David Liu: Teen Crime

Eassy07/07/13
David Liu
Teenage Crime
Teenage crime has become a serious social problem nowadays in both western and eastern countries. A large number of sociologists have spent a lot of time studying this phenomenon, aiming to find out its causes. Some of them have indicated that parents’ wrong behaviors, media’s negative influence and lack of systemized control are the three main reasons for this problem. Also, they have shown us three useful measures of preventing it based on their research.

Teenage crime is a social syndrome caused by several aspects. First of all, parents’ wrong behaviors are the major reason to drive their kids crazy. One of the parents, or even both, has some illegal habits such as drug abuse, theft and gambling. Others have got used to some unethical behaviors like borrowing money from other people but never repaying. Obviously, these habits or behaviors would mislead their children to go on a wrong way. We should never forget that children like imitating every action from their parents. Furthermore, parents’ bad relationship such as endless quarreling and fighting in front of their children, or the worst scenario—getting divorce is absolutely a negative influence of their children.　Not to mention they will no longer have normal full love from their parents; they easily suffer from discrimination not only at schools but also in communities. And such pressure will affect their personalities and will finally even force them to leave home to join a gang group. Moreover, insulting children or physical punishment carried out by parents by saying such things as ‘you are worth nothing’ or beating them in the public places would no doubt ruin their self respect, and later, these children will be full of resentment towards society.

Secondly, Media’s negative influence is another important matter to blame. Information technology development has brought several negative consequences. One of them is that children now can easily reach adult-oriented matters. DVDs, VCDs, internet soft wares, and midnight TV programmes full of sex and violent scenes lure millions of youths to drop out of their schools, rape their neighbour’s girls and even play killing games. In addition, young students nowadays can obtain almost all the news happening in the world through the internet or chat room to know what other countries’ teenagers are doing. As we know, most of the news is related to the ugly side such as killing, fighting, and raping; such information or ‘news’ is nothing but an ignition, only seducing young guys to do the same awful things in their own communities.

Thirdly, lack of systemized control is a big barrier to control teenage crime. In some countries, law and regulations are not completely established yet. Teenagers can purchase alcohol, cigarettes even drugs whenever they want. In other countries, although law and regulations exist, they are usually not administered strictly. Therefore, when teenagers commit crimes, they are not afraid of punishment. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that school teachers would turn a blind eye when they see their students doing drugs, that neighborhoods prefer to close their doors when noticing young guys living in the same community fighting each other, even killing each other.

However, teenage crime is not a kind of disease like SARS. Sociologists have already shown us several methods to prevent it. First, as the premise, we should make comprehensive law and regulations related to this social problem. One of them is to create Youth Protecting Law; a specific law to both protects teenagers from becoming involved in crimes and punishing those who have committed crimes related to youths. Meanwhile, all schools should take the responsibility to not only educate teenagers to be good students but also to protect them to stay far away from crimes. Second, it is necessary to establish a parenting education system to prevent in-family violence such as, for example, to set up Pre-marriage Education School aiming to let all pre-fathers and pre-mothers know their real responsibility when they get married or have a baby. Another useful system is called community school, the purpose of which is to educate the parents who have the history of crime or abusing their children and to prevent them from committing the same crime again. Third, regarding the media’s negative influence, we should first set up a protecting system to block all unsuitable TV programmes for teenagers. V-chip is a popular fashion and it has proved extremely useful. Another important way is to widen the legal usage of ‘Show your ID’ activity. We should extend this action from only restricting of alcohol and tobacco to limiting of the entire category in which it is necessary. Only by doing this, we can control such media with harmful contents.

In short, the research for finding out the main causes of crime among teenagers has yielded fruitful results; still, not everybody understands the relationship between teenage crime and those facts: parents’ wrong behaviors, media’s negative influence and lack of systemize control. In the meantime, although people have found some useful ways to prevent it such as to complete and tighten law and regulations, to develop a parenting education system and to set up protecting system to block unsuitable media; we still have a long way to go to completely control teenage crime.