The Violence of America’s Youth: Assault On and Off the Playground

One can never forget the endless stream of teens being prosecuted for recording beatings of fellow classmates. In January, 2007 three teens in North Babylon, New York were arrested for attacking another girl and the eight teens charged with assaulting a girl in Lakeland, Florida in March, 2008 while the girls filmed the fight,two boys stood outside as look outs. One of the attackers’ mothers said that the beating took place because the victim had been insulting them on MySpace, but the victim’s father says that the motivation was to post it on YouTube. With these types of offenses going on everyday, the outlook on safety on and off the playground is bleak.

What can be done to prevent these types of occurrences is much more important than playing the blame game as far as both parties are concerned in many of these cases. Keeping violence away from young children is one way to stop it before it starts, kids are affected by their environment. Youngsters who are exposed to violent television, music, grow up witnessing domestic violence, or live in violent neighborhoods have a higher risk of committing these acts against others. Children do know boundaries and need to be taught them and that there are consequences to overstepping them. Like the young female attackers of the 10 year old, they end up being prosecuted as in the case of the teen beatings. These things need to be stopped by teaching respect for other people and consequences when you violate someone else’s space in order to do verbal or bodily harm. Children also need to be taught that just because someone is talking about you on Myspace, it doesn’t warrant attacking them. Teens definitely have no excuse, because they will eventually learn that no matter how old you get people will continue to talk about you and the only person you can control is yourself.

The “it takes a village” approach to these measures is key to stopping assaults in school and in the community. It is not just parents’ responsibility to teach children, it is also the job of law enforcement, the law-makers, teachers, counselors, friends, and family. One of the biggest obstacles in making tolerance awareness classes mandatory is that those in charge of making laws would fear court cases of those claiming that it is an invasion of privacy or against their own personal beliefs to teach tolerance of others because it would teach racial, religious, disability, sexual preference, and cultural diversity tolerance. The people who argue these types of cases are the ones who are standing in the way of peace and promoting this type of behavior in children. One fact still remains and that is regardless to whether we agree with other people’s race, religious beliefs, disabilities, sexual preferences, or culture we all have this one world to share. We all should learn that by promoting tolerance, we are promoting respect and peace, not another person’s choice in those matters.