This section (under construction) details myths about teens
today.
"'Tween" sex and dating violence
survey finding hardly any is recycled yet again to
promote fashioner Liz Claiborne, Inc.'s "education" program. The survey
finding only around 2% of 11-12-year olds have ever done
anything beyond kissing, suffered physical or sexual violence, or
experienced cellphone or cybermeanness from someone they dated
demolishes the notion of rampant sexualization and cyber-meanness among "tweens."
Encouraging? Horrified interest groups are trying to spin these calming
findings into the image of a generation of violent sluts in order to
peddle their agendas.
Another lurid "teen
legend." The Gloucester "teen pregnancy pact" has
now been exposed as just another media and "official" fiction that
disgraces every interest involved in spreading it. Even after having
been hoaxed on every detail, however, media reporters mindlessly
continue to repeat the dubious claim of a "spike" in "teen pregnancies."
Age... or sex? More than 60% of teens in fatal traffic
crashes were not wearing seat belts! the press and highway officials
scream, followed by the usual youth-bashings about recklessness, peer
pressure, and fearlessness. What, then, accounts for the same study's
finding that over 60% of adults ages 21-44 killed in traffic
crashes also were not wearing seat belts! The real, unmentioned
story: men account for a shocking 73% of unbuckled traffic
fatalities.
Exploit baseless public panics toward youth crime,
immigrants, minorities, new technologies! A far-Right plot to
promote conservatives? NO--the disastrous, grossly wrong,
fear-everything-new blueprint issued by "Third Way" urging
progressive candidates and interests to "get ahead" of conservatives on
crime by turning in to conservatives.
Internet
predators?
Another phony panic. Repeated studies find the Internet poses minuscule
dangers to the tens of billions of teens who use it and expose the
demagoguery of politicians and groups who incessantly depict cyberspace
as a jungle of predators, bullying, and seduction. A teen is far safer
unsupervised onliine than in church--in fact, any adult who supervises a
youth is statistically more likely to abuse his/her than anyone
encountered online.
"Teen
beating" videos! The news media pick ONE out of the 2,000 felony
assaults that occur in the US every day--surprise! it involves teen
girls and was videotaped--to publicize to millions of viewers and
readers as a backdrop to reporters' and pundits' easy moralizing and
outrage, then righteously complain teens videotape brutality to seek
publicity!
"1 in 4 teen girls has a sexually-transmitted disease"
blares cloned
media
reports on an "alarming," shocking" new "CDC study" that allowed
"experts" once again to lambaste teens as deluded and ignorant.
But can anyone find this study? My queries to CDC have
turned up nothing but a chart; no information on how the 838 girls were
selected or screened or rates among 18-19 year-olds versus the high
schoolers the media berated. That African-American girls had rates 2.5
times higher than whites or Latinas failed to generated concerns
about poverty and disease among reporters who, once again,
haven't even read the reports they claim to report on.
APPALLING DERELICTION ON DRUGS.
In the last two weeks, YouthFacts sent press statements referring all
the major media the Center for Disease Control's shocking new report
showing a record 33,500 Americans died directly from drug abuse
in 2005--twice the rate at the peak of the 1980s
crack cocaine epidemic!--a massive epidemic endangering our entire
social fabric. Yet, because the illicit-drug scourge is centered in
middle-aged white Americans--not youth or minorities--the same news
media than erupts in panic over ballplayer steroids and teens and cough
syrup remains silent on a REAL drug crisis among adults that threatens
youth far more than pot or steroids.
BAD
NEWS!! Teen suicide DECLINES in 2005! Just released government
figures show teen suicide declined in 2005, particularly for girls,
casting strong doubt on the dubious media-pharmaceutical-industry panic
that 2004's temporary suicide increase was caused by warning labels
on antidepressants. What terrible news for the teen-fearing industries!
Le's see how long it takes the pharm-captive news media to mention it!
More bad news!
The American Freshman, UCLA's latest survey of 400,000 first-year
students entering in 2007, finds just 6.5% reported any depression in
the previous year--the lowest level since the question
was first asked in 1985, challenging the psychology industry myth and
media herd mentality that college is a misery-pit of depression, drunken
violence, and suicide.
