The Shaming of Young People in Contemporary Britain: Discrediting, Denouncing and Demonizing the Young Generation
Author: Sarah Pickard, Sorbonne Nouvelle – (CREW) 1

Introduction
The shaming of youth, young people and the young generation on the basis of supposed age-determined or life stage-determined biological, psychological or social characteristics that are said to be responsible for specific traits, attitudes and behaviour is not new.3 Young people have been shamed by older generations going back through history to ancient Greek, for example, by Aristotle.4
Two millennia later, much shaming of young people revolves around similar tropes. Today, however, certain sections of the mainstream media, social media and academia provide a much wider forum for youth-shaming. The sentiments propagated dissipate into popular, public and political opinion, thereby reinforcing negative narratives.5 In turn, this feeds unhelpful intergenerational tensions and divisions.
The focus of this talk is the shaming of young people and the young generation in contemporary Britain. This young generation has experienced a series of crisis, including the global financial crisis, the great recession, austerity, Brexit, the environmental emergency and now the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are living in precarity and cannot hope to climb the social ladder and/or find stability soon.6 Yet, they continue to be shamed. I argue, that just as Bourdieu commented “youth is a social construct,”7 the shaming of youth is a cultural, media, social and political construct.
In this talk, I provide some pointers to the myriad of interlinked ways young people and increasingly the young generation are shamed by society. I focus on generational labelling, a prominent aspect in the shaming of contemporary British youth. But there are many others that contribute to discrediting, denouncing and demonizing the young generation.
Generational labelling, naming and shaming
There are a host of generational labels employed to designate to young people that tend to portray them as homogeneous cohorts that supposedly share the same outlooks, traits, habits, characteristics based on their year of birth.
Cohorts
These generational monikers started with the ‘baby boomers’ born during the spike in the birth-rate after the Second World War. Their children who were born in the late 1960s and 1970s started to be labelled ‘Generation X’ during the 1990s, following the publication of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X.8Subsequently, successive cohorts have been dubbed ‘Generation Y’, followed unsurprisingly by ‘Generation Z’ for people born around year 2000 and after. Next come ‘Generation Alpha’ born from 2010 (the year the iPad was launched) onwards. The precise years of birth used to demarcate these cohorts are somewhat vague and they vary, which underlines their unscientific nature.
Other umbrella terms based on birth years are the ‘Millennial Generation’ and ‘Millennials’ that appeared within the British landscape when Madsen Pirie, President of the Adam Smith Institute, wrote with Robert Worcester a booklet called the Millennial Generation, in the late 1990s, to refer to young people turning 18 at the turn of the century.9 Shortly after, Americans Howe and Strauss published Millennials Rising using the same loose definition.10 Madsen Pirie continues to use the term Millennials, although now to describe those born around the year 2000 in A Millennial Manifesto.11
The age boundaries of the catchy term ‘Millennials’ have been stretched to suit needs, although the term ‘Post-Millennials’ is a new addition to the labelling. This overlapping illustrates well how the terms Millennials and Millennial Generation are elastic, fuzzy generalisations about generations. As Andy Furlong pointed out: “it is relatively rare for youth researchers to use the term generation as a way of distinguishing the experiences of a group of people born in a particular era from those born in earlier or later periods. This is partly because the term is thought to lack both precision and an adequate theoretical grounding.”12
Naming, blaming and shaming
The language of generations is often used in marketing, the mainstream media and by certain academics to make generalisations and stereotypes about young people.13 As Jones observes, “in their quest to target groups, market researchers reduce young people to marketing groups or ciphers which subsequently provide the sound bites for the media.”14 The young people referred to as ‘a generation’ have been attributed with certain shared characteristics, which are supposed to bind them together and separate them from younger and older generations.
Generation X, for example, is said to constitute “a generation of young people perceived to be disaffected, directionless, and having no part to play in society; a ‘lost’ generation.”15 Jean Twenge, an American popular psychologist, labels all young people born in the United States during the 1970s–1990s as an egotistical ‘Generation Me’, who she criticizes profusely because she argues, they have been overprotected and even encouraged to think they can ‘have it all’.16 In iGen, Twenge continues the same line of argument about contemporary young people stating that “the complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen’ers’ lives.” She goes on, “the I in iGen represents the individualism its members take for granted” and “their rejection of traditional social rules.”17
Other reductive and generalist labels have emerged that all have pejorative connotations and lack rigorous scientific grounding, for example, the ‘snowflake generation’ said to be self-obsessed, over-sensitive with a sense of entitlement who melts away at the first sign of trouble. It does not take into account why young people might be living with anxiety and mental health issues or empathy, as implied in the 2019 British Army recruitment campaigns advertistements.18
The label ‘antisocial generation’ is also employed to condemn various beahviours, such as juvenile delinquency, deviancy and hooliganism.19 This is not enough space here to go into, detail, but common criticisms reflect social phenomena, such as binge drinking, teenage pregnancy, knife crime, gang violence, postcode violence. Until recently, young people in Britain held European records for many of these social phenomena.20 The particularly fuzzy term disruptive or ‘anti-social behaviour’ emerged during the years Tony Blair was Prime Minister.21 He famously created the Anti-Social behaviour Order (ASBO) used by local authorities to deal with behaviour varying from spitting to prostituion with any breaches leading to a criminal record.22
Notably, young generations are ‘condemned’ as being politically apathetic and disengaged. Monikers such as ‘Generation Apathetic’ or ‘Apathy Generation’ are employed to signify young people are lazy, narcissistic and ‘cannot be bothered’ to participate in traditional ‘good citizen’ politics; they are not dutiful citizens. This shaming ignores the role of politicians and political parties have in alienating young people through punishing policies and untrustworthiness in combination with structural barriers, i.e. supply-side issues.23 Other shaming involves suggestion that young people are naïve or easily bribed, for example in relation to the 2017 “youthquake” general election that saw a rise in the ‘youth vote’ for the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn on a youth-friendly manifesto. Moreover, young people are shamed for protesting, for example, in school climate strikes or the Fridays For Future environmental movement and called immature for trying to get politicians to act on global warming (and are met with repressive policing).24
