Confronting Britain's teenage wasteland

I doubt that self-destruction was quite what Pete Townshend had in mind when his "teenage wasteland" lyric hit the airwaves in 1971. If he were writing today, the lead guitarist for British rock band The Who could easily have focused on "teenage waistlines" or any number of burgeoning youth-culture issues. However Mr. Townshend meant his words, young people in the West – and especially in Britain – are most definitely not all right.

"On every indicator of bad behaviour – drugs, drink, violence, promiscuity – the UK was at or near the top," BBC news reported Nov. 2, citing the results of a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think tank. Whatever cultural tensions led to this unsavory behavior, the demand for the death of "Victorian" values plainly ushered in more than the freedom-loving 1960s generation bargained for.

Adults, of course, are always complaining about teen behavior. But the IPPR report underscores a disturbing trend: This most liberated of teenage cultures is also the most rude, antisocial, and materialistic in Europe. And all because British teenagers spend their free time in the absence of adult influences.

If, as Townshend asserted, teenagers are "all wasted," it is not because of a restriction on freedoms, as his generation perceived. Ironically, the death of constraining Victorian-era family ideals has become the apparent conduit to the wasteland.

To be sure, France, Germany, and several other European nations that are further along on the "progressive" (read: destructive) path are also struggling with teen problems. Indeed, French President Jacques Chirac has struggled with a youth intifada. But France's problem has a specifically religious undertone and is driven by its massive immigrant population.

So what makes Britain's youth more dysfunctional than their European counterparts? Chiefly, it's due to the effective dismantling of the family and its protections. Consecutive British governments have removed the financial and legal benefits that once upheld the uniqueness of the institution of marriage, which has helped to destabilize the traditional family unit. In addition, the gradual imposition of European-style human rights and other legislation has led to the erosion of discipline in the home and in schools. That has contributed to a growing lack of respect for all authority. Parents, meanwhile, have been jailed for applying old-fashioned "spankings" to keep their children in line.

Elsewhere on the continent, family values are still largely influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, or least by the remembrance of a Western Judeo-Christian tradition. America more overtly acknowledges the religious element of its moral roots. Britain, on the other hand, is a post-Christian society with a weak, often intellectually incoherent, church. British society has steadily pursued policies that have undermined the critical atomic social element upon which all Western civilization depends: the family unit.

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