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| Teenagers gathered at the Tjornin youth center in Reykjavik |
Iceland is
successfully treating a crisis in teenage drinking. The island nation has one
of the lowest rates of teen substance abuse in Europe.
How did Iceland
do it?
The country
combined local involvement and an increase in music and sports activities for
students. The actions have helped shrink a teen culture of smoking and
drinking.
One of these
actions was the establishment of curfews for teenagers. Now children under 12
are not allowed to be outside after 8 p.m. without parents and those 13 to 16
not past 10 p.m. Over summer, when school is out, the curfew is two hours
later.
Parents are
involved in enforcing the curfew: Every weekend across Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik,
they take a two-hour early nighttime walk around their neighborhood. These
“parent patrols” visit teen “hangouts”— places where young people like to meet
and spend time together.
“We tell the kids if they are
out too late, polite and
nice, and then they go home,” said Heidar Atlason, a long-time member of the
patrol group.
Reykjavik Mayor
Dagur B. Eggertsson said the Icelandic plan “is all about” people giving teens
better choices than substance abuse. He believes the large mix of activities
that now keeps students busy and interested has very much changed the country’s
youth culture.
However,
better options cost
money. Local areas like Reykjavik have invested in music schools as well as
sports and youth centers. To make the programs widely available, parents are
offered $500 every year for sports or music programs for their children.
Other countries
are paying attention. The Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis has
been running the youth project for the past twenty years. The center says it
now advises 100 communities in 23 countries, from Finland to Chile, on how to
cut teen substance abuse.
“The key to
success is to create healthy communities and by that get healthy individuals,”
said Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. She is a sociology professor who started the
“Youth of Iceland” program, which now has been renamed “Planet Youth.” The
secret, she says, is to keep young people busy and parents involved without
talking much about drugs or alcohol.
In 1999, studies
showed that 56 percent of Icelandic 16-year-olds drank alcohol. A similar
number had tried smoking. Years later, Iceland has the lowest rates for
drinking and smoking among the 35 countries measured in the European School
Survey Project on Alchohol and Other Drugs.
On average, 80
percent of European 16-year-olds have tasted alcohol at least once, compared
with 35 percent in Iceland, the only country where more than half of those
students never drink alcohol. Denmark — another wealthy Northern European
country — has the highest rates of teen drinking, along with Greece, Hungary
and the Czech Republic, where more than 90 percent have consumed alcohol.
Anyway, Iceland’s
youth are not without troubles. Today’s news stories say rates for anxiety and possible depression have never been higher
among Icelandic teenagers.
From VOA News
