Andy Marlow, Member of Youth Parliament for Birmingham, leads a campaign called See the Good behind the Hood, which is one of three campaigns currently being run by the UK Youth Parliament in the West Midlands. Their website can be found at www.good-hood.co.uk and the aim is to promote positive images of young people in the media, as they believe that young people are being misrepresented in the press. For example, the main image of youth shown by the media seems to be one of drunkenness, drug taking, knife crime etc. However, consider the following:

- Knife crime has fallen by 15.7% in the last 2 years according to the metropolitan police survey
- The Prince's Trust has found that:
   - only 9% of young people aged 16-25 have spent time in a gang
   - only 2% carry knives
   - only 3% regularly use drugs
- There was recently a 6% fall in the rate of young people offending in the West Midlands, according to the Liberal Democrats.

Depite these figures, many members of the public feel ever more in danger on the streets and fear of crime is rising. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the public perception of youths and crime, and the reality.

This campaign aims to bridge that gap and inform the public of the reality- that not all young people are yobs.

As part of this campaign, they need stories about all the good that young people are doing around the West Midlands. Please send in stories of all the good work that young people in your area are doing in order to publcise these stories on the website and promote positive images.

As well as this, they would be honoured if you would agree to work with them on this campaign and allow them to put a link to your site on their website, as they aim to make the website (www.good-hood.co.uk ) a central and active site for all youth forums in the West Midlands.

Please respond to Andy Marlow at a.marlow@hotmail.co.uk