7 December 2005
Media coverage of drunken outbursts and risky behaviour by students celebrating the end of school may reflect increasing adult anxieties about the perceived danger posed by young people, a Monash University academic has suggested.
In a paper titled Growing Up: Risky Business? delivered in Hobart yesterday, Dr Peter Kelly, Head of Monash University's Department of Behavioural Studies, outlined why responses by the media, communities and parliamentarians to " schoolies'" behaviour could be related to adult anxieties and mistrust of young people's ability to make a safe transition to adulthood.
Dr Kelly said schoolies celebrations around Australia would continue to attract a lot of negative media attention.
"Scenes of young men and women drunk and disorderly, of acres of semi-naked bodies, of riotous singing, dancing and yelling (often to camera) create a great deal of unease and anxiety for middle, adult Australia," he said. "This is particularly so if sons and daughters are possibly among the thousands of 17 and 18 year olds 'celebrating' the end of secondary schooling."
Dr Kelly added that if middle Australia didn't like what it saw and was looking to blame someone, it should examine itself.
"Middle Australia should look less disapprovingly at the behaviour of schoolies and focus more on the family, school, economic and cultural forces that are shaping the schoolies phenomenon.
"Adult Australia, in its many parental, political, educational and corporate guises, creates a range of expectations about what young people should do -- 13 years of schooling, focus on university or further education, a job, the future, don't take risks and behave.
"It's no wonder that at a key transition point between these expectations there is an explosion of the repressed, especially an alcohol-fuelled explosion in a culture that places drinking at the centre of all forms of celebration," he said.
Dr Kelly's paper was presented at the Australian Sociological Association's annual conference in Hobart.
For interviews or information contact Dr Peter Kelly, on +61 3 9903 1237, or Ms Karen Stichtenoth, Media Communications, on +61 3 9905 1253.
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