So David Cameron is apparently going to explain that we need to learn to understand the "hoodie culture" better - that for many it is a way not of hiding aggression and criminal intent but of "keeping your head down" retreating into anonymity in an hostile world. That instead of opprobrium youngsters need nurturing to make the correct life-choices in a fast moving bewildering (and I'd add very unequal) society.

It reminds me of Germaine Greer's "The Boy" of 2003, a book extolling the real beauty of teenage males that got her some bad press with some decrying her as a middle aged pederast. I recall not buying it myself because I felt it might feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. I heard her explain the rationale behind the book at the time though. What she was trying to do was rekindle a sense of self-confidence; that boys in particular were, through their fashion statements - baggy trousers, hoodies and the like - reacting to being constantly put down, as inherently criminal, as "thickos", as failures in a feminist world that said we can do without men.

For years we have been showered with statistics about how boys are in fact doing worse than girls, at school, at university, at life. Now sure, we've had generations, perhaps millennia, where girls and women were second class citizens, chattels, not worth the same as men, and that had to be addressed. But maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Of course I'm prepared to accept that in fact women are simply just the superior being and that levelling the playing field has begun to allow that inherent superiority to shine through. But even if that is the case, it means we need to pay more attention now to boys and men, to give them the step up to realise their potentials and so on.

When I was a councillor it was a very common complaint that there were "gangs of youths" just hanging around, intimidatingly, frightening old ladies going about their ordinary business at the local shop, the chippie or whatever. Cameron is right certainly in one respect - Labour's, and society as a whole's it seems, response to this has been to criminalise them, with ASBOs, curfews, banning their attire from public places in the name of a surveillance society that wants to record our every move, Big Brother like. It seems sometimes that it's not a case of if you offend, but when you offend, we will be able to spot you (and, by extension, punishment will be swift).

The axiom that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide is Labour's mantra for centralising control of our lives and is making people feel that their privacy is under attack. And if you're young and perhaps just a little bit naughty (weren't we all? As DC should know!) and you don't quite have a full understanding of your rights you are going to be tempted to retreat into anonymity.

A friend of mine took a bunch of kids from his council estate on a couple of overseas trips to Oxford's twin cities of Bonn and Leiden last year. Some of them had ASBOs. Whatever he allowed his name put to in his Labour election leaflets this May (he lost anyway) it made him realise that ASBOs were not really the answer to many of these problems - that a little bit of TLC was what they needed to settle down and make the right kind of choices when faces with them. To have some self-confidence.

And then there was Tom Conti's contribution to "This Week" a couple of years back where he speculated that if we throw huge investment at education, that if we make schools, especially in the early years, places of respite from a hostile world, and, in some cases, hostile home lives, with class sizes of just half a dozen in the most formative years so that the environment is more family than cattle-market, that we will foster a sense of personal responsibility that will eventually feed through into massive savings in currently state provided services (especially health and social services related).

Can we afford not to address these issues? And do it better than criminal sanctions? Respect does indeed begin at home, and when prominent, and one presumes well brought up for want of nothing, young political campaigners have so little respect for the "little people" in the council estates that, when caught short, they feel no compunction about pissing in the alleyways of someone else's neighbourhood, maybe the example from the very top could be a bit better!

Whatever the answer, the youngsters of today are our future. They are ours (well not mine personally you understand - no chance of that!), a part of our communities. If our communities are outlawing them in the formative years, what resentment are we storing up for our future? And boy, do we need more people like this to change things.

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