Isn't it time the Government ceased all these fiddly piecemeal measures for dealing with that intractable, lunking social problem called the teenager and tidied them up into one? Perhaps a ceremony, like a Bar Mitzvah, but instead of matching luggage, the 13-year-old, depending on gender, would receive one or two subcutaneous implants: a slow-release contraceptive pessary and a dose of naltrexone, a drug that blocks the pleasurable effects of alcohol. Then, as a civic official bestows our new proto-citizen with his ASBO, he will go safely indoors where, alone at his computer, he can watch a specially created avatar of himself celebrate hard and wild at a virtual party.
Upon waking to a particularly tiresome or heavy-duty adult day it is worth contemplating: at least I'm no longer a teenager. I have intoxicating freedoms, money of my own, I can go outside unnagged with wet hair, get laid, devour a whole DVD boxset until 2am. Colleagues will not call me horrid names or make cruel observations (to my face anyhow) or rabbit-punch me in the loos or kick my handbag about the car park or threaten to get me after work. If I stroll around town with my friends, no one will scowl at me and conclude I plan to nick their phone.
Being a teenager is rubbish, particularly this week when a government departmental pincer movement launched a crackdown on teenage kicks. Not only are young people drinking and having sex, apparently, but they have rejected Grange Hill, a school soap opera created to deter them from these very vices through the medium of gritty social realism. How dare today's youth turn to the breezier, better-dressed pleasures of Hollyoaks and The OC, causing the BBC to kill off a 30-year show? Tucker, that fat one, and Zammo, with his two-series- long battle against heroin, was good enough for us. Truly, as the Home Secretary declaimed, society has reached some kind of “tipping point”.
Jacqui Smith was actually referring to a terrifying new statistic in her war against underage boozing: more 13-year-olds have drunk alcohol than have not. As with the many sweeping and horrifying pronouncements on the young, there was scant clarification and no historical perspective. So I rang the Home Office and discovered that this means that 54 per cent of kids aged 13 have tasted alcohol in their lifetimes. Well, sign up my two mini-winos for The Pledge! My sons have sipped champagne, swigged my beer - provoking sour-lemon-faced disbelief - been encouraged to taste wine at dinner. I thought that is how we're supposed to initiate them into a Francophile, middle-class Waitrose world: less likely to create binge drinkers than locking booze in a tantalising box marked “adult fun”.
What's more, “Nearly half of the alcohol consumed came from the family home”, and so, Ms Smith concluded, parents must be handing their kids six packs of lager. But, duh, as if! This figure has not risen since you or I were stealing cider from our dad's garage and swigging it outside the youth club disco. A government alcohol survey reveals underage boozing has decreased. As Ms Smith said: “Fewer young people are drinking, but those who are drinking are drinking more,” a sentence that was unreported in any newspaper - including this one - perhaps because it does not chime with our prevailing national narrative of self-disgust and despair: that we have spawned a whole generation unique in their dissipation and disorder, finished before they've even begun.
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Meanwhile, while teenage pregnancy rates have fallen since the mid-90s, the Government is so keen to improve its targets it is now encouraging doctors to prescribe long-term hormonal injections or implants, contraceptive methods hitherto thought unsuitable for teenagers. Not only do they affect bone density - serious among under-19s who are still creating bone - but any side-effects (including acne - and what teen needs that?) are not reversible for many months. And all condom-loathing young men are now absolved of responsiblity to protect partners from HIV or other sexual infections. Moreover, contraceptive implants have a history of dubious application, used in the developing world and among American blacks as a type of handy way of sterilising the poor.
But who cares that teenagers may be strong-armed into contraception that may impair their health. Wouldn't radically reduced teen conception rates make a fine election boast? Yet, as any health professional will tell you, the girls who have babies too young are those you never see down the clinics. They are not ignorant that sex makes babies or that the Pill prevents them. It is just that contraception means seizing control of one's fertility and these girls feel they have no control over their lives. Motherhood is their sole portal into the adult world, and against that hopelessness there is no quick yet long-lasting jab.
Sex and booze have always been the twin pillars of teenage life. Young people will always shag themselves silly no matter what the risk or moral prescription: today 80 per cent of teen pregnancies are among 16 to 17-year-olds, which is when most of us - think back - were ourselves sexually active. Every generation frets that its young - sulking, idling, pissing away potential - will never amount to a bean. But the demonisation of today's teens is dangerous and self-defeating.
This week, as I walked to the supermarket, a gang of kids - aged between 11 and 15 - charged past me. My instant thought was they were they going to shoplift or “steam” the customers. But really they just had a few quid to share on crisps, then they ran back out laughing and glowing and young. Yet their very presence, unsupervised, felt threatening, unruly and wrong.
When did we get so frightened of our children? When they started stabbing us, some of you will retort. But David Cameron this week made a brave attempt to reverse our fear: if we tell other people's children off for small misdemeanours, he reasons, others will not feel free to commit bigger crimes. Once in government, I wonder how quickly Mr Cameron will be knee-jerked into the usual prohibitions and controls. But right now his notion that we must “resocialise” the streets, that a child playing should be encouraged not arrested, that councils should resist “no ball games” bans, are truly refreshing ideas.
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It was dark and pelting when I took the short cut back from Sainsbury behind the flats and how menacing all the teenagers looked. Then it struck me that the threat was more in my head than reality: sometimes a hoody is just keeping his hair dry against the rain.