Dumb stunts and anxious adults

The juvenile pranks of teenagers on social media should worry us less than the unwillingness of grown-ups to intervene in relation to anti-social behaviour, says Dave Clements.

‘Dumb.’ So said my 10-year-old when I told him about a trend for young TikTokers filming themselves randomly walking into people’s houses - the so-called ‘home invasion’ trend.

Three teenagers announce they’re ‘walking into random houses - let’s go!’ - and then do just that. To the evident alarm of the family inside. The original video of a group of youngsters entering a London home, uninvited, has been deleted. But not before it went viral, attracting a perhaps surprising level of outrage. Not to mention the interest of the Metropolitan Police and the New York Post.

While it was no doubt a shock for those ‘invaded’ in this way, it was less a break-in than pushing at an open door. Quite literally - a woman is sweeping her front garden as they enter. Certainly, in these porous times, the dividing line between public and private, and between adult and child, has been increasingly blurred.

If you’ve ever sat on a bus on the school run and been treated to an aural assault from somebody else’s mobile phone - whether chatting on speaker phone (does nobody own earphones anymore?) or scrolling through TikTok - you’ll know what I mean. The sense that one should keep these things to oneself, and pay at least some regard to your fellow passengers, has utterly gone. And I’m not just talking about the kids. It's the adults, too.

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Indeed, it’s not young people being disruptive (on the bus or in TikTok footage) that worries me. It’s the adults staring into their phones and studiously ignoring the misbehaviour and (sometimes) mayhem around them. That’s what first got me when I saw that clip - the startled, anxious, helpless look on the adults’ faces.

Nobody knows what to do anymore. Intervening is very much out of fashion. So much so that the only time I heard another adult speaking up, it was to admonish me for ‘harassing’ the youngster concerned.

But, like my son, those who’ve seen the video are evidently unimpressed by their pranking peers - with comments like: ‘He's taking it way too far. Senseless.’ ‘Disgusting and embarrassing’, said another. ‘This is just too far, public places go for it however someone else's house nahhh.’ The biggest criticism was not, though, that they’d crossed the once sacred threshold of someone’s doorstep, from one kind of space to another.

They had crossed a different line, according to many of the presumably young TikTok community who watched the clip. ‘So disrespectful, there's a kid in the house’, said one. ‘Aww not w the kids in the house’, agreed another. Even the young man alleged to be the chief culprit - an 18-year-old ‘content creator’ calling himself Mizzy - reportedly admits: ‘Perhaps it was a bit far.’ And to give them their due, they did exit the property when they discovered there were children in the house.

I’m not defending Mizzy - who has now been arrested. He had since moved onto a new challenge: ‘Open random people’s car doors get in then ask if it’s Uber’ and, reportedly, running away with an elderly woman’s dog. It’s annoying, rather cruel, even menacing. I read one comment comparing it to A Clockwork Orange. But this isn’t a gang roaming the streets meting out random violence on their victims. It is more like an episode of Jackass.

Bored teenagers doing a dare for clicks may be wrong, even criminal, but it is not the collapse of civilisation. There are more concerning things going on in our towns and cities. In the North London neighbourhood where I live, a boy was recently stabbed to death across the road from his school. It’s good school that I’ve visited with a view to sending my son. In the conversations I’ve had since, I've been struck by the overwhelming sense of resignation. Well, what can you do?

While we rightly expect the police to tackle knife crime, what about anti-social behaviour? The government’s Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan promises to treat the problem ‘with the urgency it deserves’, to take a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach, and give agencies ‘the tools they need’ to tackle or prevent it. But it completely misses what is most important here - people in their communities addressing anti-social behaviour themselves.

The overblown response to this latest social-media craze is in stark contrast to the sense of powerlessness many clearly feel. But it also suggests that protecting our homes, our families and our privacy from intruders still really matters to us. And, going by some of the comments on TikTok, young people have an almost instinctive sense of where the boundaries are, too. Or at least, where they should be. That’s something. But what about us - the adults? When are we going to be a little less anxious, look around and start stepping in?