Youth, a year on

After the Edgeware Road tragedy last year, young people and their problems was a hot topic. JOHN McCRONE finds out if the talk has been followed by action.

For a small town, Christchurch has great facilities. The AMI stadium is expanding, everyone loves our art gallery, we are spending money on City Mall, we have an entire cultural precinct for the tourists.

But what about civic amenities for our youth?

Well, they have a skateboard park by the Waltham flyover, and the band venue Zebedees in a dilapidated industrial unit down Sockburn way. Or if they don't mind the cold, there are plenty of city-centre street corners to hang about on.

And what about a political voice?

There used to be a youth council that had speaking rights on council committees. Christchurch was a pioneer of this kind of thing. But the youth council was disbanded in 2002 and nothing has really replaced it.

So is Christchurch just a town set up for the needs of its oldies, with little thought being given to providing social and political opportunities for the young?

Last year, the Edgeware Road tragedy brought this question into sharp focus.

Christchurch was already exercised about the boy racers ripping up the roads, the taggers and the hoodie wearers, the goths and emos, the $3 BYO booze parties where community halls were being rented for supposed 18th birthdays and tickets sold to the under-aged.

There was a sense teens were getting out of control because we were not giving them enough to do.

Then came Edgeware Road. About 500 young people a volatile cross-section of Christchurch's rich and poor converged on a St Albans party, drawn to the promise of some Saturday-night action by a flurry of text messages and mobile calls.

A confrontation led to 22-year-old Lipene Sila accelerating down the crowded street, skittling 28 people and killing two schoolgirls, Jane Young and Hannah Rossiter.

A month later, as part of the grieving process, a youth conference was called to see what lessons could be learnt, what action ought to be taken.

About 150 teens attended. Much was said about a generally negative perception of youth, the need for a youth voice once more, the need for safe youth venues and transport, the need to harness the power of texting and other new forms of social networking for the good.

Firm commitments to action were called for.

A year further on, what is the progress?

A place to ask is down at the White Elephant Trust, a somewhat daring experiment in youth empowerment that has quietly taken up residence in an old building in Bedford Row, right in the heart of town.

One of the drivers of the White Elephant project, community youth worker Matt Glanville, says much has been happening and was already happening before Edgeware Road. But it is a complicated picture.

Grabbing a sheet of paper, Glanville begins sketching the broader forces at work.

First, what do we know about youth, he muses? Contrary to what often seems the perception, Glanville says teens are not solely motivated by opportunities for mischief.

"Instead, what young people seek every day, all day long, is a sense of belonging and a sense of contributing," he says.

So the task of society is twofold: to give youth a chance to express these desires, and to step in with support services when problems arise.

Glanville then scribbles four boxes representing family, school, community and peers.

He points out that the social world of the young is divided into four quadrants. The first three are easy for adults to operate in, to control. The fourth is too often a closed world.

"If things go wrong in the home, there are copious amounts of family services that can go in and support youth. The same with schools," he says.

Glanville says the community box is also well organised. This is where we have seen a recent big step up in action, especially around church youth groups and music-based youth activities.

The rise of the Christian groups, often aided by council and pokie-machine charity funding, is the story of the moment he believes.

Papanui Baptist Church has opened its $1.3 million youth centre with a recording studio, climbing wall, games room and craft area. The Life Church in Riccarton has its huge La Vida hall.

Others, like the Grace Vineyard Church in Phillipstown, the Spreydon Baptist Youth centre, and the Majestic Church in central city, have been making a big push.

"The Christians have dominated the youth-work sector over the last two to three years. They ran two courses in town to train people and have just released an army of youth workers. They are well resourced and new groups are everywhere now," he says.

Glanville says many kids are group-hoppers, going to different places each night. They may not be Christian but they are happy to put up with "15 minutes of God-talk" for a feed, some friendly adult faces and a chance to mix.

"Even for those young people who don't identify as Christian, they've been doing incredible work really."

Glanville says the other big tick in the community box is the growth of organised music activities. Forming bands, holding raves and competing in rock quests has begun to rival school sports in teenage life.

Christchurch City Council has played a big part with 4YP (For Young People), a programme that runs inter-school competitions for various musical styles and sponsors gigs at venues like Zebedees in Blenheim Road.

Riley Hurst, a 16-year-old "metalhead" from Kaiapoi High School, is competing in the finals of Rapid Storm next week with his band Stepping On Jonie's Toes. Hurst says it is a sign of the times that his school now has a music and cultural wall of fame as well as a sports one.

Fellow band member Mark Woodcock, 16, from Rangiora High School, says the public support for musical events is huge in Christchurch compared with his hometown of Newcastle, in England.

