We must pour into young people instead of relying on punitive measures

Politicians promise tougher policing, harsher punishments, and new powers to control young people in public spaces.

Instead of investing in care, governments invest in surveillance, policing, and criminalisation. But these responses are not solutions. They are distractions from a deeper political failure: the abandonment of young people by the state and the expansion of punishment as a substitute for care.

As someone with a youth worker background, I have seen what actually changes lives. Relationships, trust, stability, and collective care. I have worked with young people who were written off by schools, criminalised by police, and treated as threats before anyone asked what they were carrying or surviving.

What transformed them was not surveillance or coercion. It was having consistent adults who listened without judgment, spaces where they could exist without being treated as suspicious, and opportunities to build confidence, creativity, and belonging rooted in healing and justice.

Punitive approaches treat young people as problems to be managed rather than people shaped by the conditions around them. These approaches distract from a deeper political failure: the abandonment of young people by the state and the expansion of punishment as a substitute for care.

For years, the state has dismantled the very infrastructures that help young people survive and thrive. Chronic underfunding has led to youth clubs closing. Community centres have disappeared. Mental health services are stretched beyond recognition. Schools are literally crumbling while teachers and pastoral staff are expected to absorb the social crises created by austerity measures.

At the same time, young people are growing up in a society defined by deepening inequality, housing insecurity, increased policing, and increasingly bleak economic prospects.

We cannot separate so-called “antisocial behaviour” from these conditions. Young people are navigating isolation, poverty, trauma, and hopelessness in communities that have been stripped of resources.

Yet instead of investing in care, governments invest in surveillance, policing, and criminalisation. The system continues to fail young people this way: it withdraws support and then punishes people for the consequences.

Fines, curfews, dispersal orders, and increased policing only increase harm. They deepen alienation while ignoring the fact that the state continues to fail young people.

The additional pressure placed on parents and carers, many of whom are struggling to get by in the cost-of-living crisis, becomes another form of scapegoating. Families are blamed while the systems producing instability escape accountability.

Youth work creates the conditions for safety because it is rooted in trust rather than control. It gives young people space to process grief, anger, and alienation before those feelings are criminalised.

Community-led projects reduce harm more effectively than punitive policies because they address the root causes of harm rather than merely reacting to its symptoms.

When young people have access to food, housing support, mentorship, creative outlets, political education, and genuine community, they do not just survive. They begin to imagine futures beyond abandonment.

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Sara Bafo is a community organiser and educator with a background in youth work.

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