It seems to me that we don’t like teenagers very much at the moment. We worry about them and we don’t understand them. Hasn’t it ever been thus? But, at the moment, reading the newspapers, I get the impression that the next generation is about as socially acceptable as the aliens in Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

Take a look at the evidence. When they’re not hanging around shopping centres, obscuring their faces by wearing “hoodies”, they’re ganging up on the Deputy Prime Minister.

John Prescott told of his experience at a motorway service station where his enjoyment of a bacon buttie was able to continue only after the intervention of Special Branch officers. He was lucky they were there. Otherwise, he might have been subjected to the new phenomenon of “happy slapping”, in which he would have been beaten up just for the fun of it, and the results photographed and distributed via mobile phones.

And then there is Tony Blair and the ASBOs — not, as one might think, a group from the Prime Minister’s guitar-playing youth but the result of new Labour’s Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. Antisocial behaviour orders are designed to combat theft, intimidation, drunkenness and violence but have made the headlines mainly in relation to their effect on juveniles.

There are arguments for and against ASBOs but, meanwhile, their numbers are rising spectacularly. There were 2,600 of them last year, 116 per cent more than the year before. Interestingly, 1,063 of them were served on children between the ages of 10 and 17.

Do ASBOs work? I haven’t the faintest idea but nor, it seems, does anyone else. The Daily Express may think so (“ASBOs proven to work” — June 2005) but, in the same month, The Guardian was asking: “Are ASBOs really working?” and went on to suggest that they might be just a “ quick-fix solution to cure society’s ills”. Even the Home Office isn’t sure. Its own figures show that one ASBO in four is breached and for some getting an ASBO is a badge of honour, enhancing a teenager’s cred.

What does seem pretty certain is that the flood of ASBOs has helped to demonise an entire generation. Individually, the cases often seem ill-judged to the point of absurdity: the boy with Tourette’s syndrome banned from swearing; another boy banned from using the word “grass”; two brothers, aged 10 and 12, banned from “making rude gestures”. But they add up to create a cumulative vision of a Britain full of yobs, with crack houses on every inner-city estate, drunken louts running amok in provincial towns, and so on.

It all leads to what Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, the human-rights watchdog, has called a “recipe for the alienation of a generation of deprived kids”.

I am not saying that such antisocial behaviour doesn’t exist: the Bluewater shopping mall enjoyed a 23 per cent rise in the number of visitors the month hoodies were banned. But I wonder if the Government hasn’t got a vested interest in painting the worst picture possible. It seems to be using juvenile delinquency in much the same way that the Conservatives used immigration at the election, playing on our worst fears.

Why? Because teenagers have no vote and no voice. Because they’re an easy target. Because combating perceived delinquency puts the Government on our side.

It seems that children can do no right. Even when exam results soar, we are told it is only because standards have been so debased. And universities are queuing up to give gifted but privately educated students a good kicking, rejecting them for being the stuck-up little bastards that they must surely be.

All of which leads me to wonder how I, as a writer for teenagers, should portray my heroes if my books are going to be seen in any way as relevant or in touch. Should they, I wonder, be heroic at all? Take Alex Rider, for example, the teenage spy who first appeared in Stormbreaker (1998). Although he has often been compared with James Bond, Alex is in many ways his antithesis. He is no patriot. He has no desire to serve his Queen or country and would much rather be at school with his friends. Alex Rider is manipulated, lied to, tricked or blackmailed into his adventures. This seems to have struck a chord with young readers and may be the reason why the books have had such success.

But in my new book, Raven’s Gate, I have gone for a protagonist — again, no hero — who may be even more in touch with our times. From our first encounter with 14-year-old Matthew Freeman, we have a boy who seems to have sprung directly from the Ten O’Clock News: “He was sitting on a low wall outside Ipswich station, wearing a grey, hooded sweatshirt, shapeless, faded jeans and trainers with frayed laces. It was six o’clock in the evening and the London train had just pulled in. Behind him, the commuters were fighting their way out of the station . . . but the crowd meant nothing to him. He wasn’t part of it. He never had been and he sometimes thought he never would be.