Word: britishers
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Britons have never been very comfortable with the idea of childhood. ("Culturally, Britain just doesn't like children much," says Batmanghelidjh.) In Victorian England, rich children were banished to nurseries and boarding schools, while their poorer contemporaries were sent out to work. The British are still expected to function as adults from an early age. At 8, Scotland has the lowest age of criminal responsibility in Europe, followed by England and Wales, where youngsters answer for their crimes from the age of 10. Yet children venturing into the adult world often feel rebuffed. "I don't get the feeling that...
Rapid social change has not helped. Family and community life have been redrawn in most rich countries, and none more so than Britain, where marriage rates are down to a 146-year low. A study in 2000 by the OECD found that British parents spend less time with their children compared to other nationalities, leaving them more open to influence from their peers and a commercially driven, celebrity-obsessed media. Elder Britons too often see their youngsters as a problem. Dominique Jansen, a Dutch mother living in England, says she recently took her two toddlers to her local church...
This youth culture echoes and magnifies aspects of the adult world around it. Binge-drinking, for example, is hardly the preserve of young Britons. A report by the organization Alcohol Concern noted that one in three British men and one in five women drink double the amount considered safe at least once a week. And, unlike many British sports, this pursuit is popular from the bottom of the social spectrum right to the top. Photographs of Princes William and Harry emerging flushed from nightclubs are tabloid staples...
...play that premiered at a north London theater in February. Her teenage protagonists are dysfunctional and knowing, their cruelty as casual as their sexual relationships, their racy behavior only partially camouflaging palpable misery. There are no adults in the play to intervene or to comfort. For too many British kids, that's not drama; that's real life...
...among Britain's teenagers. So do pervasive but invisible social barriers of class and race. Income inequality is greater in Britain than the rest of western Europe, and the gap between its poorest and richest citizens has been growing since the 1980s. Social divisions have proved remarkably resilient, and British kids born into poverty - as many as one in three, according to the Children's Society - still start life at a serious disadvantage. Britons "continue to believe that poor people just need a kick up the backside to break out of poverty," says Reitemeier. And while skin color doesn...