The Power of Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is an enormously powerful influence that most young people need to contend with. It is responsible for many young people mindlessly going along with the crowd and not thinking for themselves leading them to start smoking, drinking, experimenting with drugs and sex and more.
Recently, here in Sussex, there have been a few high profile reports of tragic incidents in which youngsters, infuenced by peer pressure (combined with booze), have drunkenly bundled into a car only to end up in a nasty accident with people hurt or even killed. The combination of peer pressure and strong drink can lead even the most well behaved and timid teenagers to make rash and potentially fatal decisions.
A few weeks ago a friend and colleague took a short holiday, leaving the family home to be looked after by his son and daughter aged 16 and 15. Both children had always been trustworthy, reliable youngsters who didn’t show any interest in hanging out with the kids drinking alcopops in the local park. They were both subject to the same peer pressures as any other kids their age, leading them to make some questionable but harmless fashion choices, but they weren’t what could be called ‘troublemakers’.
Some of the sons friends apparently suggested that they might have a party on the Saturday night and the boy, feeling pressurised, agreed. By the time Saturday came round word had spread and the mini party for a few close friends had escalated into a full blown teenage rave. There was nothing the son could do but go with the flow and try to keep things under control as groups of youths clutching bottles of super-strength cider, spirits and wine started to turn up at the house.
At around midnight the neighbours came round to get the noise turned down but their visit was met with a tirade of abuse from a bunch of apparently drunken youths. It was shortly after this visit that one particular young man suggested that they should ‘go for a ride’. Apparently he was hell bent on stealing a car to go joy-riding around the estate. When somebody pointed out the car keys to my colleagues van, which was parked in the drive, the youth exclaimed that he didn’t need to ‘nick a motor’ after all.
My colleague’s son tried to dissuade the lad from taking his dad’s van but the drunken boy, full of booze and bravado, wasn’t listening to reason. By this stage the bullying lad had recruited a band of partners in crime and was hell bent on taking the van out for a spin. Anyone who was refusing to go with him was mercilessly ridiculed and pressurised with name calling and threats from his gang of cohorts. So a band of about 6 youths (girls and boys) piled into my collegues van, the engine was noisily revved up and they took off across the estate. There was nothing that my colleagues son could do to stop them. His sister, by this stage, had consumed too many blue alcopops and was lying almost unconscious on the bathroom floor.
Inevitably it all ended in tears but, luckily, nobody was badly hurt. The band of drunken van thieves tore around the estate roads for about 15 minutes before the alcohol soaked driver lost control on a bend, smashing the car into several parked vehicles before piling into a gatepost, writing off the nearly new Citroen Berlingo van.
Obviously the police were called, statements were taken, parents had to retrieve their kids from the police station and recriminations started to fly around. My friends Berlingo van, which he’d recently proudly obtained on van lease, was completely written off and several of the neighbours’ cars had were badly damaged, along with a number of neighbourly relationships.
How easily this story could have ended with people in hospital or even dead. How could this situation have been avoided? What could the son and daughter have done to prevent the situation from escalating to the degree that it did? There is strength in numbers so if a group of potentially threatening young people turn up hell bent on a boozy party what could my colleagues children have done to turn them away? They didn’t want to be humiliated and seen as kill joys by their peers.
Incidents like this one are occurring all too frequently up and down the country. Peer pressure is often responsible for death, injury and tragedy but what can young people do to avoid these pressurised situations and where can they turn when backed into a corner by aggressive, troublemaking peers?
