What’s your perception of young people? Where did you get it?

Recently, we've been thinking a lot about how perceptions of young people affect their everyday lives. From what young people think of themselves and their peer group to the impact on their aspirations and behaviour, stereotyping has a big impact.

In the last two weeks of 2012 the ReachOut! Academy Year 11s watched Plan B’s Ill Manors. On first viewing, the boys thought it was merely a gritty portrayal of life on an East London estate. Did you think that too?

Next, we watched Plan B talk about the film on Ted Talks. We discovered that he meant for Ill Manors to be a satire of the stereotypical ‘chav’. ‘You could hear a pin drop,’ one mentor commented, as the Year 11s listened open mouthed as Plan B spoke about the “demonization of the working class.” He went as far as to say ‘chav’ is a word just as prejudiced as the racist, sexist and homophobic terminology we all know shouldn’t be used.

After the silence, the debate began. Born and raised in Hackney, it’s fair to say the boys know what it’s like to live here. Taken on face value, Ill Manors gives an impression of Hackney as a bleak no-go zone. Dangerous, hopeless, rotten. Plan B wanted to satirise this stereotype – but how many people didn’t get the joke?

This raised the question of what people might think of Hackney, its communities, its people, and its youth. And, alternatively, what might they think of other, more highly respectable areas and people.

In the next session, we asked the boys to link up positive and negative behaviour with some well-known faces. Not a single person guessed that it was ShakaHislop who studied Mechanical Engineering at NASA and Boris Johnson was in a ‘gang’ who smashed up restaurants in Oxford.

So who did the Academy boys pin stereotyping on? The main culprits: the media, teachers, the police, politicians. But as mentee Noah said, “we all do”.

There are some people able to give a realistic assessment of our community. We ended the session on a high as watched George the Poet’s My City. Young people and mentors enjoyed the clever and poignant lyrics - George the Poet doesn’t see the community through rose tinted glasses. His message could be understood a bit more clearly –it’s harder to miss his jokes. Sadly, most people don’t know about his work.

We wanted the boys to join in the debate on how they and their community are portrayed and understood by others, and they did. But what really impressed us was their desire to articulate their ideas, get their point across and be heard. As Boris Johnson shows, everyone stereotypes and is stereotyped. What’s important for us is they boys are aware of it, care about how they are viewed, and don’t feel the pressure to live up to low expectations.