Britain in 2009: A nation of bullied social networkers who don’t believe in global warming
The annual Social Trends study published by the Office for National Statistics presents a revealing portrait of the way we live now. Terri Judd reports
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Online networking is popular among children - 27 per cent of eight- to 11-year-olds have a web profile, but only 15 per cent of parents do so
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Households
Almost a third of young men live with their parents
Nearly two million men aged between 20 and 34 still live with their parents, almost twice the number of women of the same age. The proportion of young adults who are reluctant or unable to leave home has increased by about 300,000 since 2001. Far more are continuing with their studies, while others are unemployed. The lack of affordable housing is the chief deciding factor in living with parents. The proportion of single-person households has doubled since 1971, from 6 per cent to 12 per cent, while the number of marriages in England and Wales – 237,000 in 2006 – was the lowest for more than a century. The average age at which people tie the knot is 31.8 for men and 29.7 for women. In the past 10 years, the number of women under 25 giving birth has overtaken the number marrying by that age.
Education
More three-year-olds than ever are going to school
The age at which youngsters are first sent to school has been dropping for three decades. While only a fifth of three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in nurseries in 1971, that figure has now tripled to 64 per cent.
At the other end of the educational ladder, there has been an even greater increase in students benefiting from higher education, from 621,000 in the 1970s to almost 2.6 million in 2007.
Parents, however, are struggling to keep up with their offspring's educational needs. While 59 per cent of mothers and fathers were confident helping a Year One child with their homework, only 17 per cent could provide any advice by the time their son or daughter was in the last year of school.
Law and order
Crime has halved in 10 years but two-thirds of us still think it is rising
The British Crime Survey reported that offences had dropped from 19.4 million in 1995 to 10.1 million in 2007-08, but the message does not appear to be getting through to the public, and 65 per cent of people still think crime levels are increasing.
The fight against gun crime seems to be making progress, with firearms incidents down 6 per cent in 2007-08, to 17,300. However, violent crime still accounts for 20 per cent of all crimes, a total of 2.2 million incidents.
A quarter of young people aged 10 to 25 said they had been a victim of crime in the past year. The figures were highest among boys aged 10 to 15 – 38 per cent of whom said they had been a victim and 28 per cent had been assaulted. One third of all crimes recorded were theft or handling stolen goods.
Employment
More women than ever are making a mark in the workplace
The gap in employment rates between men and women has closed to its smallest on record. While the number of working-age men in employment fell from 92 per cent in 1971 to 79 per cent in 2007, the rate for women went from 56 per cent to 70 per cent. By the end of last year, 16 million men and 13.6 million women had jobs.
Lone mothers with children under five were least likely to be employed – only a third worked, compared to two-thirds of those with partners.
People are working longer, with one-fifth saying they toiled more than 48 hours a week. But industrial relations affected productivity, with more than a million working days lost to labour disputes in 2007.
Population
The number of people in the UK is growing by 1,000 a day
Today, more than 61 million people live in the United Kingdom, with a further 10 million predicted to inhabit the country by 2031.
Since 2007, there have been more pensioners than children under 16, and the past three decades have seen a threefold increase in the number of people over 90. At the moment, more than 400,000 Britons can claim to have reached this grand age.
As has been the case since 1922, slightly more boys are being born than girls. Of the 772,200 live births in 2007, 51 per cent were male.
While applications for British citizenship increased by 8 per cent in 2007, to 160,980, a similar number – 173,000 – left the UK to work abroad.
Life expectancy for women is now 80.4 years – almost double that of a century ago – and is still way ahead of men, whose average lifespan is 77.2 years.
Lifestyles
Two-thirds of teens are now social networkers
Britain is still a nation of couch potatoes it seems. Both sexes say that watching television is their favourite pastime, while sport and exercise comes fifth for men and 10th for women. Computers have brought the greatest change of the past 10 years – the number of homes with a PC has risen from 29 per cent to 70 per cent. Online networking is most popular among on children – 27 per cent of eight- to 11-year-olds have a web profile, but only 15 per cent of parents do so. By the age of 16, more than two-thirds of teenagers are using sites such as MySpace and Bebo.
Wealth
One in four households admit that they have no savings
The rainy day may have come but a quarter of households were unprepared, reporting in 2007 that they had no savings. Pensioners were most likely to have savings of £20,000 or more. In the past 20 years, average household net wealth has more than doubled in real terms to £113,000 per head. In 2007, 36 per cent of people said they were living comfortably, compared to 24 per cent in 1986. The number of people finding finances difficult to manage dropped from 26 per cent to 18 per cent.
Despite total household debt rising more than threefold in the past two decades, it remained at 90 per cent of annual disposable income.
