Numbers game Local press portrayal

This attitude has filtered down to local newspapers, according to research by Janet Turner, a postgraduate student at the University of Southampton.

Her study focused on reports from January to December 2003 in Eastleigh News Extra, a weekly local newspaper in Hampshire. Just over a third of the stories in the newspaper showed young people to be offenders or troublemakers, while only 17 per cent portrayed them as achievers. The negative stories were mainly associated with violence, vandalism, alcohol or drugs, and included incidents of school arson, drunken vandalism and "yobs" making elderly people's lives a misery.

Turner said: "The routine references to 'teenagers' and 'youths' draws attention to a specific age group. It does not take long for behaviour such as this to be associated with everyone in that age group."