Teen Violence No Longer Shocking
By Darryl Duke. Filed in My View On Things |Tags: Darryl Duke, desensitization, teen viloence, teenagers, why i pray in the shower, youth development
I have the fortune to talk to teenagers on a regular basis at a local youth center near where I live. Some are in a shelter part and some in lock up. There’s a difference in the two groups I talk with. The teenagers in lock up who are both male and female are more rigid in their views about life. This makes it very hard to gain their trust and help them understand how their choice to live the way they do and do some of the things they’ve done isn’t the way they need to live in order to feel better about themselves. One young man I talked with killed someone and another had held people up at gun point and even pistol whipped a few on occasion. Both told me they understood why they were locked up, but admitted it took a long time to see any error in their actions. Some important needs we have in life is to feel loved and that we belong with others. When these needs aren’t met by family, some teenagers look to have them met in the wrong type of friends and even gangs. We live in a country where many of us, especially our youth has been desensitized to the things that use to be shocking to us and unfortunately some become so effected that they act out in ways that hurt others and not care about it. Esteem needs are also important ones to have met. They include our need for self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others and respect by others. I suppose in some groups, violence does somehow fulfill these needs. I also believe that these needs are not being met by the parents or parent. However, if you look how our world has changed over the last 25 years, I think you would agree it’s not just bad parenting that has effected our youth in a negative way. We live in world we’re our standards for being a better person than we were before has been lowered and our standards for being someone special has as been raised. This may not cause everyone to kill another, but it has effected many of us to the point that it’s no longer shocking when we hear about it.
