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Teen Violence Essay

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Eating disorders. Anger problems. Suicide. When hearing these words, many things come to mind, but the most important thing to know about these words is that they are directly related to teen violence. The website “Family First Aid” tells us that teen suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death amongst adolescents in the United States and half of these yearly suicides are due to teen violence. Many people believe that slight cases of teen violence are just part of being a kid, when in fact they can have extremely awful and life changing effects on teenagers. It is important that we as a society acknowledge that teen violence is a problem and do something about it. Bullying, cyber bullying and abusive relationships are three serious acts of …show more content…

One way bullying can affect the teen victims is by causing them to feel like the only way they can defend themselves is with violence. The anger of being continually picked on builds up and eventually, the victim becomes violent by either physically hurting themselves or their peers. They can result to actions such as cutting themselves to release pain, angrily arguing with those they care about or even physically harming others including the bully Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, the authors of “Bullying Beyond the School Yards”, define cyber bullying as “willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices” (Hinduja 5). Cyber Bullying began when the use of electronic devices began, but it became more common when social networking sites were invented. Over the years, social networking has become a place where what people write is something they would never say in person. Because people have become so naïve of the power of their own words, feelings are hurt. Online, teens have an opening to indirectly say what they want and a lot of the time they are victimizing people and putting them down by either commenting or blogging about a person’s secrets or beginning hurtful rumors. This form of adolescent aggression can be given the term “social sabotage” and is most common among girls (Hinduja 93). Cyber bullying in some cases can be more hurtful than bullying itself because

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