Kidstuff

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The term "binge drinking" refers to a particular pattern of self destructive behavior associated with depression. Usually, at erratic intervals when a person's unhappiness becomes too much, they drink strong alcoholic beverage to escape, either until they pass out or until they feel mentally "blurred" enough to cope. It's almost always done alone, at home, in secret, and there's a lot of shame associated with doing it.

However, when the government refers to "binge drinking among young people", they mean something quite different. They're talking about teenagers getting drunk together. The drinkers are not isolated and alone but together in small groups. They don't do it in secret, but in public spaces. They don't do it to escape depression, but socially as a set. They're not ashamed and don't try to hide what they do, rather they openly enjoy it. It doesn't happen uncontrollably when some threshold of stress is reached, but is planned. The point is to have an enjoyable, relaxed time with your friends. It's what's usually called "A night out".

According to the government, "binge drinking in young people" causes something called "anti-social behavior". This term has never been clear - over the years I've heard it used to refer to doing anything with someone else finds annoying, picking a fight, being grumpy and uncommunicative, rape, calling someone a rude name or spraying graffiti.

When the government uses the term, the meaning is similarly elastic and vague, but it generally means "being noisy and uncouth". If you're singing on the street at midnight, using swear words in a public place, or riding a skateboard somewhere that isn't a skatepark, then you're being anti-social. Also if you're sarcastic to a police officer or wear a baseball cap, this is anti-social behavior. So sometimes is having a beard, but only if it's a muslim beard.

So there's a TV advertising campaign about it - featuring a lone teenage drinker who's so drunk he climbs up a building and falls off. Apparently alcohol makes you die while doing annoying things.

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There is another campaign running to stop teenagers doing the other thing they allegedly do quite a lot.

Yes, the rate of teenage pregnancies is already the highest in Europe, and it's increasing. Apparently, this has nothing to do with reduced sex education in schools, or the lack of condom machines there - no, it's because British teenagers are stupid and feckless. And seeing as educating them outrages decent christians, and they're too dumb to be taught anyway, they've got to be scared into being sensible.

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Now, if you're young but not yet 16, there's no TV ad-campaigns yet to stop you drinking and fornicating - though if you do fornicate with another child you're both legally abusers of children - but you're still anti-social. Riding your bike on the pavement, or in the park, or being out late at night, are all now outrages against society, and the police can impose a curfew for it if they feel like it. This obviously only applies if you're working class.

However, if you're working class enough to be considered "deprived" or "in serious poverty", the BBC is raising money to help you. But only tonight.

Every year at this time, the BBC run a charity event called "Children In Need", where celebrities do amusing things on TV, in return for the public making donations. They now usually raise a few tens of million pounds, and it goes to maintaining special schools for disabled children, setting up playgroups for those that don't have them, and if the the fashion runs that way in a given year, feeding children in the third world.

This year it doesn't. This year the issues are drug use, prostitution, bullying, sexual abuse, terminal illness, homelessness, disability and sticking sharp metal into your flesh because your life is complete shit. Last year they raised GBP33.2 million, which certainly sounds impressive, but split so many ways I wonder how much good it does.

The official website tells us "£100,000 pays for a respite nurse for 3 years at a hospice for terminally ill children and their families", "£17 pays for a therapy session for a sexually-abused child" and "£75 pays a specialist nurse to look after cancer patients". So a little money goes a long way.

But as if to counterbalance that message, It also tells us "There are approximately 60,000 children in care in the UK" and "19,000 children a year attempt suicide".

So on the one hand giving children what they need is relatively cheap, so we have to wonder why it's left to the charity of ordinary people to do what the state easily could and should do. And on the other, an unimaginably large number of lives have been fucked up right from the start.

Though when they get a little older and start drinking, they stop being victims and become the enemy.