Naming but not shaming
The terms ‘Millennials’ and ‘Generation Y’ are sometimes used in Political Science, mostly to designate more objectively a cohort who has been politically socialised at a particular point in political history, and/or who are said to display common social and political characteristics. Thereby, distinctive characteristics are attributed to young people born or young people who turned 18 around the time of the new millennium (the age ranges vary) due to the political, socio-economic and technological environment they have grown up in. This can be useful, for example, when the year 2000 is viewed a technological turning point in history with the advent and democratisation of the internet and digital technologies. It can also be helpful when used to understand political behaviour, as did Mannheim with his concept of ‘generational units.’25
Generational names can also be used in a meaningful way to describe the effects of political and economic policy decisions inflicted on young people, such as the ‘jilted generation’,26 ‘generation rent’, the ‘sacrificed generation’, the perennial ‘lost generation’, the ‘left behind generation’ and the ‘Generation Xploited’. To this we must now add the ‘Brexit Generation’ and ‘Generation Lockdown.’
Wyn and Woodman refer to ‘social generations’ with post-1970s generations experiencing specific economic and political conditions that are different from predecessors.27 This is an interesting case in point, as these terms describe the situation that young people have had to endure, which have been imposed on them, for example, instability, precariousness and austerity, rather than traits young people are said to have or display. The concept of political generations emanating from the impact of the political period of a young person’s political socialisation is also helpful to understand participation.
Why we play the game of shame
For Lakoff and Johnson we use myths and metaphors to help us understand the world.28 The myths and metaphors we construct say a lot about our society. In this way, people employ expressions such as ‘generation apathy’ to make sense of lower rates of voting among young people. The widespread use of the apathy metaphors regarding young people’s political participation reveals society tends to have a negative view of all young people, which is shown in persistent ‘young people as a problem’ narrative.
Lakoff challenges the classical view that categories are defined by objective shared features.29 He argues that we categorise to try and understand the world using cognitive metaphors. I contend the term ‘Millennials’ is a mostly unhelpful categorisation and a Bourdieusian social construct used to make sense of political participation and citizenship of young people. The journalistic moniker ‘Millennials’ lumps all young people together, overlooking intragenerational differences and sidelining minorities. It also contributes to intergenerational tensions, when so-called generations are compared, especially as ‘Millennials’ seem to be compared unfavourably in terms of voting and are often deemed responsible for the future ‘downfall of democracy’.
Conclusion
In sum, the terms we use to designate young people and the concepts we use to analyse them can serve to perpetuate negative stereotypes and generalisations. The ‘young people are a problem’ narrative, or the ‘young people are all the same’, or ‘the trouble with young people these days’ narratives, which are used in the mainstream media but also some sections of academia are unhelpful. Moreover, not only do they feed the ‘young people as a problem’ narrative, they nourish societal divisions, notably intergenerational conflict.
Many sections of the mostly right-wing mainstream media have generated and perpetuated the shaming of young people, especially the Daily Mail, whose typical readership is white, middle-class and middle-aged. This shaming of young people involves, imagery, narratives, labelling, stereotypes, demonizing of a whole generation creates a “moral panic” that seeps into public opinion and is then reinforced in “deviancy amplification,” a concept Cohen devised in the 1960s about Mods and Rockers.30
Successive governments, notably those led by Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher (Conservative, 1979-1990), Tony Blair (Labour, 1997-2007), David Cameron (Conservative, 2010-2017) and now Boris Johnson (Conservative, 2019-) have shamed the young generation and exercised social control by introducing repressive measures and legislation – often to please the more numerous and more likely to go to the ballot box older generations. This has particularly impacted on young people from underprivileged, poor backgrounds. It is young men from black and ethnic minorities who are the target of most shaming. Even those who are politically engaged and “put their money where their mouth is,” for example, the black grime artist Stormzy from South London who has funded scholarships for young black people to go to the University of Cambridge.
The young generation in Britain had already been the most affected by a series of crisis stemming from the global financial crisis, the Great Recession that led to austerity measures (education, housing, welfare, leisure). They have and will be affected by Brexit as their possibilities to travel, study and work in the European Union diminish. They then had to face the ‘environmental crisis’. Now they are dealing with COVID-19. They continue to be shamed.
But today’s generation of young people in Britain, as shown in various surveys, polls and studies have less risky behaviour are less likely to get pregnant, less likely to binge drink than just a decade ago. They are also more likely to vote and to protest. In stead of blaming and shaming, it would be more helpful and constructive – for all generations – to reduce the intergenerational tensions and divide and look behind the rhetoric of the newspaper headlines and parliamentary debates. Politicians should address the significant structural issues that have resulted in the young people being the first generation not to experience upward mobility, increased debt, not have better future to look forward to, i.e. hope.31 Now more than ever.
To end, I would like to quote the voice of someone young who various politicians, including Donald Trump and Scott Morrison have attempted (unsuccessfully) to shame. The following word were written by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, just two weeks after she started her school climate strike, on the day before the Swedish general elections:
To all the newspapers who still don’t write about and report on climate change […]. To all the political parties that pretend to take the climate question seriously. To all the politicians that ridicule us on social media, and have named and shamed me so that people tell me I’m retarded, a bitch and a terrorist, and many other things. To all of you who choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent catastrophic climate change than catastrophic climate change itself. Your silence is almost worst of all. The future of all the coming generations rests of your shoulders.32
The Shaming of Young People in Contemporary Britain:
Discrediting, Denouncing and Demonizing the Young Generation
Annex
1)

