Nanny's Media Studies

Nanny believes that children and teenagers should try to make the best of themselves.

A laudable, and worthy, view.

Unfortunately, Nanny has taken her views to the extreme. Something that she is prone to do all rather too often.

Nanny is now offering teenage criminals media training, at around £40 per hour, in a police campaign to improve the public's perception of young people.

Approximately 25 serial and former offenders, between the ages of 13 to 17, sit with law abiding teenagers on the 100 strong Essex police youth forum. The forum advises officers on how to tackle youth offending.

The forum itself is not very expensive to run, around £5K per annum, and can be seen as a logical means to try to address "youth crime". However, offering media training to criminals does not seem the most logical use of time and money.

Sergeant Ian Carter, programme manager of the Proactive Essex Police Youth Strategy (Pepys)- which is a 3 year £1.3M project - said that the media training would help to tackle "misperceptions" among adults about young people and anti-social behaviour.

Not everyone is impressed with this idea. James Frayne, campaign director of the Taxpayers' Alliance pressure group, thinks that it is a load of bollocks.

Quote:

"This is a perfect example of how modern policing in Britain

has completely lost its way."

Charles Clark, Deputy Chief Constable of Essex and the spokesman on youth issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said:

"We are not rewarding young people for being good or bad,

we are trying to engage with them."

Nanny misses the point, it is not the state's role to "engage" with teenagers it is the role of the parents. That role of course is "hindered" by the fact that Nanny does her best to "rubbish" parents, and to take away their responsibilites for bringing up their own children.