As presidential elections approach, engagement appears low among under-35s – but some see staying away from the polls as a form of protest
A growing number of 18- to 35-year-olds say they are not planning to vote in Kenya’s presidential elections next week.
About 40% of the 22 million people registered to vote in Tuesday’s elections are aged 18 to 35. Under-35s make up 75% of the country’s population.
Continue reading...Analysis: as NHS shuts London clinic for young people, new regional hubs are planned – but thousands remain on waiting lists
When the Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust in London was established in 1983, it was a different era in terms of the medical understanding of gender dysphoria and the cultural debate around appropriate treatments for transgender young people.
The demand for the service was unrecognisable for what it is today: in the past decade alone, the number of referrals to the GIDS went from 138 in 2010-11 to 2,383 in 2020-21.
Continue reading...There are fears that the e-cigarette boom has the potential to create a generation of young people hooked on nicotine
Lindsey Smith’s son was 14 when he bought his first vape. Engrossed in videos of YouTubers making “ghost puffs” with the vapour, he decided he wanted to try it for himself.
At first he would spend hours trying to copy the strangers online – sitting in his bedroom and practising exhalation techniques to create the ghost-shaped clouds he was seeing on his screen.
Continue reading...Calls for aid to be let into Port-au-Prince district after ‘battlefield’ violence leaves dozens dead and cuts supplies of food and water
Haiti’s capital has been racked by a week of heavy fighting between gangs, with the global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warning that thousands of people were trapped without food or water in one district of Port-au-Prince’s notorious Cité Soleil slum.
“We are calling on all belligerents to allow aid to enter Brooklyn and to spare civilians,” said Mumuza Muhindo, the MSF’s head of mission in Haiti, in a statement referring to the contested area within the sprawling Cité Soleil.
Continue reading...TikTok craze for dressing up linked to unruly behaviour among young people at screenings
Some UK cinemas have banned groups of young people wearing suits during screenings of Minions: The Rise of Gru.
The decision came after some young moviegoers were criticised for rowdy behaviour after a viral trend erupted on the social media app TikTok.
Continue reading...Covid, climate, stability and violence contributing to young people feeling pessimistic about future, survey of 15 countries suggests
African youth have lost confidence in their own countries and the continent as a whole to meet their aspirations and a rising number are considering moving abroad, according to a survey of young people from 15 countries.
The pandemic, climate crisis, political instability and violence have all contributed to making young people “jittery” about their futures since the Covid pandemic began, according to the African Youth Survey published on Monday.
Continue reading...Force claimed it approached groups before launch of Project Alpha which scours social media sites
Youth violence experts have said they had no involvement with a police scheme that collects children’s personal data, despite the Met claiming to have consulted them.
Project Alpha, involving more than 30 staff and launched in 2019 with Home Office funding, scours social media sites looking at drill music videos and other content. It has prompted concerns about racial profiling and potential privacy violations.
Continue reading...Author cites Brexit and the climate crisis as examples of previous generations ‘breaking’ their future
The author Elif Shafak has said she thinks “there’s a scream building up” inside many young people, because they feel their future “is being shaped by older generations”.
“It’s difficult to be young, in this age in particular,” the Turkish-British novelist told the Hay festival. “It’s their future that’s been broken by previous generations,” she said, citing Brexit and the climate emergency.
Continue reading...Rate of abuse against parents is highest among 19- to 25-year-olds and most perpetrators are male
At least 40% of child-to-parent violence and abuse incidents are unreported to police, according to research.
The study into the “hidden harm” commissioned by the London mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) found that the rate of violence and abuse against parents and carers was highest among those aged 19-25, and 81% of perpetrators were male.
Continue reading...Victims of family violence in childhood often only given support once recognised as adult perpetrators
Queensland’s child protection system is failing First Nations children exposed to domestic and family violence, with some victims going through their entire childhood without receiving therapy or specialist support despite being in and out of home care, a report has found.
Often it is only when a man is later recognised as a perpetrator of violence himself that he receives help for his experiences as a child, according to the New Ways for Our Families report, released on Thursday.
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Continue reading...A lack of teachers and school uniform issues blamed for school closures but confusion is a sign of differences in vision for Afghanistan’s future
Earlier this week, girls across Afghanistan arrived for lessons on the day secondary schools were due to open for them for the first time since the Taliban seized power. They were told to go home, and informed schools would remain shut indefinitely.
As international outrage grew at the U-turn, the official Taliban response was confused and contradictory. The group blamed a lack of teachers on the closures and said they first needed to create an appropriate environment for girls to study, and decide on appropriate uniforms.
Continue reading...In Lyari, a slum notorious for violence in Pakistan’s most populous city, Mehr Ghar offers young people a safe place to hang out and study – and, for many, an alternative path to gang life
Living in Lyari was like living on the frontlines of a war, says Nauroz Ghani, who grew up in the Karachi slum notorious for its bloody gang battles. So used to the constant gunfire, he says he would “become restless if a day passed by without hearing the sound of a firing”.