Daily Mail, 26 August 2017.
“How did so many students turn into snowflakes”,
(https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4824866/How-did-today-s-students-turn-snowflakes.html)
2)

Daily Mirror, 2 July 2018.
“One in ten millennial would rather loose a FINGER than give up their smartphone.”
(https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/one-ten-millennials-would-lose-12835452)
3)

Travel and Leisure, 23 August 2017.
“‘Vacation shaming’ is preventing millennials from taking time off.”
(https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/travel-trends/millennials-vacation-shaming)
4)

Huffington Post, 24 April 2017.
“Snowflakes? Millennials put baby boomers to shame.” link here
5) Binge drinking


Daily Mail. 22 April 2011.
“Binge shame of UK teen girls: They’re drinking TWICE as much as those in the rest of the developed world.”
(https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1379470/Binge-shame-UK-teen-girls.html)
6) Teenage pregnancy

The Sun, 16 April 2014.
“Britain’s Youngest Parents.”
When born, in North London, the baby’s mother was aged 12 years and three months, her father 13 and her maternal grandmother 27.
(https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/746069/britains-youngest-parents)
7) Knife crime, gangs


Daily Mail, 4 April 2018.
“Britain’s feral gangs ‘are now a bigger danger than terrorism’: Criminals’ online boasts of shootings and stabbings inspire the next generation of gangsters.”
8)

The Guardian, 4 March 2010.
“Don’t blame us for political apathy.”
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/04/young-people-voting-apathy)
9)

University of Cambridge.

The Times, 30 December 2019.
“Stormzy says his grants are pro-black, not anti-white.”
(https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stormzy-says-his-grants-are-pro-black-not-anti-white-5nqrltnb3)
10)


