It shows a girl fighting at school and then switches to her home where she is whacked over the back of the head by someone, before the camera shows her taking drugs and then behind bars. The same scenes are repeated, each time a little faster, as a way of suggesting
that young lives will continue to spiral out of control again and again unless we do something about it.

Some viewers may find the hard-hitting advertisement upsetting but Barnardo's Yorkshire director, Peter Allinson, says it's not a deliberate attempt to shock people. "We want to draw attention to the fact that there are children in our country who are in very difficult situations and who need our support. We are not trying to offend people, but we do think it's important to put across a message that the public can react to, otherwise they won't stand up and take notice of what's happening out there."

He says that simply bombarding people with statistics stops working after a while. "We've done poster campaigns and newspaper adverts in the past, but unless you get on TV you don't get through to a large part of the population, and in the run-up to Christmas we thought it was a timely reminder to people about some of those most vulnerable
in society."

The TV advertisements coincide with the charity's Breaking the Cycle campaign, which reiterates the point that those young people most likely to become involved in crime and anti-social behaviour are from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds. This might not sound like ground-breaking research, but it comes at a time when teenagers, in particular, are being unfairly demonised as violent, foul-mouthed yobs
who roam the streets looking for trouble.

A recent YouGov survey of more than 2,000 adults questioned in Yorkshire showed that 60 per cent thought that British children were beginning to behave like animals.

It's an image that Barnardo's wants to change. "The majority of crime is committed by adults, there's only a small proportion of children
involved and of those an even smaller proportion commit serious crime. Of course they need to be dealt with in a serious way, but we lock up too many children and it's time we recognised they are important and started talking about them in a positive way."

Charities like Barnardo's play a key role in helping troubled young people before they end up in jail.

"I recently had a discussion with a young man who had been going down this road of crime. A lot of his friends were into drugs, but he made the decision to get out of this cycle with support from Barnardo's and he said to me, quite spontaneously, that if he hadn't received this help he would be dead, because a lot of friends had died," Mr Allinson says.

"There was another young woman I talked to who was the victim of domestic violence. She had lost her self-confidence, but we were
able to get her some accommodation and she went on to university and now she's helping other people in similar situations. It shows that with the right help at the right time we can make a difference to people's lives."

Barnardo's in Yorkshire works with more than 10,000 children, young people and their families, and has more than 40 specialised projects geared to providing practical advice and support. "What we call 'stickability' is very important, because a lot of the young people we pick up have suffered for a long time, so we have to stick with them through thick and thin," he says.

"We believe that the majority of children want to do the right thing. All young people need varying degrees of support, it's about understanding the kind of services they need – it might be practical support to help find accommodation, going back to college, or simply making sure they get the right advice. Because at the end of the day, they need to know that they have options in life rather than feeling trapped."