Image of young people in the media

[ukyp]

Campaign proposal

To improve the image of young people through the media and other community projects

Purpose of campaign

Image of young people is something very important. We have been targeted by the media and sometimes used as the worst example of young people in Europe. We need to ensure that work that goes on across the UK which is positive is highlighted, be it through national or local media so that young people can be taken seriously and the ignorance surrounding young people in today’s society is overcome. Relations between young people and different industries (e.g. the police), need to be improved and this can only occur if young people feel they have a fair deal and treated seriously. It is unfair to generalise about the majority of young people using the example of the minority.

Read more about this campaign

Discuss

· What do you think of this campaign idea?
· Is this issue important to you?
· Is the campaign realistic and achievable?
· What challenges would this campaign face?
· How could we make this campaign successful?

Vote

Click here to cast your vote

If you haven’t registered to vote, REGISTER NOW. It will only take a minute to do. Click here to register.

[M-lo]

I fully support this proposal.

Surveys have been done into this issue by groups as diverse as UK Youth, the British Youth Council, Sheffield UK Youth Parliament, Frontier Youth Trust, The Prince's Trust, Barnardo's etc.

From this data, it is apparant that young people have an image problem in the UK.

96.2% feel that it's important for young people to be positively represented in the media (UK Youth), yet 98% of young people "feel that media, always, often or sometimes represents them as anti-social", while "More then 80% of the young people surveyed thought that the way they are represented in the media leads to older people respecting them less" (British Youth Council)

In a survey by Frontier Youth Trust, 61% of respondents said their opinions of young people are fuelled by the media, and the Prince's Trust found that 3/4 feel scared when they see a hooded youth.

Many of these organisations and more have banded together to organise a National Youth Week this year, similar to that of Australia (which is an unbridled success), to celebrate the positive contributions of young people. It would be senseless for the UK Youth Parliament to miss out on this.

This is not simply an issue of us wanting better PR. It is tearing communities apart. Older generations now fear the young because all they see of young people is the negative media image. Youths in many areas are suspicious of older people- and for what? These divisions are caused in many cases by an irrational of youths. It has even entered our vocabulary- where once 'youth' conjured up positive images, it now brings to mind a drunken, knife-wielding, hoodie.

This is an issue that strikes at the very heart of what UK Youth Parliament is about. We were elected to give young people a voice- yet the only voice of youth many hear is the Sun's daily commentary of Broken Britain.

It is for these reasons that I wholeheartedly support this campaign proposal.

[Bex]

I fully support this proposal
I think that young people are grouped into that small minority that do drugs , have sex and commit crimes and the teenagers doing good in society are overlooked to often. This issue is important to me as even doing nothing teenagers shopping with friends are followed and spyed on just incase and are assumed to being doing something wrong .
I feel that this is a realistic and acheivable campaign although it may face challenges such as press attention as they only ever want to point the bad in people.

[Liam Hannan]

so...

the gist of this "national" campaign is

"let's do more locally!"

Am I the only one seeing the irony there?

[Harrison]

Originally Posted by Liam Hannan

so...

the gist of this "national" campaign is

"let's do more locally!"

Am I the only one seeing the irony there?

I completely agree. A national campaign like this would be too large for a national co ordinator and would have regional or local city district co ordinators therefore essentially becoming a local campaign.

The ethos is great. I couldn't agree more that we need an improved representation in the media, however, we could do this through other campaigns. If we think about, should this campaign pass and get media attention, what would the title of the article be 'Young people think they should look better in the media'. That doesn't prove why we should look better. It would be much more interesting for an adult reader to see a national campaign like the abolition of tuition fees being publicised and then they realise we are manifesting ourselves in mature topics for the benefit of young people and that will give us better representation in the media, can you not see that? That actually proves our worth of getting good press and at least tries to aim to eradicate horrendous stereotypes instead of in essence telling people what we are going to do and not doing anything. This campaign in terms of national status isn't practical enough.

What it would do is produce reports and studies from local areas about correct young people media representation, or incorrect as the case may be. Once again, this is local. Let's keep it local. It would work better on a local level.

[M-lo]

There's no point doing this campaign locally. Local media is already pretty good at representing young people fairly. It's media like the Sun that we need to target for fairer representation- and are they likely to listen to a small group from a suburb of Hull? I don't think so. We'd have much more clout as a national campaign.

There's plenty of ways this could make national news. Remember Barnardos' report last year claiming that young people and children were being demonised? But we'd be missing the point by merely trying to get the media to report that we think they're misrepresenting us... what we'd need is to get specific positive stories into national press, not mere complaints that there aren't any.

Which is, again, why we need it national. A national campaign doesn't mean we leave the co-ordinator to do it all himslef/herself. It means the whole nation is involved. So, this is a very feasible campaign if we make a national network of local groups- i.e. local groups put forward positive stories from their area, which the national network puts forward to the national media.

Again, there is no point doing this locally. There are so many organisations working on this- what we need now is unity with them, rather than division. And they are uniting- to do a national youth week this year, and UKYP cannot be involved in that if we are working merely at a local level.

[joshl1972]

I'm fully on board with this. Our UKYP branch in Coventry is currently running something similar called "Goodie in a Hoodie", and our aim is to improve YPs image in the media. So far it's been pretty successful, and we've had lots of great events for YP to participate in.
I'm voting for this one!

[jake.B]

Well I agree with the media to a certain degree. Our generation is bad, not all. But a lot are bad. Although when does saying there all bad and thugs in every newspaper and on t.v. help to sort the problem out?

[Anonymous]

How would this be achieved?

[xvictoriax]

i'm actually doing this myself in my own county and to be honest if you cared about the problem you would do the same and talk to newspapers etc and get them to publicise what young people do?