Juvenile Crimes – Our Main Pain!

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By Supporter Contributor Paul Smith

It’s sad to admit but over the past years the problem of youth crime is becoming more and more urgent. Teachers, social organizations and specialists working in this field are very concerned about the tendency to degradation of the new generation of our society. Young people who have not come into this life yet, deprive themselves of the prospects to find a worthy place in our society. It is a matter of concern for parents, teachers, politicians and scientists, as well as law machinery. Being the most painful problem for adults and elderly people, juvenile crimes seem to be a very little, most invisible issue for young people. Of course, the lion’s share of the blame for all this weighs on the conscience of modern society.

Common juvenile crimes.

Today it is difficult to clearly outline the limits of the young criminals, as many young people without being a juvenile delinquent, have already crossed the “line of criminality” in their thoughts and behavior. The attitude of young people to the crime can be described as fear and indifference at the same time.

Youth crime significantly differs from the overall crime by the character of the offense. Mercenary and violent crimes are the most prevalent among young people. Besides such common delinquencies as fights and hooliganism, other popular youth crimes are stealing, money blackmail, fraud. Statistics shows that the amount of mercenary crimes is increasing. Every second juvenile delinquent points to mercenary crime.

Prostitution is a special type of youth crime. In the majority of cases those who provide sexual services are accused of the crime. Though, we all know that frequently the true criminals are staying in the shadow. Unfortunately the reasons which force young girls to sell their bodies are not properly examined. Sociological studies show that the vast majority of prostitutes are women aged 12 to 34 years, many of them are under-aged girls. What are the main reasons making these women to become prostitutes? The most common reasons are difficult financial situation and drug addiction. Having found themselves in the world of prostitution, women can’t escape from this “lower depth”, have their own family, raise children and live normal life.

Addiction takes the first place.

Among many reasons and motifs of juvenile crimes drug addiction takes the first place. All over the world the majority of drug-abusers are young people.  Drug abuse can be regarded as a developing youth subculture, covered with mystery, performing the function of escape from the real problems, challenges, insecurity.

Besides drug addiction the whole spectrum of new addictions can be observed in many countries. Addictions to work, shopping, computer games have analogy with drug addiction, all of them function as the way to escape from reality to the world of illusions. And the reasons for these types of addiction are very similar – social estrangement, fail in adaptation to reality. Further searches for new emotions and experience leads to crime.

Of course we can continue enumerating negative reasons of juvenile crimes, still the main blame for youth becoming criminals lies with the families. The worst thing is human indifference. That’s who we are – indifferent people. We calm themselves down: “it’s not my child. I have a good family.” But in fact somebody else’s children don’t exist. All in all, we, our children and society suffer from these “somebody else’s” children. Maybe, it’s high time to stop and think for a while. If every person makes just one step to help these young people, everybody wins! If tomorrow something bad happens with your close person, the guilty can be a “bad”, “somebody else’s child”, and it’s we who are to be blamed for his crime!

Paul Smith works as a writer at http://classyessaywriter.com. He writes on such topics as psychology of the young generation, crimes and Human rights.

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Comments (3)

  1. I was working with children in the mid-1970’s when I first saw a shift in dynamics with children and juveniles. Over the years I have seen more and more children treated as expendable.

    Granted, much of my work has been in areas of the country where agrarian society was dominant, but I’ve also lived in cities. What I have seen, however, is that as children are now luxuries rather than necessities, that our treatment of them is different.

    However, more than that, I see that we no longer have coming of age rituals. We no longer transition children to juveniles to adults in any sort of orderly fashion. We don’t give them things that say, I’m almost an adult or I AM an adult.

    It takes a village to raise a child is a truism. And as our extended families of small towns (villages) crumbles to dust our children fall apart as well.

    I saw desperate welfare mothers beg and borrow to get their children to Anchorage to separate them from the Crips or Bloods and all it did was to transplant a gang culture. Those kids were not a part of the Alaskan community and were more alientaed than they were in L.A.

    I cannot blame families per se – the definition of family has changed so much over time. I would say that we are in a time of terrible transition – sort of a new “dark ages.” When you don’t have an extended community to provide for children then children get lost.

    Yes, there are drugs, but drugs were not regulated in the 1800’s so much – you could go to an opium den. What we had was a different community structure – and a 14-16 year old boy could go work on a neighboring ranch or farm or learn to shoe horses or study to become a blacksmith or… or. Now we regiment children to fit little round holes in little round-holed pegboards.

    And the other thing I saw in the mid-70’s was the rise of truly serious crime becoming more widespread among youth (boys, mostly, at that time) – arson, murder, rape, etc. We were putting highly dangerous kids in with status offenders and that was the death knell for status offenses (now CINA – Children In Need of Aid).

    So far (knock on wood) my grandkids are all good kids, good students, good friends to their friends. They have involved parents and extended family. We reward what is positive. Not all children are so fortunate to live without fear of violence, without drug or alcohol use in the home, without food deprivation due to lack of resources. So many children come from backgrounds of neglect, poverty, misery, etc. that we are creating an environtment where kids act out.

  2. Thank you Marsha, for this wonderful comment. As usual, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I like this comment so much, I’m going to put it up as a regular supporter contribution post.

  3. Pingback: Marsha Graham Speaks Out on Juvenile Crime | deafinprison

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