How talking to 500 young Scots has restored my faith in the future

I’ve spent time with people who are trying to unpick the most challenging issues around fixing the health system, the prison permacrisis, and a myriad of other difficult problems. It feels tough right now.

I have been really lucky to have had the chance to speak to around 500 students in schools over the last three weeks. It shifted my world view. First, how are they all so tall? Better diet seems to have bred a generation of giants, at least to my 5ft 4in height.

Secondly, and more importantly, they are smart, opinionated, passionate, thoughtful and, honestly, I think the country will be safe in their hands. I always dislike the narrative, often in the mainstream media, about young people, anti-social behaviour and the like.

Compassion and empathy

Although I know it is an issue, most people I see in the courts and prisons are in their 30s. It seems that our young people are held to a different standard as a generation.

We spoke about crime, violence, safety and what action we should take. They got their information from TikTok, my cajoling of them to read newspapers probably fell on stony ground. But regardless of where they got their news, they were well-informed, engaged and forthcoming about how safe they felt in communities.

That was what they said, that they felt generally safe, and they also showed real compassion and empathy for people whose circumstances were different to their own.

Even at 16 and 17, there was a range of opinions – some different to mine. One young man passionately and articulately defended the use of capital punishment, others disagreed with me on prison size and sentencing.

Declining levels of violence

What was different is that they engaged in the conversation, debated their argument, listened to mine, disputed some of the facts that I put forward and so much more. I talked about how the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey estimates there has been a 58 per cent reduction in violent crime from 2008/9 to 2021/2 – with annual incidents dropping from 317,000 to 134,000. This is, of course, still too many and violence is disproportionately prevalent in some areas.

They talked about how the media portrayed the challenges – how it inflated issues, promoted fear and discord, and how they filtered it. They talked of how the crimes of young people and women seemed to make the front page, whilst equally horrendous crimes by older men seemed to create less opprobrium.

They were thoughtful, open-minded, curious and able to hold nuance in their discussions in a way that is lacking in every other public forum. I spend too long consuming media where the opposite is true.

Even I, a self-anointed optimist, find it grinds me down and leaves me searching around for hope for the future. Well, all we need to do is look at the next generation, our children and the children of others, who are ready and waiting to rebuild the flawed world that we have left them.

Karyn McCluskey is chief executive of Community Justice Scotland