It is right to reject the hysterical fiction of London as a city in moral freefall after the disorder in Clapham (Editorial, 8 April). But the deeper issue is not only exaggeration. It is the ease with which young people, once visible in public space, are turned into signs of disorder before they have done anything at all.
Society does not merely fear what some young people do; it fears their collective presence. Teenagers gathering on a high street are too quickly read as menace, excess or incipient criminality. In that sense, the language surrounding Clapham matters as much as the incident itself. Terms such as “feral”, “swarm” and “gang” do not neutrally describe behaviour. They help produce a belief in the young person as threat, as someone to be monitored and contained rather than understood socially.
