Youth Curfew Considered

The Village of Thorsby is considering imposing a curfew on the town youth in an attempt to curb vandalism. Several weeks ago council decided more information would be needed before introducing a nightly curfew. Although I am not a parent, please allow me to give the parental units some well-intentioned advice: if your kid is already a hellion, a curfew won’t help. Try military school instead (kidding!)

If I truly believed that a curfew would solve the vandalism problem in Thorsby, I could probably get behind it. But I don’t believe it will help. A mandatory nightly curfew will only serve to make Thorsby feel more like a Nazi concentration camp than the charming little village it actually is.

I\m sure there are many people (some of them parents even) that truly believe enforcing a curfew on the teenagers of an entire town is a sensible idea. Maybe some folks even believe it is a great idea. After all, in theory, a teenager who is stuck at home between midnight and six a.m. cannot get into much, if any trouble because they will either be (presumably) supervised or asleep. But hey, you know what else works in theory? Communism. Think on that for a minute, if you will.

While imposing a mandatory curfew may make a slight difference in the amount of vandalism occurring in Thorsby it will not stop the problem. A lot of havoc can be wreaked in the early evening. For a youth curfew to actually hinder any youthful shenanigans it would have to start at six p.m. and run to six a.m., not that I’m suggesting we try that.

Oh, but a curfew will deter under-age teens from drinking, you say. A curfew will not stop the teenagers who want to drink alcohol from drinking it, although it may cause them to drink more, faster, during the hours they are allowed to be outside, in order to have a good time before they have to stumble home to make curfew.

A town curfew will solve few, if any problems for several reasons, particularly the inability to enforce it. I have to believe police have more urgent things to do with their time then chase a bunch of 15-year-old wannabe hoodlums around the mean streets of Thorsby. The local group Citizens on Patrol doesn’t have enough volunteers to fully monitor the village every night. Most towns simply don’t have the time or resources to patrol for under-age curfew breakers from dusk until dawn. And why should they have to? Last time I checked Canada wasn’t a dictatorship.

If parents want to enforce a curfew on their own kids, they are well within their rights to do so. It isn’t up to city councils to raise or discipline their town’s youths. It isn’t up the provincial government either, in case Ed Stelmach gets any bright ideas.

Rodney MacDonald, the premier of Nova Scotia, promises to impose a mandatory curfew on children under the age of 16 between the hours of one a.m. and six a.m. if re-elected in June. Talk about an abuse of power! MacDonald apparently fancies himself a somewhat stern father-figure to all the children of Nova Scotia. MacDonald is trying to confuse voters into believing that family values and unnecessary rules are the same thing.

They aren’t.

If teenagers want to act out, they will find a way to get around a mandatory curfew. They will crawl out windows and hide in shadows to avoid being caught by their parents or the police. They will meet up on the outskirts of town, where they will be less visible to police, to party or just hang out. They will be further away from help when they need it. They will be afraid to go to the police for assistance if there is an accident or someone gets hurt if they are afraid of getting in trouble for breaking mandatory curfew. They will actively rebel against authority because forbidden fruit tastes sweeter and breaking curfew seems cool.

If you want to scare kids off the streets after dark there are easier ways. Show them pictures of grotesquely wrinkled people while telling them horror stories about what happens when one does not get enough “beauty sleep”. Put them in hockey as soon as they turn four years old to train them into waking up at five a.m. so they will learn to go to bed early, even when they grow older. Mash up a sleeping pill into their evening meal and enjoy a quiet night at home. Okay, maybe save that one for extreme cases.

I don’t know the best way to keep teenagers from running amok in the streets. But I do know it is up to families, not the government, to decide if their kids need a curfew.