问答题

One evening, when Bagehot was at university, a student who lived next door to him fell badly ill. An ambulance was called, but its route was blocked by a pile of clothes and a gaggle of drunk, naked young men. They were members of a drinking society (roughly analogous to American fraternities). The boozy nudity at precisely this spot, they explained, refusing to budge, was an awfully important initiation rite.
This incident came to mind last month when something not dissimilar happened near Wigan, in northern England. A group of youths obstructed an ambulance and harassed the paramedics in it, whose patient died. That little act of thuggery was scarcely noticed amid the ongoing run of murders by British youngsters, by knife and sometimes gun. Most of the victims have been young too: 18 people aged 18 or under have been killed in London this year, stabbed on the street or shot in nightclubs—not many by Los Angeles standards, perhaps, but troubling by Britain’s. Not all the victims have been teenagers, a father in Warrington was beaten to death outside his home last week after remonstrating with vandals. "No street is safe any more from marauding hooligans," lamented the Sun, which recently fulminated about the yobs who urinated in drinking-water supplies delivered to flood-stricken western England.
Are British delinquents really more depraved, and more numerous, than they used to be, or than other countries’ are That university prank—as well as confirming that the posh and plebeian classes can be oddly alike—suggests that there is little new under the sun, even if the Sun says there is. Hysteria over degenerate children was even more intense in 1993, when two ten-year-olds murdered a toddler in Liverpool. From punks and skinheads, through the gangs that prowled the post-war London rubble and beyond, "yoof" has always been a concern, and always getting worse. "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty," says a Shakespearean character, "for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." It is true that more teenage British wenches are got with child than other European ones, and that British teenagers are unusually prone to taking drugs, fighting, venereal disease and boozing: a senior policeman called this week for tighter rules on alcohol. But few who drink or smoke pot graduate to knife crime. Many do none of these things; most are better-off and better-educated than ever.
Not much has changed—and don’t generalise: those are the relaxed arguments of some sociologists, criminologists and other yoof-ologists. But an old problem still counts as a problem: that Britons have always worried about yoof doesn’t mean they are wrong to do so now. And conversations with teachers, youth workers and yoof itself suggest that in some ways the plight and behaviour of teenagers have indeed deteriorated.
Hard evidence is difficult to come by, but more British teenagers seem to be carrying knives, intended to protect but liable to endanger. More assaults than previously seem to be provoked by imagined "disrespect"; afterwards, a teenage omerta often confounds the police. Murder is still overwhelmingly a male offence, but girls seem to be committing more violent crime too. Urban gangs are pursuing rivalries and vendettas against groups from other neighbourhoods, separated by boundaries that are invisible to oblivious adults. "Happy-slapping", whereby assailants film their attacks for their later amusement, has been an unanticipated consequence of putting cameras on mobile phones.
As in America, the worst problems are often concentrated in specific communities. But they have wider costs, because adults can’t tell the sociopaths from the bored loiterers. British adults, research suggests, are less likely to intervene than other Europeans if they see youngsters up to no good, with the result that parks and squares are turned over to adolescent rule.

Why does the author cite Bagehot’s story in the first paragraph