Which side exploits teens most shamelessly? The Drug
War, or drug reform groups? The latest demagoguery over
Monitoring the Future drug-use figures show White House drug czar John
Walters and Marijuana Policy Project director Rob Kampia will spout any
emotional crap about teens that promotes their political schemes--which
proves how little they care about young people.
"The children! The children!"
Baseball's steroid revelations have brought a new barrage of
hypocritical sanctimony about kids, led
by former senator and tobacco lobbyist (now steroid investigator) George Mitchell ("our
children!"), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ("our young people!"),
President Bush ("America's young!"), CBS, NBC, and everyone else
flooding the airwaves with cloned terror tales about high school athletes
and drugs. Disgusting. Skyrocketing drug abuse by parents and adults in
communities--topping 30,000 deaths, 400,000 hospital emergency
cases, and 1.8 million arrests--represent dangers to our youth
from violent abuse, family breakup, and drug-dealer violence. Yet,
when have you EVER heard Congress, the White House, or major
media point out that American
middle-aged parents' soaring drug abuse
represents a danger to young people hundreds of times worse
than some cleanup-hitting juicer?
"Teenage pregnancy" What we call "teenage" births (a misnomer,
since most are fathered by adult men age 20 and older) are up in 2006.
The same interest groups that grabbed credit for the dramatic decline in
births from 1990 to 2005 are now clamoring for more funding to turn
around 2006's increase. Meanwhile, there's a giant irony no one wants to discuss--one
that exposes how ludicrous today's "debate" over "teenage sex" has
become.
Slander at 6. CBS
Evening News'
latest hysteria continues to show the news media has no clue how to
report the 88% of violent crime and 95% of homicides the FBI reports are
NOT caused by juveniles--and no interest in facts.
Then, CBS's ludicrous
"Secret Life of Teens" series, relying on self-interested net-nanny
hawkers and consultants, misrepresents (yet AGAIN) teen-internet life as
apocalyptically perilous. Can reporters today say anything fair
or accurate about youth... or
even new?
Oxycontin.
Even worse, CBS News has announced yet ANOTHER rehash
of "Generation Rx" hysteria, adding to the myth that Oxycontin and other prescription drug abuse is a
"teenage epidemic." Yet, in fact, as a top Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist told Congress
in November, middle-aged white men are dying the most from abuse of
illicit
drugs--especially pharmaceutical narcotics, with annual death tolls now
exceeding 30,000. CBS is not just a youth-hating network--it
and other media outlets are dangerously failing to inform us of
critical drug issues.
2006 youth crime. Yes,
it's feeding time again! The FBI's just-released 2006 crime figures are
already being pounced on by police, reporters, and their always-wrong
"experts" like James Alan Fox to grab bucks and ratings. Here's a guide
to the anti-youth distortions you'll be seeing and the truth about
the latest changes in youth crime--good and bad. Also, the girl-crime
apocalypse continues to be a myth, as
girls' crime, especially murder,
falls sharply.
Kid Nation, the CBS reality show about
8-15-year-olds cooperating to restore a New Mexico ghost town, is
igniting a mental-health, pundit, and culture-war-nanny panic so absurd you have to
wonder whether its visual depictions of youthful independence, empathy,
and competence are what really have the grownups so scared. Should we
require V-chips to protect these "experts" from a TV show that so
clearly traumatizes them?
Blaming youth. Officials from acting US
Surgeon General Kenneth Moritsugu and the drug czar to the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America are rushing to blame young people for America's
drug and alcohol crises. Addicted parents? Abusive families? Troubled
adults? Officially, these problems don't exist. See also the
open letter to the Partnership
challenging this cowardly crusade.
The most crazed drug rant ever. Drug czar
John Walters tirade against teenagers at a September 6 press conference
sets a new low, even for his cruel, lunatic drug war policy that has
brought danger and heartache to America's young people--and the
older generations, whose rampant drug abuse he STILL (even after a
record 31,000 deaths, 800,000 hospital cases, and 600,000 imprisonments)
refuses to admit even exists. Unfortunately, the
Marijuana Policy Project's Bruce Mirken shows the same
unreasoned panic about teens and and denial of real
drug crises that make today's drug-reform lobbies as irrelevant
as Walters.