Health
Anti-depressants given out at four times the rate of the early 1990s
While Britain has tackled its smoking habit with some success, depression, alcohol and obesity plague us more than ever. In 2007, 34 million anti-depressants pills were prescribed in England, up from nine million in 1991.
The number of smokers has fallen from almost half the population to a fifth in the past three decades. But the number of alcohol-related deaths has more than doubled since 1991.
By 2007, a third of boys and girls were obese. The situation was even worse among adults, with 65 per cent of men and 56 per cent of women above a healthy weight.
The most common sexually transmitted disease is chlamydia, with 200 cases per 100,000. At the end of 2007, an estimated 77,000 people in the UK were living with HIV, with 7,800 new cases that year.
Housing
One third of our children live in sub-standard homes
The poverty gap is still much in evidence, with one third of families with children living in sub-standard housing. However, the proportion of children whose parents' disposable income is well below the national average has fallen from 26 per cent to 22 per cent in the past decade.
The disastrous state of the housing market is also reflected in the ONS study. The number of property sales plummeted from a peak of 154,000 in December 2006 to 52,000 by December 2008. The number of home repossessions soared by 25 per cent between 2006 and 2007.
The rate at which new houses are built has been falling for four decades, from 426,000 in 1968 to 214,000 last year. Between 2006 and 2007, the number of rental properties rose by 10 per cent, or 300,000.
Single-parent families are most likely to be renting their homes – 63 per cent of them are tenants, compared with 19 per cent of couples with children.
Travel
Foreign travel soars with trips to new European nations
Before the economic downturn, Britons took a record 45.4 million holidays abroad, an increase of 56 per cent since 1997. The number of trips to Latvia rose tenfold, while Slovakia and Poland saw 957 per cent and 719 per cent increases, respectively. Spain is still the main destinations for a third of British holidaymakers. But half of those interviewed in 2008 said they were less likely to go abroad this year.
Environment
A little over half of us are worried about climate change
Just 53 per cent of people questioned said that climate change concerned them, slightly below the European average. Nevertheless, there have been positive moves to avoid energy wastage.
Over the past decade, the amount of household waste recycled has risen from 8 per cent to 35 per cent. Sixty-six per cent of adults no longer leave televisions on standby and 50 per cent always turn lights off when they leave a room. However, for the first time, the number of two-car households has surpassed the number of families with no car.
Society
More boys are seeking help for bullying and abuse
The number of children seeking abuse counselling from ChildLine has risen substantially, with the number of boys contacting the charity more than doubling from 24,115 in 1997-8 to 58,311 a decade later. In 2007, more than 81,000 boys and girls were in local authority care – up 18 per cent in 10 years.
Forty per cent of children whose mothers work are cared for by their family, usually their grandparents.
The proportion of people receiving intensive home care rose from 12 per cent in 1993 to 52 per cent in 2007.
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Comments
THESE KIDS ARE GOING TO LOSE THE ART OF REAL SOCIALISING AND GETTING IN CONTACT WITH OTHERS ON THE PLANET FACE TO FACE. THEY NEED TO GET OUT TO DANCES, EVENING CLASSES, EXERCISE CLASSES, AND GENERALLY GET OUT. WE NEVER ALLOWED OUR SON TO JUST PLAY COMPUTER GAMES AND CHAT ON THE COMPUTER, FOR ONE THING YOU DON'T HAVE ANY IDEA OF WHO THEY ARE ACTUALLY TALKING TO. HE IS THANKFULLY A VERY OUTGOING AND SOCIAL YOUNG MAN, SOMETHING HE WOULDN'T HAVE BECOME IF WE HAD ALLOWED HIM TO WASTE ALL OF HIS TIME ON THE COMPUTER.
I AM NOT SURPRISED THAT ONLY JUST HALF OF US ARE INTERESTED IN SAVING THE PLANET. IT MAKES ME SICK THAT PEOPLE CAN BE SO INSULAR, GREEDY AND IGNORANT. I AM SO PLEASED TO BE ONE OF THE PEOPLE FIGHTING TO SAVE US AND OUR PLANET, IT IS LUCKY THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE ME AND OTHERS WHO ARE PREPARED TO STAND UP AND BE COUNTED INSTEAD OF BEING ONE OF THE SHEEP BEING LED ROUND BY THE NOSE BY THIS GOVERNMENT AND ITS ALLIES.
ISN'T A SHAME THAT BOYS OR GIRLS HAVE TO REPORT BEING BULLIED OR ABUSED, THIS WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE FOR THE SENSITIVE.
WELL AT LEAST I CAN SAY WITH A VERY CLEAR CONSCIENCE I DIDN'T SIT BY AND FIDDLE WHILE ROME BURNED.
