No education or job may cut short youths' lives

Prolonged unemployment among youngster may prove fatal. A study has discovered that youths who remain jobless for an extended period are prone to develop some self-destructive tendencies which may eventually prove suicidal over a period of time.

The study has come out with some shocking statistics. According to the study, one out of six youths who remained unemployed for a prolonged period died within span of ten years. 

Long-term joblessness paves way for frustration among the youngsters. This frustration, in turn, leads to alcohol and drug abuse which takes the toll on health and eventually results in death. 

It has been found that 15 per cent of the youngsters, in a city in the UK, could not survive a decade after losing gainful employment. Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) as they are called, these youths fell prey to suicidal tendencies like over-drinking and drug abuse and died within a span of ten years of becoming recluse in the system.

The ongoing recession has seen sharp rise in the number of youngsters in the 16-24 age group who could be categorized as NEET. The figure stands at 935,000, which constitute 16% of the population of this age group.

The sharp increase in the number of dropouts in the field of education and training saw corresponding increase in the ‘social cost’ of being outside the system.

The Government's director general of schools Jon Coles told a press conference in London:

"They had examined what had happened to the long-term Neets of ten years ago. They found one profoundly shocking thing, which I still find profoundly shocking today. Those who had been outside the system for a long time, whether because they were permanently excluded or simply because they had dropped out at the end of compulsory schooling and had not got into anything else, 15 per cent of those young people of ten years ago were dead by the time the research was done."

Chances are that this is a one off case and hence should not be generalized for the whole country. Coles hoped that the statistics is an exception to a particular locality which his aides failed to name. He insisted it was 'one bit of local research which could not be taken as representative of the whole country'.

However, as a senior most bureaucrat in the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) he confirmed that some youths died young after falling out of the system. Once the die is cast these youngsters are forced into the abyss of a 'downward spiral' and eventually end up dying young.