On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed.
Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.
Well worth reading today. Although we may not have the violence, we have here ourselves a burgeoning case of social stratification and consumerist despair. The article states most UK youth are statistically unable to afford a house of their own (and start their families) until the age of 34. Hey, that sounds familiar. [via pumpkineyes]
sangsara.net 
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