Why are Youths Turning to Violence?

On September 8th 2010 a 16 year old year, Lorraine Thorpe from Ipswich was sentenced to 14 years in prison after murdering two people on separate occasions, at the time she was only 15 years old. One of the victims was a 41 year woman who was beaten to death by the teen girl, the other her father whom she smothered. Another case of young killers includes that of the James Bulger murder in 1993, this notorious case showed how two 11 year old boys from Liverpool could abduct, torture and then kill a 2 year old toddler. These two cases although 17 years apart show a link in how youth violence is a major and on-going problem in our society. In this essay I will look at the factors influencing youth violence and such life destroying crimes could be prevented.

Violence is a term defined as behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage or kill someone of something. Youth violence is something we are all familiar with, very often we hear about the latest teen to be arrested for stabbing a school mate often over a silly dispute, which they chose to solve with a weapon. But why are youngsters turning to violence to solve their issues? I believe some of the reasons include; the media, as generations younger and younger are growing up with media as a large part of their daily life, with video games especially having a control over young generations. Secondly the education system also have a big influence in a child’s behaviour in later life, the purpose of the system to teach skills and qualities to help a person with their life and career down the line, so with this responsibility education systems should take strict punishments on acts of violence, ensuring that a child knows the consequences of their actions. Another factor ...

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...re put into schools on this matter even if a parent was not fully committed to a child they would still benefit from basics of right and wrong and how to behave. As for video games, this matter could be easily resolved; if people really did show more of a concern then it would be an easily fixable to remove the large amount of unnecessary violence from these games. But even if all these possible influences were fixed, would it help? Maybe this is a growing problem due to dozens of factors, we constantly hear that it is becoming harder to be a child in today’s society, the media is constantly judging and commenting on our behaviour, weapons are becoming readily more accessible to youths, so is there really a quick fix to our problem? No I don’t think so, to address this problem properly we would have to look at ourselves as a society and see what we are doing wrong.