Criticism
Since the event began to attract large enough numbers to warrant annual media attention, Schoolies week has become a familiar concept nation-wide. The media have represented the event as a period of lawlessness, loutish behaviour and unruliness. Some local residents and media have criticised the event due to binge drinking, and sexual promiscuity. Police attention is regularly required where the collective behaviour of schoolies at some locations gets out of hand, such as at Rottnest in 1986. In efforts to reduce such acts, the week-long event on Rottnest in Western Australia has, as of 2006, been reduced to three days, which itself has resulted in a fair amount of criticism from young members of the public.
In recent years, violence (notably sexual violence) has become an increased threat to the safety of attendees. Fights have broken out between schoolies from one area and another and predictable media coverage of antics, accidents, and attacks has followed. The Queensland Government has been criticised for their efforts to stage-manage the event and limit celebrations.
2009 saw one of the most troublesome Gold Coast Schoolies celebrations in history, where in one night, police arrested 30 schoolies, and the number of arrests for the entire week doubled compared to the previous year. Superintendent Jim Keogh said that during eight days of 2009 schoolies celebrations, 217 schoolies had been arrested on 244 charges, compared with 94 schoolies arrested for the same period in 2006. Charges were laid against schoolies for serious assault, drunk and disorderly conduct, drug possession and obstructing police. The incidents prompted talks of banning Schoolies week. This has led schoolies to look at safer alternatives to ensure their wellbeing.
Read more about this topic: Schoolies Week
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)