Frightening news about teens:
Girls and boys are happy--happier than ever before--our best surveys
show. What terrible news! Look for culture warriors, popular authors, psychiatric and
pharmaceutical industries, agencies, and news-media panic mongers to
step up efforts to convince teenagers that, despite their optimism,
they're really miserable and depressed.
Enough Lindsay!
Bad enough that the American news media relentlessly exploit
celebrity gossip. But it's excruciating when reporters, commentators,
and self-serving treatment "experts" cast troubled young stars as
symbols of
all "young people today." If the Associated Press's and other
miserably crass reporters want a poster child for a generation packed
with drug and alcohol addiction woes, try Lindsay's dad from hell.
Enough MySpace! Atlantic Magazine's latest
megafeature is just the latest overwrought junk-media panic that your
teen faces epochal dangers online. Leave those kids alone. Teens
are in far more danger of murder and rape in church than unsupervised on
the Net.
Quick
quiz: what age group shows the biggest rise in violence, serious
crime, and drug offenses? It's not youth or young adults...
the massive crime epidemic the news media, the cops, interest
groups, and "experts" endlessly scapegoating youth refuse to
face.
The "teenage brain" The handful of "experts" who claim "science" has "discovered
teenagers act as they do" are stretching neurological studies far
beyond their bounds, indulging primitive strereotypes about
adolescents, and generally demonstrating their own lack of cognitive
development.
Beating up on girls
The distorted,
poisonous attack on today's girls and young women as meaner and
more violent, depressed, materialistic, shallow, etc., by
authors, the news media, and interest groups across the spectrum
reveals the cruelty of commentators apparently threatened by
the spectacular advances in health, safety, and better
attitudes among Millennial females.
Shootings
Are schools "full of angry kids" waiting to commit mass shootings? In fact, in a nation that leads all other Western nations in gun murders by far,
our high school and college campuses are safer than Denmark....
Crime But aren't youth committing more serious crimes today? NO. They're committing FEWER than previous generations. In 1965, the FBI estimated youths under age 18 accounted for 30% of all serious violent and property crime in the country. In 2005, that figure was 17%,
the lowest level ever recorded....
Do teenage mothers save
taxpayers money? A university economics team's long-term
analysis that all sides agree is the best ever done reaches an
astonishing conclusion: having babies during teen years is an
economically rational decision by poorer young women that leads to
higher incomes and lower public costs over time. Why haven't you heard
about this research? Because all sides depend on vilifying teen moms as
costly fools.
Mental Health Crisis
The mental health crisis that isn't!
Statistics don't support fears of a psychological emergency on our college campuses.
Teenage Drinking
Yes, heavy drinking IS a problem...all across American society. We hear incessantly about the 5.5 million teenage and the 8.9 million young-adult binge drinkers ages 20-24. But why does no one mention that the same National Household Survey finds 11.5 million binge drinkers ages 30-39, 11.3 million ages 40-49, 6.2 million ages 50-59, and 4.5 million ages 60 and older?....
Drugs After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions over the last 25 years, the United States now suffers the worst drug abuse crisis in history. A record 31,000 Americans died directly from abusing illegal drugs in 2004. But it's not teens--40-59 year-olds comprise BY FAR our worst drug abusing population, especially for heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and drugs mixed with alcohol. Teens are being scapegoated for the burgeoning middle-aged drug crisis...
Suicide Teenagers are the
least likely of any age group to take their own lives, and their rates of self-destruction (suicides and other deaths indicating suicidal intent, such as accidents by guns, poisoning, hanging, and undetermined intent) have
plummeted in recent decades. A high schooler is three times more likely to suffer a parent's suicide than the other way around. Why, then, are teens stereotyped as suicidal risk takers?....
Teen Drivers
You've seen the mass hype about "teen killers on the road" as if Americans were in dire peril of being wiped out every time we venture off the curb. So: how many miles does the average teenage driver have to drive before suffering even odds of being in a fatal accident? The answer, and the truth about
the unconscionable scare campaign vilifying teen drivers, add
up to an "expert" disgrade.