‘Young people want to come together’: experts respond to mass teen meet-ups in Clapham | Young people

IIt didn’t start with a flyer sent via Snapchat. Youngsters have been invited to gather at a basketball court in south London to celebrate the start of the Easter holidays. They were told to bring their own weed and laughing gas as it would be late.

Chaos ensued in the following hours. Hundreds of young people came to the “connection” last Saturday and then gathered in Clapham High Street.

Stores in the area were packed, including Marks & Spencer, where videos showed teenagers fighting in the aisles. Some shopkeepers reportedly locked their doors and fireworks were set off on Clapham Common.

Days later, another connection occurred. The Metropolitan Police issued a 48-hour dispersal order and six teenage girls have been arrested so far.

Anger over the scenes grew in the following days. First came the headlines denouncing “wild youths.” Then political reactions began.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the disorder showed “a culture where too many young people believe they can do whatever they want and nothing will happen”. London Mayor Sadiq Khan condemned the “utterly appalling” scenes. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, claimed the unrest was evidence of “social collapse”.

On Friday, the boss of M&S called for a crackdown on “brazen, organised, aggressive” retail crime. The Met said these events were “supported by online trends and viral content on social media platforms.”

But young people organizing online events is not exactly new. Since the rise of smartphones, the words “connections” and “instincts” used to describe a date have spread through messaging and social media apps. In the early 2010s, Blackberry Messenger and Facebook were the main ways to organize connections; details were being passed on en masse to friends and contacts.

Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said the difference now was the “speed and scale” at which news of the gathering could spread.

In recent years, Snapchat and especially TikTok, where ads for links are publicly available, have led to widespread advertising of events. In 2023, hundreds of young people set out to Essex for “Southern Motivation”. Those who gathered on the beach caused the police to issue a dispersal order.

Elliot Major said the lack of places for young people to hang out in person was also a factor, with digital spaces now the only way for many young people to organize real-life meet-ups.

“There is nothing new about young people organizing mass gatherings,” he said. “What has changed is the context. We have eliminated the physical spaces where young people come together safely: youth clubs, community centres, even affordable public spaces. In their place are digital platforms, organizing meetings quickly and at scale.

“We often frame these moments as behavior problems. But they’re also symptoms of a deeper change: a generation with less structured opportunities, fewer shared spaces, and more uncertainty about where they fit.”

Elliot Major’s analysis matches what a teenager involved in the Clapham connection told the Metro. They said “word of mouth” helped spread knowledge of the event. The original brochure did not mention that this was a mass event with the potential or intent to cause disorder.

“I think some people wanted to rest somewhere because there weren’t many places to go,” Young said. “But connections like this are 100% unacceptable, especially if they’re setting things on fire. A few people came to cause trouble and it got out of control.”

Dr. is a senior lecturer in the sociology of youth and childhood at King’s College London. Tania de St Croix said the reaction to the Clapham connection was “overblown” and an example of moral panic.

“I can imagine this might be scary for some people in the community, including young people who work in restaurants and stores,” he said. “But the public outcry and the language of ‘incorporation’ and ‘wild youth’ gangs unfairly demonize young people.”

A recent report by youth charity YMCA found that local authority funding for youth services in England has fallen by 76% in real terms over the last 14 years, representing a loss of £1.3bn since 2010-11. Services were still struggling to recover.

The amount spent by local authorities on youth services in England and Wales in 2024-25 has fallen by 10% on the previous year.

De St Croix said: “Youth clubs have been sold, and while youth clubs still exist, they generally open very rarely.”

He added that the social media element of this story was a “distraction” from the real issue. “Young people want to come together,” he said. “Social media provides this, but this shows that they want the opposite of social media, they want to meet in real life.

“Young people are showing us that they need a space that’s a bit more informal and where they can get together in groups, but we’re seeing more and more public spaces not allowing that.”

De St Croix, who has been a youth worker for 30 years, said in the last five years he had seen “a huge increase in mental health problems among young people” and an increase in the number of young people “not feeling connected to their schools” because they felt they were “constantly in trouble”.

He said some schools have rules where students are not allowed to be in groups of more than six, and he has seen “loneliness and lack of hope” increase because young people “don’t even know what kind of life they can imagine because their options are so limited.”

“These are young people who have seen playgrounds closed during lockdown, spent some of their formative years locked inside and can’t even see each other at school. Some young people live in cramped quarters. They can’t meet up with their peers at home and aren’t allowed to hang out on the streets.

“I’m not saying this excuses all forms of violence, but it’s hardly surprising that young people are looking for the chance to come together and do something they might see as exciting.”