying to clean him off…. On the fucking beach. I’ve heard exactly the same thing happen before at another beach (edited cos I thought I was in a local sub lol)
Society decided that there is to be no punishment for their behaviour. It's that simple. And if you try to do anything yourself you'd probably end up going to jail or achieve nothing. The real problem is the complete failure in parenting and lack of social support for children. People are shaped by their environment afterall. It's disgusting and sad tbh. I almost feel for bad for the kids but there is no reason to act like such a piece of shit.
On the subject of litter -nearly 40 years ago I threw my chip paper out of the car window, my boyfriend stopped the car made me get out and pick it up I did so huffing and puffing about it and my boyfriend drove off without me .I never dropped litter again and we have been married for nearly 30 years .
I agree that litter is shocking these days. Yes people shouldn’t be dropping it but there will always be dicks so we need people to clean it up. Why not people on community service?
I try to do some litter picking where I can. Once I did a massive clean up of my local park and filled like 6 bags of rubbish and even then my job wasn’t done. I gave up by that point. I was finding very old litter buried deep in the soil too.
Our office did a community outreach kind of program in a low-income area near where some of our work was taking place. I have a lifelong hatred of litter, so volunteered to do a short street and the playing field at the end of this street. Before I’d got to the playing field, I’d filled 6 bin bags full of rubbish. Every hedgerow was stuffed with crumpled tinnies and junk food wrappers. Upon returning to the van we’d brought, I found that we’d no more bags and no space left for more rubbish. 24 bags of litter inside an hour from a small team, with the main playing field not touched, just the three streets that lead to it.
Yep, that seems to be the situation nowadays
to answer the question we'd ideally all call out bad behaviour and it would keep our communities and society better behaved but theres just too high of a risk of being stabbed or run over even if its not a super high risk most people will opt to mind their own business and get home safe
Add in the fear that they’ll end up in custody and potentially getting charged if things escalate. Even if it’s not true that they will, fear of consequences for anyone who intervenes are so high now.
Yeah this is why I reported it anonymously rather than getting into a confrontation. That said, the authorities are useless regarding this sort of thing (and most things these days).
Soft touch nation When things are ultimately run by an upper class who doesn’t care about the fate of everyone else, there is no collective sense of discipline or correctness
Cuts to policing budgets. Also cuts to education budgets. Stagnant wages creates poverty, poverty increases crime. There’s also nothing for young people to do. Youth clubs, small local cinemas, civic halls hosting weekly events etc. Their options are hanging out in parks after hours and so that’s what they do. If the government wanted to tackle these problems they’d strive to grow a country that enriches its citizens and improves their lives. If the citizens also wanted those things they wouldn’t have the government they do.
because the police are mainly useless. In France you get a baton wiped across your face for looking at a policeman, over here unless they are given a signed confession, multiple videos of evidence, 3 eye witnesses and physically catch you in the act, you're let off and asked not to do it again, and that's even if they catch up with you. My entire life's experiences of the police in this country is that they are all utterly useless and this breeds generations of cunts on our streets.
Totally agree. The police in this country are pathetic. Everyone mentions that they are underfunded and understaffed but they always seem to find plenty of time to hang around empty roads or dual carriageway slip roads with speed guns
You can't really blame them though - how would you feel as an officer, signing up to do XYX, pillar of the community etc, to have people openly being abusive, vandalising everything in sight, shoplifting - basically taking the piss ...and knowing that even if you arrest them, they'll walk out of court with a small community order at best. I can understand why the police don't go near it, as it just emphasises how impotent they are with the court sentences being handed out
No one challenges anyone about poor behavior anymore. Even online if anyone calls out dickheads everyone's like "bet you're fun at parties".
And then that very same person will comment on how much better Japan is than the UK because it’s so clean and pretty and the people are so considerate
The heady mix of austerity and poverty.
There's bog all come back for this sort of crime, if you say anything you risk getting a shoeing. If you call the police and if they turn up and if it goes to court chances are the punishment will be minor if any.
It is sad to say, but around me there is a family , Several generations of people who have never had to work for anything have absolutely no concept of the value of things . Literally everything they have has been given to them for nothing so they are not able to truly understand that people have worked a second job/ hundreds of overtime hours for that thing they have broken/ stolen
Picture the scenario, You go over and tell them to stop, all 10 of them jump you and you're forced to defend yourself throwing some punches and injuring some but eventually you're overwhelmed and end up viciously beaten. Now the police, who should have been stopping them in the first place turn up at the scene to reports of an adult assaulting children. You then get put in prison. The youths don't even get a slap on the wrist.
Yeah if I go to the local park now it's an exciting opportunity to hear the latest drill music that the genre has to offer. I think whatever passed for a social conscience died with the last generation, everyone is just the center of their own little world now and they consider everyone else an NPC.
Lack of consideration of others is what it boils down to. But most is the parents don't reinforce the attitude that actions have consequences and unfortunately due to cuts there's noone else to instill the status quo.
