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When you picture teenagers hanging out, what do you think of? Bustling stores, boardwalks, malls, all places where teenagers can congregate just to hang out and spend time together. Now, however, teenagers are disproportionately being pushed out of these spaces both due to unfair rules and new demographics that are taking over what used to be for those 13+.
Part of the reason why these places are pushing back against teenagers is that for a while now there has been a stereotype of mischievous teenagers “loitering” and causing trouble in these public spaces. These stereotypes are so pervasive that some places are banning people who even just look like teenagers, with a notable example being Ocean City NJ’s “Backpack Ban” which banned the use of backpacks from their boardwalk. This law was cited as a safety concern, as they found people could be carrying harmful items in these bags, but they specifically targeted backpacks, the bags that most teenagers would be carrying when going to hang out after school.
Another problem with these laws is that there isn’t any clear definition of what is ‘wrong’ behavior for teenagers. In a law proposed for Ybor City, the specific words used are “stay unnecessarily” in public spaces. This statement, “staying unnecessarily” is impossible to clearly define and seems to directly outlaw just hanging out.
There is another example that hit close to home recently, and that is the state fair. Whereas in years past, teenagers could hang out at the fair with their friends after school, but recently, in 2023, that rule was changed after a teenager got run over after being kicked out of the fair due to an unrelated commotion. This rule unfairly punishes all teenagers, instead of going to the root of the problem and removing the people causing the commotion in the first place.
Unfortunately, these laws don’t even do what they propose to do, which is to reduce crime committed by young people at night. The truth is, if somebody wants to commit a crime at night, they simply will not follow the curfew. This anti-teenager legislation isn’t the only reason that teenagers are feeling excluded from public spaces, there is also an increasingly changed expectation of who is going to be in each public space.
For example, the character of the “Sephora Kid” is very popular right now on social media, satirizing the 10-12-year-old children who have taken over certain spaces in recent months. These characters are funny but also represent a larger issue, there aren’t age-appropriate spaces for younger kids anymore, leaving spaces typically meant for teenagers to be overrun by poorly behaved children.
When this current generation of teenagers were tweens, there were stores like Justice, Claires and Ivviva that were meant for that specific age group, now those stores don’t quite exist in the same form anymore so these kids have defected to other places like Sephora, Lululemon and Ulta. This creates an uncomfortable, and sometimes annoying, energy in these spaces.
It just seems like teenagers can’t win, we can’t be in places that we used to be able to because we “cause too much trouble” and the few spaces that do still exist for us are being taken over by other people. It is incredibly frustrating.
