Our young Olympians can inspire every generation

August is the time when we promise to catch up, do some thinking, reflect, recharge, read and prepare for the post-party-conference autumn. It never works out like that, but we go on thinking it will. We are now a year on from a particularly busy early August 2011; and in the second week of a spectacularly busy Olympics. The reflections this week are therefore rather poignant.

August 2011’s riots were frightening. If you were there, they must have been incomprehensible, until the days after allowed for some considered responses. I remember vividly the howling about feral and unparented youth; the automatic assumption that our under-18s lit the flames, went wild and cared for nobody while they broke the windows and hearts of their communities. I recall the tenacity of that view, despite the concrete evidence that most of those arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned were over 18. After all, why let the truth get in the way of a good stereotype?

The disturbances were deeply troubling and the damage wreaked was inexcusable. The perpetrators needed to be held to account and, more importantly, expected to change. But the troubles were also, from a national perspective, scattered and localised, and not a reflection of a nation facing anarchy.

Leap forward a year. Speak and listen to the thousands of young people who have stepped into leadership and volunteering roles, including in communities where August 2011 was a scary place and time. Find the footage of the hundreds who helped clean up. Meet the young Londoner, no stranger to gangs, who was recently in my office to discuss his personal work with young people at risk of gang involvement. He says that his mission is “to get them to believe there’s another way”.

Watch again the thousands of under-18s involved in the Olympics opening ceremony, including the seven you had never heard of who were handed the flame and lit the cauldron. Watch those who have been competing, including 15-year-old gymnast Rebecca Tunney, or remember the many who carried the torch on its 8,000-mile relay through their streets.

True colours
We seem unfazed by our national ability to hold two contradictory ideas about our adolescents. They either are, or they aren’t, a danger to themselves and others. Which is it to be? Or are yours all great – it’s just a problem with those others? Can we challenge the negatives and show we believe in them? Most are fine young citizens, utterly mystified by a nation that, against all the evidence and at the scream of a headline, believes the opposite and becomes unable or unwilling to give the most vulnerable among them the chance to shine.

So, come on GB. They’re on your team. Here are just a few of the young Olympians and Paralympians who give us reasons to cheer: diver Tom Daley, still a teenager, was only 14 at the Beijing Games; Eleanor Simmonds won two golds in the swimming at the Paralympics in 2008 when she was 13; fellow Paralympian Gabi Down, a wheelchair fencer, is still only 14; and 15-year-old Lithuanian gold-medal swimmer Ruta Meilutyte has lived and trained in Britain for the past three years.

Also, remember it was after pressure from young people that the decision to ban under-18s from volunteering at the London Games was reversed. Young people are fighting to contribute to society.

Maggie Atkinson is the children’s commissioner for England