The Death of the Night Out

Generation Z is often maligned as a ‘homebody generation.’ Battered by the rising cost of living and stunted by the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s youth would seemingly rather sit at home, scrolling and focussing on ‘self-care’ than socialising with friends. They prefer matcha lattes and Pilates to wild nights out. 

The impact of this is being felt across Western Europe. In France, 70% of nightclubs have shut down since the 1980s. In Amsterdam and Barcelona, venues are calling last orders much earlier than they used to. And in formerly lively Berlin, you’re now just as likely to get chucked out at 10 p.m. as 4 a.m. The UK, too, has lost around 400 clubs—more than a third—in the last five years alone. In London specifically, a city once world-renowned for its vibrant nightlife and music scene, just 6% of venues open past 2 a.m. 

There are plenty of reasons for this. Money, of course, plays a huge part. For many young people, regular nights out are simply unaffordable, especially in expensive capital cities like London and Paris. The pandemic, too, meant that large numbers of this cohort were locked in their homes for two years when they would have started going out to clubs and bars for the first time. To many of them, the world of sticky dancefloors and sweaty bars feels foreign and frightening. Jérémie Peltier, a French writer who has written a book on the topic of declining nightlife among Gen Z, told La Parisien: “Since the pandemic, there have been a lot more house parties. It’s cheaper, you can control the music, the people you invite and how the night progresses, as going out is viewed as more stressful or even potentially dangerous.”

This latter point is particularly worth touching on. Gen Z is no doubt more health conscious and cash-strapped than previous generations, but an often overlooked reason for their aversion to nightlife is that the streets tend to be less safe than they used to be. Speaking to The Times, Michael Kill, head of the Night-Time Industries Association, explains that “sexual harassment and petty theft,” especially in crowded areas like London’s Soho district, are keeping young people indoors. This is compounded by the fact that there is often “no CCTV” and “not enough police on the street to ensure these things are not happening.” Two 18-year-old female students in Soho, echoing Peltier’s hypothesis, tell The Times that they prefer house parties, because the streets feel unsafe. A 24-year-old French woman expresses similar concerns when speaking to Le Monde: “I’ve had two unpleasant experiences. In 2017, I was drugged without my knowledge in a bar in the Saint-Michel neighborhood and ended up in the emergency room. Four years later, I was sexually assaulted in a very commercial nightclub.” She tells the paper that she now only goes out every three months, and prefers to spend her evenings at home. Again, women speaking to Belgian broadcaster RTBF are hesitant about going out. One 27-year-old says she doesn’t “feel safe in these kinds of places” unless she is in a group. A 25-year-old shares this sentiment, lamenting that “there are a lot of cases of harassment in nightclubs.”

Outside the club isn’t any less dangerous. People, particularly women, often cite fear of walking home in the dark, travelling on public transport, or getting a taxi as a major reason for avoiding nights out. A shocking 95% of Belgian women do not feel safe at night, and one-in-five say they have been followed. In the UK, the vast majority of women are not comfortable walking alone at night, and only a third feel safe using public transport. Even comparatively safe options like Uber, Bolt and local taxi services aren’t much better. Almost half of women aged between 16 and 25 have felt unsafe in a taxi in Paris and the surrounding region. 

These fears are not unfounded. Earlier this year, a British woman visiting Paris was brutally raped by a taxi driver while returning from a night out. And in general, there has been an uptick in assaults and harassment against women in major European cities, including Paris, Madrid, and Berlin.   

One crucial and undeniable reason for this is the scale of mass, unvetted immigration. Across Europe, foreign nationals are routinely overrepresented when it comes to crimes like rape and assault. The fact is, when large numbers of young men arrive from abroad with little documentation or paperwork, governments will always find it difficult to know who they are and whether they have a criminal past. Combine that with authorities’ proclivity for losing track of asylum seekers altogether, and you have a recipe for disaster. 

As much as the European establishment would like to forget it, many people will no doubt remember the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Years Eve 2015. That night, packs of men, most of them of North African origin, hunted down women and assaulted them. Over 500 police reports of sexual assault were made in the aftermath, 28 of those involving rape or attempted rape. Similar scenes played out in Milan during NYE last year, when multiple groups of female tourists reported being cornered and assaulted by Arabic-speaking men. 

Then there was the tragic case of Maria Ladenburger, a 19-year-old medical student in Freiburg who even volunteered with refugee charities in her free time. Ladenburger was murdered in 2016 by Hussein Khavari, an asylum seeker, as she made her way home from a party thrown by her university faculty in the early hours of the morning. Khavari raped and strangled Ladenburger, before leaving her to drown in a river. Khavari claimed to be a 17-year-old Afghani, but had no paperwork when he arrived in Germany from Austria. It was later discovered that he was not only likely to be an adult man in his thirties, but also that he had previously been serving a 10-year prison sentence in Greece for attempted murder in 2014. But he was released just a year later due to prison overcrowding. Earlier in 2016, Ashley Ann Olsen, an American woman living in Florence, was strangled and beaten to death by an illegal Senegalese immigrant she had met at a nightclub. 

Not to mention the fact that busy venues like nightclubs and concerts are often prime targets for terror attacks. In 2015, Islamist terrorists targeted, among other locations, a concert at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, shooting and killing 90 people there alone. Then, in 2017, Islamist Salman Abedi detonated a bomb in the foyer of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena, killing 22 people, many of them children. 

This string of awful cases were highly publicised at a time when many Gen Zers were just beginning to go clubbing for the first time. And since then, stories like these have become all too common. In June this year, a 24-year-old Polish woman was raped and stabbed to death by a man suspected to be a Venezeulen migrant, while returning from her shift as a barmaid late at night. Last month in Munich, an Eritrean migrant allegedly attacked and sexually assaulted an 18-year-old and 17-year-old girl at random during the early hours of the morning, punching one girl in the face and smashing a bottle over her friend’s head. 

With all this in mind, no wonder young people are choosing to stay home. Stories about attacks, rapes, and even murders on nights out are inescapable, especially those at the hands of people European nations continue to import and struggle to deport. While the chances of being assaulted at random still, thankfully, remain quite low, it’s easy to see why many people decide not to take that risk. This creates a vicious cycle. As more venues close or close earlier, and night-time crowds thin, the less safe people feel. Which, in turn, discourages them from going out. 

This is a sad state of affairs. In swearing off nightlife, Gen Zers are missing out on some valuable milestones. Nights out were once a crucial part of growing up, teaching young people how to read social cues, interact with people from all walks of life, and navigate alcohol-fuelled, potentially hostile situations. Without those messy, chaotic and sometimes regrettable late nights spent at bars, clubs, and pubs, Gen Z risks being severely undersocialised. Or at least, more so than they already are. 

It really shouldn’t be this way. Yes, going out late at night is always bound to incur some risks, even in places that are otherwise safe. But it’s worrying that so many of our cities now feel off-limits after dark. If Europe wants to save its night-time industry, it needs to make the streets feel safe again. Otherwise, it’ll be last orders for an entire way of life.