We must get our heads out of the sand and ask ourselves the tough question about why there is so much youth violence in our society - and actually be willing to be honest with the answer.
More than 5,000 youth ages 10 to 24 lose their life each year to violence, drug abuse and suicide. More than 750,000 youth ages 10 to 24 were treated in emergency rooms for injuries suffered due to violence.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, direct and indirect costs of youth violence, such as medical, lost productivity and quality-of-life costs, exceed $158 billion each year.
We have been bombarded with the terrible images of the recent rash of incidents of youth violence. Students in a third grade class making plans to hit, duct tape and kidnap their teacher. Teens luring a cheerleader classmate to a home and beating her repeatedly while a camera rolls. A high-school student throwing a metal chair at another classmate, knocking the victim unconscious. A high-school student beating another student to death in a fight.
More appalling than these acts themselves seems to be the general lack of outrage over them! A few choice "Oh my gosh-es" and we seem to be done for the day. The media seem to be more interested in post-game decision making, trying to decide if these youth should be tried as juveniles or adults or whether well-known books would be the answer to these ills.
What we need to do is analyze the root cause and investigate solutions.
As a country, we spend billions of dollars annually on anti-violence, anti-drug, anti-bullying and anti-suicide programs, yet the incidents not only continue, they appear to be getting worse in severity and frequency and occurring in increasingly younger children.
Today, our youth stand a one-in-four chance of becoming victims of some form of violence before reaching high school. What we're doing isn't working to minimize or manage, the existing problem of youth violence.
We have to focus on preventing it in the first place. Today's youth are coming into society - into life - equipped with inadequate social skills and character development that would help them understand that this kind of behavior is simply not OK.
"It's all about me!" is the mantra of many of our youth today, and the behavior we see splattered all over the Internet is the result.