Mccrindle. 1 November 2017.
Endnotes
1 Please note this work is still in its infancy.
2 “YOUR ARMY NEEDS YOU” is a nod towards Field Marshall Lord Kitchener’s ‘YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU’ recruitment campaign during the First World War.
3 M.J. Rendall. 1907. Schools of Hellas: An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 BC. Macmillan.
“The Athenian streets were full of young Hooligans, while the aristocratic lads developed more refined, if more vicious, methods of giving vent to their instincts.”
4 Aristotle. Rhetoric. (Ῥητορική), 4 BC. Book II. Chapter 12, “On Youthful Character.”
In: George, A. Kennedy. 1991. Aristotle, on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Oxford University Press, 165.
“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances […] They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
“In terms of their character, the young are prone to desires and inclined to do whatever they desire. Of the desires of the body they are most inclined to pursue that relating to sex, and they are powerless against this. They are changeable and fickle in desires, and though they intensely lust, they are quickly satisfied.”
5 Sarah Pickard. 2014. The Trouble with Young People These Days: ‘Deviant’ Youth, the Popular Press and Politics in Contemporary Britain. “Labelling the Deviant. Othering and Exclusion in Britain from Past to Present.” Emma Bell & Gilles Christoph (eds.). Revue française de civilisation britannique (RFCB) – French Journal of British Studies, (19)1, 91-122.
6 Judith Bessant, Rys Farthing and Rob Watts, Rob. 2017. The Precarious Generation: A Political Economy of Young People. Routledge.
7 Pierre Bourdieu. 1980. La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot. Interview with Anne-Marie Métailié in Les Jeunes et le Premier Emploi. Association des Ages, 1978, 520-530. Reprinted in Pierre Bourdieu. 1980. Questions de Sociologie. Les éditions de minuit, 143–154.
8 Douglas Coupland. 1991. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. St Martin’s Press.
9 Madsen Pirie and Robert Worcester. 1998. The Millennial Generation. Adam Smith Institute/MORI.
10 Neil Howe and William Strauss. 2000. Millennials Rising. The Next Great Generation. Vintage Books.
Howe and Strauss.
11 Madsen Pirie. 2017. A Millennial Manifesto. Twelve Ideas to Help Government Win Over Young Voters. Adam Smith Institute.
12 Andy Furlong. 2013. Youth Studies. An Introduction. Routledge, 11.
13 Sarah Pickard and Judith Bessant, eds. 2017. “Introduction.” Young People Re-Generating Politics in Times of Crises. Palgrave Macmillan, 1-16.
14 Gill Jones. 2009. Youth. Key Concepts. Polity, 59.
15 John Ayto. 1999. Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins. Bloomsbury, 586.
16 Jean Twenge. 2006. Generation Me. Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than Ever Before. Free Press.
17 Jean Twenge. 2017. iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—And What That Means for the Rest of Us. Atria Books, 2017, 2-3.
18 Wolfe, Cameron. 2019, December 19. “Best of 2019: ‘Your Country Needs You’ Army recruitment campaign.” Dynamic. Published on United Solutions website: (https://www.uniledsolutions.com/2019/12/best-of-2019-your-country-needs-you-army-recruitment-campaign)
According to Wolfe: “The campaign included a series of TV adverts that portray three potential recruits at home or work who are ridiculed for their “millennial” attributes by their peers. These characteristics are then re-contextualised as sought-after skills in the army. The aim of the campaign is to show that qualities that can be perceived as weak or embarrassing are in fact desirable characteristics in the army. ‘This generation of 18 to 24-year-olds gets a lot of bad press. They are constantly berated in the media with a barrage of derogatory terms and dismissed as a lost cause,’ said Nik Studzinski, chief creative officer at Karmarama to Dezeen. ‘As a modern and progressive employer, the British Army sees things differently. It sees a generation full of potential – capable, talented and keen to make a difference,’ he explained.”
19 Geoffrey Pearson. 1983. Hooligan. A History of Respectable Fears. Macmillan Press.
20 Sarah Pickard. 2014. ‘The Trouble with Young People These Days’: ‘Deviant’ Youth, the Popular Press and Politics in Contemporary Britain” ‘Labelling the Deviant. Othering and Exclusion in Britain from Past to Present’. Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (RFCB)—French Journal of British Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 91–122.
21 Sarah Pickard, ed. 2014. Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain: Victorian and Contemporary Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.
22 Sarah Pickard, ed. 2014. Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain: Victorian and Contemporary Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.
23 Colin Hay. 2014. We We Hate Politics. Polity.
24 Sarah Pickard, Ben Bowman & Dena Arya. 2020. ‘We Are Radical in Our Kindness’: The Political Socialisation, Motivations, Demands and Protest Actions of Young Environmental Activists in Britain. Youth and Globalization, vol. 2, no. 2, 250-279. (https://doi.org/10.1163/25895745-02020007)
25 Karl Mannheim. 1952. “The Problem of Generations.” Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Collected Works, volume 5, edited by Paul Kecskemeti. Routledge, republished 2001, 276–322 (Original German version published in 1928).
26 Ed Howker and Shiv Malik. 2013. Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted Its Youth, 2nd edition. Icon, 2010.
27 Johanna Wyn and Dan Woodman. 2006. “Generation, Youth and Social Change in Australia.” Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 9, no. 5, 95–514.
28 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
29 George Lakoff. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
30 Stanley Cohen. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Routledge.
31 Sarah Pickard. 2019. Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in Britain in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
32 Greta Thunberg. 2019. No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. London: Penguin, 3-4.
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