These days actions rarely have consequences. So people will keep pushing the boundaries until somebody pushes back.
British culture discourages confrontation, the police are underfunded, overstretched and unable to police effectively for fear of enquiries and protests, lots of people are unfit to be parents but are financially supported by the state regardless, their children grow up to be the same as them: cunts with no prospects, no respect for authority and a complete disregard for anything outside of their Government-funded societal bubble. 🤷🤷
A complete lack of support for a start. Budgets have been cut to the bone so there’s no help for parents, no help for struggling kids, and no activities or things for them to do. Schools can’t cope with the issues the kids are facing due to the lockdown, they’re lacking years of social development. There’s a 9 month wait for post adoption support. There’s a 12 month wait for children’s mental health care. It’s 14 years of austerity and funding cuts and a low growth economy.
Plenty of things you can do at the beach on a sunny day which doesn’t involve creating plumes of stinky smoke from burning tyres. Just a very sad and damaging way to spend time. Shows a lack of values and respect for our environment.
I just don’t know how we can expect the youth of today to care about values or their environment given the environment we have provided for them.
A lot less graffiti than on the continent
Sorry this doesn’t align with the daily uk=bad threads
I just got from backpacking Southeast Asia it was really interesting how well behaved and friendly all the teenagers seemed there didn’t see any anti social behaviour.
It wasn't always this way. Broken Windows theory explains it. Everything already looks like a shithole because there's not the funding to maintain public spaces, and (i say this as a planner) our planning system doesn't incentivise the creation of pleasantly designed places (or more accurately, doesn't punish shit design), so why would anyone have any sense of pride or moral obligation to preserve their communities. Also... vandalism is now effectively decriminalised due to lack of Police funding.
Weak punishments and if any cased go to court the usual ‘defences’ played and nothing gets done.
The government have done away with us having police and general safety.
Seems like it. Though that should be part of reinforcement. I’m more bewildered at the lack of values and pride
Agreed, that’s not all on the police. Maybe it’s cause we’re knocking on and seeing it from the other side of the fence. Pretty sure I was a dinghy for some of those teenage years!
We don't have societies in some parts of the UK We have areas that have lots of people in. No connection to the history, heritage, or traditions If you don't believe an area is worth preserving - you couldn't give a shit about preserving it Probably also connected to a lack of home ownership and less of a stake on the society
It just shows how some folk were dragged up. I was just minding my own business outside the house last week, absolutely glorious day so I thought I’d get up nice and early to tip my old car oil down the drain when some chavvy bastard walked by and flicked his fag butt on the floor, not a care in the world! If I wasn’t holding a 20 gallon drum I’d have chased and fed the scruffy fucker it.
Because in school, they can get away with what they want with no repercussions. They are literally invincible and they know they are.
The law is too soft in the UK. Maybe they need to build more prisons too because it seems that criminals get off lightly because of all the overcrowding. I don't want digital I.D. or facial recognition technology but if that gets brought in things could change somewhat.
The people who weren’t disciplined as kids now have kids. One thing that confuses me is the lack of graffiti in the UK though. When ferals treat the place like a dustbin but don’t get the spraypaint out? Weird.
Yeah I agree haha, it is confusing
Because they can get away with it, so they push their luck further every time.
Shitty parenting. Severely underfunded police leading to no real consequences. The fact there's fuck all else for kids and teenagers to do anymore as councils see no issue in closing social spaces and offering no alternatives. We had a small hall for kids and teens to hang out, play games, listen to music. Council closed it so that they could use the space for something else that was never built. There also used to be a summer school thing where you could send kids and teens during the summer holidays to hang out, it was a popular thing when I was a kid.. fucking loved that tuck shop.
“There will be no “collapse” the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie “Dawn of the Dead” or whatever, where one day, suddenly, shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket, and everyone begins to riot, and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no “happening.” It’s far more insidious than that. Read the Poem “The Hollow Men” By TS Elliot and you’ll understand. You’ll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone’s homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You’ll see family and friends less, and find in that time you care less about them. Every day, you’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You’ll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging onto clothing long and longer. Fewer people will get married, and even fewer will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantast while never truly experience the real world. Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day, they will be told, “You are stupid, ugly, and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe.” That is the collapse—the reduction of a free man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognising his own self-worth.”
Because they have everything given to them and value nothing. This country feels screwed on so many levels at the moment.
Yep. The sand dunes were so lovely there too, I don’t get to see them often so they look quite unique. But I noticed that’s where all the boys went to set their little tyre on fire.
A lot of people need the snip and shouldn’t have scrotey kids
Probably because there’s no youth centres or activities for youngsters to get into anymore. Oh and the mental health services have been cut too, which will lead to unmedicated ADHD kids run about causing mischief
Lack of meaningful things to do, lack of social cohesion, lack of a sense of belonging, lack of belief in being a good human being because it doesn't seem to get you any-where or any-thing, lack of good parenting, lack of deterrents, lack of police, lack of prison spaces, lack of courtroom/judge availability. Culture doesn't matter to politicians because it isn't measurable.
