Проект НПК "Юность. Наука. Культура": Informal Youth Groups: Danger or Saving Life?

informal Youth Groups:

DANGEROUS OR SAVING LIFE?

by Diana Timbakova

Gymnazium №1, t. Tuimazy

Teenagers due to their youth maximalism are attracted by something new and unusual. Very often we can see misbehaving teenagers with unusual appearance in our city. These are informals.

Skinheads, Goths, Emos, Punks and many others are the striking example of such informal youth groups. Generally they are young people with low self-respect who oppose the traditional world in which they feel as fiasco elements.

But there’s a mismatch between the existing informal youth groups and teens’ knowledge of their nature and that is the problem. That’s why we decided to study informal youth groups as dangerous or saving life things.

We set the aim to explore informal groups and define their negative and positive aspects.

Thus, the object of our research is informal youth groups and the subject is informal youth groups in our town.

As the hypothesis, we state that informal youth groups don’t promote the comprehensive development of a teen’s personality

We studied the definition of what is an informal youth group and now we can say that an informal youth group is a form of communication and life of teenagers, united by interests, values   and likes”. 

They are formed because of the following reasons:

First of all, they are conflicts with parents, teachers and friends;

Secondly, it’s the change of our society, the system of our life;

Next, it’s the influence of popular culture;

And it’s teens’ desire to be different from the others.

Last time, we can see teenagers in our town with strange appearance. Some of them are dressed in hideous clothes and their hair is shabby.

Having made some observations, we realized that they are the representatives of two informal youth groups: Emo and Goths. We tried to reveal the typical features of these informal groups.

So, black and pink colours; piercing and tattoos; hair covering almost the half of their faces are typical for Emos. And when they’re laughing – the walls are trembling, when they’re crying – they can flood the whole town”.

Alarming fact that Emo-kids, being extremely sensitive, have the highest rate of suicide cases.

The others, Goths, like black colour that means “death”; black make-up; silver  crosses and crucifixes. And their motto is: "The whole life is preparation for death".

Gothic subculture does not teach a teenager to achieve goals in life and distorts reality. Constant thoughts about afterlife suppress psyche and forms pessimism, depression, reluctance to think about the future. 

A survey was done in our gymnazium to find out whether our students tend to be informals. The results are shown in the diagram. As you see, 88 percent reject informal groups, and 12 tend to be very emotional.

In conclusion, we can say that all subcultures have positive and negative aspects.

The positive ones are:

1. drive for self-expression,
2. desire to be independent of people’s opinion,
3. to be different.

 While the negative are:

1. appearance that scares other people;
2. reluctance to work;
3. they don’t promote the comprehensive development of a teen’s personality.