Another Teen Sexually Assaulted
The recent Rolling Stone piece "Sexting, Shame and Suicide" tells the story of a teenage girl from Saratoga, California, who got drunk at a party, passed out, and woke up the next morning covered in Sharpie marker drawings. She frantically pieced together the story: she had been carried to a bedroom where three boys stripped her, fingered her, drew all over her skin in Sharpie—all while capturing the whole thing on camera.
As the images spread around her high school, the victim found herself publicly shamed and abandoned by her friends, lamenting in a Facebook ...
Online (Child) Pornography a Public Health Risk
This article from the UK's Daily Mail echoes what many child development and sex abuse experts have begun to realize: youth exposure to pornography is not just a personal issue, it is a public health problem.
The piece, by Dr. John Woods, ran over a year ago. Sadly it's even more relevant today than it was in 2012. The article makes the following excellent points:
Although the internet doesn’t create these problems, it can release interests which would never have surfaced otherwise.
For every young person who has come to the attention of police or social ...
What Do We Know about the High School Class of 2013?
This just out from Child Trends; some fascinating and sobering statistics about the high school class of 2013.
BETHESDA, MD — June 11, 2013 — Imagine a senior class of 100. They’re the product of their genetic predispositions, their families, their communities, and all of the opportunities (or lack of opportunities) they’ve encountered since birth. They’ve made both good choices and not-so-good ones. They’re on the threshold of adulthood. But what do we really know about them and what does their future hold?
Child Trends, a nonprofit, ...
Adolescent Depression Impacts Young Adult Relationships
Depressive or suicidal symptoms during adolescence might do more than temporary harm. Researchers at Child Trends have found that young adults who had reported those symptoms as adolescents were more likely to be in unhealthy relationships, characterized by violence or infidelity.
Because they knew it might be tempting to attribute this to demographic differences, researchers controlled for age, gender, parent education, family structure, income and race/ethnicity. In their brief, "Measuring the Associations Between Symptoms of Depression and Suicide in Adolescence and ...
OVC Video Series Addresses Children’s Exposure to Violence
The Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) has released “Through Our Eyes: Children, Violence, and Trauma,” an online video series to address the needs of children exposed to violence and victimization.The series includes a public awareness video in which victims discuss the effects of the violence and trauma they experienced; and three topic-specific videos detailing evidence-based treatment, child advocacy strategies, and community-based approaches to help those affected.
Visit http://www.ovc.gov/pubs/ThroughOurEyes/index.html for details.