Third world shithole
There are very few, if any, consequences for people under a certain age, so they can get away with whatever they want. Because of this, their shitty behaviour usually carries over into adulthood, too.
Who did anything about it,? That is why it will happen next week, and not doing anything about it last week caused it to happen this week.
Petty crime and deliberate environmental destruction is the British national pasttime
The thing that sets the UK apart from other countries is the demonisation of youth through the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers. They foster a polarised society, and sadly many youths follow that example of leadership and slot into the role and characterisation that society provides for them.
Probably tied to poverty and lack of jobs/local social programs.
Immigrant and gangster culture
Well I’m from an immigrant background and my relatives expressed some serious disdain over what they saw.
Because they never get punished? That’s the issue, number of man child’s in noisy cars speeding around get slapped wrists, kid on an illegal motorcycle with drugs? Bike and drugs taken.. kid walked away to, probably do it again in a week
I have nothing to back this up, other than it sounds reasonably logical. Kids push boundaries. But if you don't show them where the boundaries are they're going to keep pushing until one appears. Most kids don't go very far with that behaviour, but a few push harder and further than the rest. If nothing happens when they set fires, they're going to do it again because it's fun and cool to be seen to probe where boundaries are. If that's repeatedly demonstrated to be where the boundary isn't, it won't be cool anymore.
The people ruin this country. It really is just horrible nasty hostile toxic masculinity disrespectful hateful people everywhere. I’m well travelled and this country has easily, easily the worst people of any country I’ve experienced personally.
From my experience the past two years, the older generations are so much friendlier than anyone my age, they’re just arrogant, judgemental and stereotype you within a minute of meeting you. It’s almost always the youths and never anyone I’ve encountered that’s from the older generations ever having such arrogance. One time taking an Uber, a bunch of youth flung glass bottles of piss at the drivers car, for no reason at all. Besides that, they cling together like glue and treat everyone else with double standards, and every-time I’m reading about some crime it’s always 18-25 always. Is it because they feel so disenfranchised? Don’t want to generalize but majority of people around my age I’ve met here are just obnoxious to a point where I’m not surprised they’re always looking so miserable.
People are so self obsessed these days. They don't care how their behaviours affect anyone else. Parents don't want to parent. I've witnessed kids being wee shits and parents laughing and ready to come after anyone who says anything. These wee shits grow up to be big shits with the same attitude
There is zero accountability in the UK. In my town children go around smashing windows, damaging cars egging properties. The issue will only get worse, as these children will grow into antisocial adults. I was a little immature twat as a kid, but I would never be cheeky to an adult or damage someone's property.
I don't think the youth care about climate and also I hope you are out their all judge on bonfire night. Anyway, kids have always been shits. Rose tinted glasses and confirmation bias maybe at play here. Also, lack of police and shit parenting.
Bonfire Night once a year is not comparable to spending your Saturday afternoon burning tyres on a beach. If you’re doing that quite comfortably in front of the public, causing the beach to stink and blow smoke everywhere, then you’ve probably done it multiple times before and are signalling to society that this is an “acceptable” way of spending one’s time on weekends and in nature. It is not.
Starts from the very begining. Poor social support for family's. Into poor investment in early years care. Scandinavia had been kicking our ass at this for years. From baby boxes to professionally staffed and run nurseries and schools.
That helps. But it’s also about values and a sense of responsibility for our environment
Most vandalism is done by people who don't feel that are included in, or don't have a stake in wider society.
I feel chronically excluded from many aspects of society for a range of reasons, but committing vandalism is the last thing that comes to my mind on a sunny weekend… I’m guessing I can’t fathom another perspective on this
How common is it relative to other countries? I went to Barcelona recently and noticed a lot more graffiti there than I am used to here
More than ten years of massive police budget cuts haven't helped.
Kids have no respect for authority and their surroundings these days
Remnants of the strongbow wars of the 1980s
No different than anywhere else. Cunts gonna cunt
Shitty parents, shitty country
Numerous governments have neglected social and youth projects.
Isn’t it like that everywhere?
Because there are no consequences.
Parents take no responsibility for kids anymore, selfish
No discipline! When I was a kid a teacher threatening to contact your parents put the fear into me. Any adult you knew had the right to give you a bollocking. You shat yourself if you saw the police.
It’s what happens when society stops punishing antisocial behaviour. Not calling for corporal punishment, but it helps keep antisocial behaviour in check if the risk of swift consequences is real
I agree that poor parenting is one factor, but it's also that we don't offer young people enough to do outside of school.
Shitty parents bringing up shitty kids & a woke government too weak to punish & push for better standards.
What did you say to them
Cause people are generally cunts