“My teenage years were lost to violence,” says Ghani, 24. “I had no interest in getting an education. Instead, I was attracted by their guns and activities.” He saw dead bodies on the street and one boy was killed in front of him. “All of us who lived during those days have such memories. We lived in terror, but it had become habitual.”
Continue reading...After perilous journeys fleeing human rights abuse in Eritrea, the four boys had arrived safely in the UK. Yet in the space of 16 months they were all dead. What went wrong?
For a while, the four teenage boys, Alex, Filmon, Osman and Mulue, did a reasonably good job of looking after each other. Filmon and Mulue had met in Eritrea before they embarked on their long, dangerous journey to Britain; the others became friends en route or in London, in a park near a Home Office registration centre for unaccompanied child refugees. Their similar backgrounds drew them together, as did the shared experience of travelling 3,300 miles in search of safety.
Mulue and Alex had both spent time in foster care before moving into independent accommodation; Osman and Filmon were living in a hostel in north London. They had all become used to surviving without parents, instead leaning on each other for support. All of them were also struggling with the unsettling reality of their precarious new lives, which was so different from the expectations they had clung to during their traumatic journeys.
Continue reading...Resolution Foundation thinktank report says third of ‘returners’ on temporary or zero-hours contracts
Young people who lost their jobs during the pandemic in the UK have returned to less secure work, often in gig economy roles, according to research from a leading thinktank, which also found almost 50,000 more men under the age of 24 are now economically inactive.
A report by the Resolution Foundation published on Monday found young people had returned to work rapidly in late 2021, with unemployment now slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels, but a third of the 18- to 34-year-olds back in the workplace were now in atypical, insecure work.
Continue reading...In Puerto Viejo, scuba diving was once just for tourists, but a centre is training young people with few opportunities to care for the ocean on their doorstep
“I put fresh almond leaves in your underwater masks as anti-fogging – a way to avoid using chemicals. You can remove them once in the water, just before diving,” says Salim Vasquez, 14, pushing her dreadlocks away from her mask.
She distributes the equipment to her fellow divers, who are aged between 14 and 24, and Ana María Arenas, a group coordinator. It is 8am on a cloudy Sunday morning in Puerto Viejo, a Jamaican-inspired city in the south of Costa Rica. The young conservationists are preparing to dive into the Caribbean water for their weekly reef monitoring.
Continue reading...Analysis: school absences are soaring, but experts disagree about the importance of vaccinating young children
Covid cases in the UK have fallen sharply in the past few weeks, and hospital admissions appeared to have turned a corner. But now, it seems, the situation has stalled, with cases bobbing around 90,000 a day.
The reason for the change is that while case rates are falling among adults, they are rising among children – where vaccination rates remain sluggish.
Continue reading...The first time I worked in an office, I was the boss of a group of sceptical youngsters. They looked for my weak spots – then became my first full-sighted friends
My first experience of office life was daunting. You might expect one’s first experience of working in an office environment to be pretty gentle: making the tea, a bit of filing, running errands for the boss. Not a bit of it, in my case. Aged 20, with no experience of office life, I was the boss. And, just to add a little spice to the task, I was totally blind.
My job as a community service volunteer at Youth Action York was to persuade a sceptical group of teenagers to give a helping hand to local elderly or disabled people who were struggling – assisting them with their shopping, perhaps, or tidying up their garden. It felt like a challenge, and my teenage volunteers made sure it was.
Continue reading...Academics and clinicians say bill ‘will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health’
Hundreds of clinical psychiatrists and psychologists have warned that the police and crime bill reaching its final stages in parliament “will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health”.
“We cannot think of better measures to disempower and socially isolate young people,” they say in an open letter signed by more than 350 academics and clinicians and published online.
Continue reading...One of the city’s most wanted, Peter Wainaina was given a second chance and used it to turn his life around and help others find different path out of poverty
At the entrance of Kibagare, a slum in Nairobi’s outskirts, boots of dead gangsters dangle from electricity wires that hover over ramshackle homes of wood and iron sheets.
With little state protection from crime, angry local people will often take the law into their own hands and beat an offender who is caught in the act, sometimes to death.
Continue reading...The Omicron variant has refocused attention on vaccination rates as data shows disparities in uptake across age, region and ethnicity
Hundreds of cases of the new Omicron Covid-19 variant have now been confirmed in the UK and experts have called for a renewed focus on vaccination rates.
As of 4 December, just over eight in 10 people aged 12 or older UK-wide had received two doses of a coronavirus vaccine, according to data from the UK Health Security Agency, while 89% had received a first dose. This means about 6 million eligible people may still be unvaccinated, based on ONS population figures as opposed to counts of GP records. So who are they?
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