Also, try pressing Caps Lock.
Anyway, welcome to the 21st century:
http://www.flixxy.com/technology-and-ed
Typing into a computer IS socialising in a way you appear to simply not understand.
Kids now live in a world without the same boundaries you had in your childhood, a typical online forum can contain a mix of people from 30 different nations, all exchanging ideas in real time. Physical ability / disability, skin colour, size of nose are irrelevant - for the first time in history we can engage with a person's mind directly. If any of us has a question about anything we can speak to an expert instantly, if we want to cross reference something we can do instantly.
You were afraid your son might speak online to people you do not know? There's definitely something to be said for the nanny state! In one of my incarnations, I am a hacker (an ethical hacker) and frequently address comments by "concerned parents" about their children talking to strangers online ("strangers" being people the parent doesn't know), asked how parents can install keyloggers and monitor their kids, etc.
What kind of parent requests this? The kind of parent who seeks to control, not to understand or to teach. I advise they do not utterly abuse the trust of their own child, but that they take the time instead to teach that child in the ways of the world, to turn something potentially very negative and with explosive consequences into a communication channel. If the child is very immature / young, then the PC should be in the lounge, not the bedroom.
Back to this article, sadly misinformed / misinforming.
1. Law & Order
Crime has halved in 10 years but two-thirds of us still think it is rising
Your views contradict those of another Indy reporter:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr
Which claims violent crime has *risen* by 22%
That's real crime we're talking about, the kind that most people *should* be afraid of. If (as you claim) up to 38% of people aged between 10-25 have been the victim of crime, are you seriously saying there is no reason for fear?
2. Employment.
Employment figures amongst men fell from "92% in 1971 to 79% in 2007, the rate for women went from 56% to 70", is there a correlation?
3. Lifestyles
Britain is a nation of couch potatoes? Compared to whom? One of the main reasons that so many children have a PC at home these days is because it is pretty much compulsory in the same way that a pen and paper was years ago. I am sure that people like soaring_eagle would have argued that mass production of pens and paper was also a bad idea - people locked in their rooms, scibbling away, writing and drawing all kinds of stuff. The sit, silently staring into their books and call this "lurning". The Devil's Work, I tell you!
4. Travel
Foreign travel soars with trips to new European nations
Hardly surprising when it was cheaper to go to Sardinia for 2 weeks than it was to go to Skegness. This is common sense.
5. Environment.
Your entire entry refutes your own title! According to your own stats, over 50% of us take global warming seriously which is a pretty good average when one considers the crap the capitalists have been chucking at us for the past few decades. The rest of your very own stats indicate a massive change in opinions, not that we "don't believe in global warming".
And you place social networking between 2 apparently negative concepts, thus indicating that it is also undesirable. You do so from in front of a computer. And which would you prefer, the idea of them sat chatting to a group of people from all over the world, or sat in front of Eastenders?
I'm getting tired of this view that kids today just sit bashing off in front of their computers. I'm almost 40 and I do a lot of ICT teaching, the kids I teach are no couch potatoes, no more than they were when I was their age. The percentage of physically active young people I meet today is probably more than I remember amongst my siblings when I was their age, they partake of a wider and more interesting set of sports than were available to me and they travel more.
The "couch potatoes" you vilify have always existed - 10 years ago they were "glued to the box".
People live busy lives and it is so easy to lose touch with old friends. I still write letters to some friends who don't want to e-mail and I still phone my mother who wouldn't know what to do with a computer. But social network sites don't stop children from socialising. In my experience it is usually parents who do that. Networking is for those fill-in times between going out, going to school, doing homework and sleeping.
I think you got soaring-eagle1's point wrong.
"WE NEVER ALLOWED OUR SON TO JUST PLAY COMPUTER GAMES AND ...". Soaring_eagle1 seems to point out the importance of moderation. He/she does not condemn social networking and the Internet. I agree that kids should spend their time playing computer games and chat, as well as doing other things that take them out of the sofa and into the real world.
As for the Caps, it's true. Should not be there.
Please rephrase Terri!!!
Hacks. What are we to do with them?
I believe that communication in all forms enables the exchange of information and promotes the values of community. I can't see a whole lot wrong with that.
The increase in the levels of bullying may go some way towards explaining why so few young people are keen to play outside, so we have to make young people feel safe and older people re-used to viewing groups of youths as normal and not just potential trouble.
On the report, to pose the question in my subject field; I have read innumerable articles with stats re increased repossessions since the recession began to bite, but not a single report on how people renting are fairing? Thatcher may have began the inversion of the proportions of home owners/tenants in this country, but a not insignificant minority still rent and that minority is set to rise until more affordable homes are made available.
ALL SAID WITHOUT SHOUTING!