"My brother is a drummer in a band there, and he can't get any gigs. All of us here are playing in three or four bands. There's so much more opportunity."

Indeed, with one of his other bands, Beneath The Silence, Woodcock has just won the national annual Smokefree Rockquest.

The same kind of public support has started to go into other creative activities. There are sponsored theatresports events like the Crash Bash script-writing contest. There is the Emerging Artist Foundation. There are organised computer gaming events.

However, Glanville says that, in reality, while all the church youth groups and band competitions do excellent work, they reach only a fraction of Christchurch's 32,000 youth. And as adult-controlled enterprises, they are not touching on the fourth quadrant in a teen's life, the one marked peer relationships.

"Say you go to a church group from 7pm to 9pm on a Friday night, play around and have a great time. That's great community involvement. The positive relationships offer you some resilience to move forward," Glanville says.

"But when 9 o'clock comes and you and your friends head down to the Botanic Gardens, that is where we find it difficult to operate.

"It's sad but true that when children become 13, 14, 15, that part of their life becomes very closed off."

Glanville says what Edgeware Road made clear is that this is the new area where we need to be investing some time and money. Which is where the White Elephant Trust comes in.

White Elephant was originally formed as a DJ training collective. It was set up by established Christchurch DJs to help young people organise their own weekend raves and dance events.

Brent Silby, a teacher at Unlimited and DJ with Audio Dreams, says the belief was that teens should be allowed to create their own safe and alcohol-free parties, with adults just there to advise on the practical details to be the hired help rather than the paid youth organisers.

Silby says there is a lot that teens need to know about running events: "I mean, what do you do if someone collapses with alcohol-poisoning, if they turn up and have been drinking before they came. That's a difficult situation for a 15-year-old to have to deal with."

But the key was to trust young people and let them take the lead in organisation and promotion, he says.

The result has been a string of affordable events around town under brand names like Nitrate, Rinsed and Red Panda.

Since Edgeware Road, White Elephant's brief has become much broader. A lease has been taken on premises in Bedford Row, creating space for meeting rooms, a radio station, recording facilities, and even a shop, Formation, which sells youth-produced art, craft and clothing.

Glanville says the goal is to support teens in forming any kind of club, or starting up any sort of entrepreneurial venture.

White Elephant has already started to branch out with computer gaming, fire dancing and body-piercing groups. Pool parties and bus parties are in the plans.

Glanville says the dream is gradually to see the youth of Christchurch becoming networked through social websites such as Bebo and Facebook. Rave organisers like Nitrate have already made a start with their databases of thousands of names.

These connections will allow young people to find others with the same interests across town and then through support structures like White Elephant, a place where flyers can be designed, halls rented out, funding applications written, safe-event check-lists created, their ideas turned into realities.

Glanville admits the White Elephant project is making a few people nervous. Adults do not like the idea of giving up control.

Yet Edgeware Road illustrated the way social networking is already amplifying teen activities, creating a new dynamic in that peer-relationship quadrant. A better plan is to get in there and help young people use social networking to create their own safe and productive weekend activities, says Glanville.

So post-Edgeware, there are new youth groups, plenty of band gigs and dance events, and even visionary attempts to allow kids to construct their own fun. Less has been done on the transport front some at the Edgeware Road conference were calling for free late-night buses and emergency taxi cards.

Then on the question of a grand central-city youth facility, a show-piece building unlike White Elephant's rather tatty premises, the feeling seems to be this would actually be a waste of money.

Christchurch City Council community support manager Catherine McDonald says fashions change so fast in the teen world that a purpose-built centre could be uncool within a year. The council has already been caught out once with the expensive development of a youth website, Drive Thru, which was almost immediately made redundant by the advent of Bebo and other social-networking sites.

So McDonald says the council is probably better off supporting individual events and projects rather than spending big on bricks and mortar. But there is going to be action on the youth-voice front, she says.

One of the key criticisms at the Edgeware Road conference was the lack of a forum where teens can speak up for the kinds of facilities and services they feel the town should be delivering.

Christchurch City councillor Yani Johanson, himself a member of the old Youth Council, says this was how the Washington Reserve skateboard park came about. Skateboarders were considered as big a social menace as boy racers are now. But it was through the Youth Council that skateboarders also came up with the solution.

The council seems loath to revive the youth council in its old official form. However, McDonald says the Canterbury Development Corporation has been charged with getting a new independent body, the Otautahi Youth Council, up and running. A first conference is being held in October.

So a year on from Edgeware Road, the consensus seems to be that more can be done, and more needs to be done, to create a safe and positive environment for Christchurch's youth. At the same time, however, a good effort is being made.

- © Fairfax NZ News