Is it me, or are our youth getting more violent? I don’t mean all our youth – of course – but it does seem to me that the kind of assaults kids get involved in are more violent now than say ten or twenty years ago.
If you know anything about me, you’ll know I’m a huge advocate of our youth, and try to communicate this as often as possible to a society saturated with sensationalised media tales of drunken knife wielding overtly sexual teens.
So I don’t say this lightly.
It seems to me that young guys and – increasingly it seems – girls think nothing of a king-hit here, or knifing there. No knife? Well then the nearest schooner glass will do.
In a week that saw a fifteen year old school girl become the fifth person charged over the stabbing murder of an apprentice chef in Parramatta, I read of a sixteen year old boy stomping on the head of forty-three year old man leaving him unconscious in the street. The attack was apparently unprovoked and alcohol fuelled.
It’s not surprising then that the News Ltd press and Labor opposition had a field day when it got wind that the NSW Attorney General wanted to look at the way young people were handled by the court system.
Smarter people than me have tried to address these issues, citing everything from the media to the fact we don’t have corporal punishment in schools. Some claim that the breakdown of the family unit and the diminishing role of the church in society have played a big role.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. I don’t think we can lay this at the door of one particular factor. Perhaps it’s more a case of our kids being caught up in the perfect storm of varying issues – different for each person.
I firmly believe that rather than ostracise these young people we must engage them and one thing is for sure, with a multitude of factors at play, it’s going to take a multitude of strategies to reach out to these kids. Tougher sentences will not have much of an impact, because after all these are just kids – and if you know kids, you know they don’t think long term. They act in the heat of the moment, and only become aware of the consequences a split second too late.
Author: Dan Haesler, he is a teacher, writer and speaker at the Mental Health & Wellbeing of Young People seminars He writes for the Sydney Morning Herald and blogs at http://danhaesler.com/ and tweets at @danhaesler
Well said Dan! We as a community need to look beyond bandaid treatments, to structural innovation that provides a platform for change. My observations in the classroom suggest our kids want to care, they are interested in the future and are more aware of the issues facing society than my generation ever were. They want to connect, they want to be a part of something bigger. However they are struggling to identify that ‘something bigger’ and lack the tools to cope with this increased awareness of life. As a result many feel helpless or ineffectual. This internal conflict creates an internal battle that may manifest in outward relationships.
I agree wholeheartedly, we need to engage our kids and support them so they may learn how to learn – this is what I like to call the ‘cooperative flexibility’ effect.
Thanks for the blog. I agree that there are likely to be a combination of problems. I believe though that there is a general softening of boundaries right throughout childhood and adolescence in the last few decades. I’m not suggesting a return of corporal punishment but I think it is important that kids get a firm and clear (non negotiable by parents) consequence to bad behaviour inthe years when it starts to emerge. Things like time out, detention etc are non violent but unpleasant consequences and need to be there. Quite often I think schools are feeling intimidated by over involved parenting and continue to give second or third chances when actually the boundary has to be clear. The key here I think is that everyone is on board giveing the same message. Parents need to accept the consequences and boundaries put in place by schools and reinforce them so that when their child comes home and says they’ve been treated unfairly, the question is at least asked “what did you do?”. If instituions and parents cannot work together on this, the concept of personal responsiblity is not learnt early enough. Unfortunately, real life has consequences and it is too late to be learning this for the first time at 18.
I say this as a psychologist working in Universities where I see some young adults who are still not around the idea of personal responsibility. I fear perhaps we (as a community) could be guilty, of protecting (therefore preventing) our youth from learning this vital life lesson.