Petty Disagreements

Petty Disagreements

By Senior Correspondent Devon Maloney

The recent high profile case of a bulling victim committing suicide has left us in the wake of a media tidal wave about increased violence in teen girls. Nine adolescents were charged with driving their new classmate, Phoebe Prince, in Massachusetts’ Hadley High School to hang herself because of cyber bulling over the Internet.
Another incident in 2008 left the media to raise questions about whether violence between adolescence girls is on the rise. Four girls (along with two boys as lookouts) beat up a 16-year-old cheerleader, Tori Lindsay, for the sole purpose of putting the fight on the Internet.
But regardless all the hype in the media about the Internet being a new battlefield for teens to become more violent and more vicious than ever before, a recent Op/Ed piece in the New York Times explained that, despite the rise of the Internet, girl violence has been falling.
Titled the “Myth of Mean Girls”, the April 1 article was co-authored by a Mike Males, a top researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Males and his co-author, Chesney Lind, looked at all angles of teen violence, including studying the FBI’s records on girls’ arrest rates in the past 15 years. They found “violent offenses fell by 32 percent, including declines of 27 percent for aggravated assault, 43 percent for robbery and 63 percent for murder.”
Those dramatically lower rates show that a few well-hyped and very isolated incidents in the news may not really show the real trend of a problem. We teens, as reckless and immature as we many seem, are really not nearly as bad as many adults may think. Males and Lind’s article was right in saying it was wrong that our “news media and myriad experts” were a bit overzealous and “eager to sensationalize every ‘crisis’ among young people.”
For me, while I can’t compare what is happening with teens today to teen life in the 70s, 80s, and 90s without Internet access, I can say the media seems to be over exaggerating the relevance of facts and figures that “prove” a whole range of new teen dilemmas. As awful as the stories above and the many other incidents of bulling that didn’t make into the blogosphere are, the general trend seems to show that the levels of teen violence and bulling are improving.
"It does not matter whether the rates have fluctuated up or down and what the media wants to say about it,” sophomore Palak Bhandari, said. “What really matters is that these antics are stopped once and for all."
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This piece was originally published in the Vienna Connection.