Society in "deep trouble" shocker
A few days ago Unicef released a league table of the well being of children and of the 21 industrialised nations that were surveyed, Britain came bottom.
Unicef looked at 40 indicators from the years 2000-2003 including poverty, family relationships, and health.(click to link to story)
One of the report's authors told the BBC that under-investment and a "dog-eat-dog" society were to blame for Britain's poor performance.
Child well being table:
1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Spain
6. Switzerland
7. Norway
8. Italy
9. Republic of Ireland
10. Belgium
11. Germany
12. Canada
13. Greece
14. Poland
15. Czech Republic
16. France
17. Portugal
18. Austria
19. Hungary
20. United States
21. United Kingdom
Source: Unicef
All in all, this is pretty grim as I'm supposed to be working directly with young people to increase their opportunities and sense of well being. I guess it's back to the drawing board...
David Cameron according to BBC news
is to call on society to restate its authority over the young, following the shootings of three London teenagers.I must be honest and say that I found this particularly disappointing especially as DC has been quite pro young people and displaying a youth work approach in handling them so far. To be fair to DC, I think he's been the victim of some poor journalism as the rest of the report reads:
"We urgently need to encourage a culture of intervention. In a healthy society, children are the responsibility not just of their parents, but of the whole community," he will say.
"I'm not talking about taking on a gang of dangerous thugs. I'm talking about treating children and teenagers with respect - with the expectation that, if they are spoken to as reasonable people, they will respond as reasonable people."
It also talks about him consulting young people in his constituency.
I promise to make my next post cheerier and shorter...
Labels: David Cameron, international affais, politics, Unicef, well being, young people
posted by Helsalata @ 7:12 am
2 comments
2 Comments:
There does seem to be a rough correlation here: Larger, world playing countries seem to gravitate toward the bottom half of the list. I am not quite sure what this observation means, if it means anything at all.
Think about it!
Hi Thanks for your prayers by the way - they were obviously heard and acted upon - I survived, the family survived and the school survived - and even better I was richly blessed by the LENT event and got a plug in about LENT in assembly this morning!
Now onto your Blog posting which is very interesting. I think DC has spoken a lot of sense recently but will still not vote Tory - or Labour for that matter after recent events. I think the 'ban the hoody' slogans have not helped and are indicative of a suspicion we now have of the present teenage generation. The sort of stuff you are doing is making a small dent into a massive issue - a beuutifully formed and well thoughtout dent of course but we need to find a way to give more responsibility back.
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