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Celebrating children's positive contribution to society is a key part of our work. Here, Fiona Bawdon, deputy chair of Women in Journalism, discusses research findings highlighting the persistent negative portrayal of teenage boys in the media.

Teenage boys: why good news is no news

When a newspaper photo of ordinary lads in hoods just standing around is visual shorthand for ‘broken Britain', clearly teenage boys have an image problem.

Research commissioned by the campaigning organisation Women in Journalism shows just how toxic the teen boys ‘brand' has become. The research (conducted by Echo) tracked national and regional newspaper stories about teen boys over the course of a year. They found coverage was unrelentingly negative and focused disproportionately on crime.  Teenagers were referred to variously (in descending order of frequency) as yobs, thugs, sick, feral, hoodie, louts, heartless, evil, frightening, scum, monsters, inhuman and threatening. There were very few positive stories involving teens to balance the bad ones.

For much of the press, there is no such thing as a good-news story about teenagers. Stories about sport and entertainment, which might have balanced more negative coverage, often took a critical line.

Anyone who ‘takes on' a group of teenagers is feted as a hero. A man in Croydon who tells off a pair of teenagers for throwing snowballs at a stationary bus (and gets punched for his pains) becomes ‘a lone have-a-go-hero' in his local paper. A story headlined: ‘Gran's war on yobs' turns out to be about a pensioner urging local people to report vandalism to police -entirely sensible advice, but it hardly amounts to a declaration of ‘war'.

In one striking example, a local newspaper columnist wrote about an incident involving hooded youths which left him shocked. He had gone to the local takeaway to collect a curry when he found the shop doorway blocked "by a group of youngsters...wearing hoods and blank expressions." He was agonising over whether the safest course would be to "give them a hard stare" or "avoid eye contact altogether", when something shocking happened: they "politely got out of my way so I could collect my waiting meal". "One of those sitting moved his legs, opened the door for me and told his mate to move".

Should we infer from this shocking account of a young man showing everyday common courtesy that if, instead, the teen had pulled a knife and made a threat, this would have been so unremarkable as not to warrant a mention in his newspaper column?

Teen boys themselves think they get a particularly raw deal from print media. Echo surveyed 1,000 boys aged 13-19 across five UK regions. Some 85% said newspapers give them a bad press; just 6% thought newspapers portrayed them fairly. New media fared a little better, with 30% of boys saying online news sites showed them in a good or neutral light. Reality TV shows were seen as most favourable, with 44% of those surveyed saying programmes like X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent portrayed them in a good light.

For all the coverage about teenagers, boys' voices are rarely heard directly in the press: Echo found that only one in 25 stories about young people actually quotes young people themselves.

One of Women in Journalism's most striking findings was how much teen boys are influenced by the bad press they get. Nearly a third said they are ‘always' or ‘often' wary of teenage boys they don't know; nearly three-quarters have changed their behaviour to avoid other teens. The most popular reason for their wariness, cited by 47%, was ‘media stories about teen boys', compared with just 37% who said their wariness was based on their own or friends' bad experiences of other teens.

If you would be interested in hearing more about our work to promote the positive contribution of young people, contact Sandeep Shah, Senior Communications Officer.