Someone has to stop the internet. New studies have shown a surprising increase in self-harm among young people, and crimes of modern technology is directly to blame for the epidemic of adult commentators make generalizations and missing the point.
Self-injury is a serious problem. This is what happens when someone finds respite from the pain and frustration, an outlet to express their fear and anger, and these destructive feelings turned into the opposite, scoring on the skin, sometimes fatally so. Now there is a deep crisis in the mental health of young people and self-harm is only a symptom of the crisis - according to the latest figures, self-injury has increased to 70% in the last two years between the ages of 10 and 14 years, and there has been a startling increase in suicide attempts themselves among the people with all his life yet to be lived, many of them related to bullying.
When young people are in danger, it is natural to look for a simple answer that seems to have a simple solution - the prohibition of censorship on social media use for young people, and all this will stop. Blame technology, however, is rather too easy to answer.
Technology, according to Melvin Krantzberg, "is neither good nor bad, nor neutral." No doubt, a new era in communications technology have multiplied the effects of bullying, enabling young people to abuse each other in new ways and intimate without stopping. But the internet is also a lifeline to millions of young people. Children are not just using technology to pornographic violence and torment each other about their tastes in a tank top and pop music; they use technology to make friends, share information, build a support network, and learn things that are not taught in school hours.
Bullying, meanwhile, predates the internet for several centuries. Before Ask.fm and Facebook have toilets for girls, fitness center and playground; There is not the school itself, which, to a large minority children has long been synonymous with a special type of social ritual torture. None, however, shows that the way to stop bullying it just to prevent children from going to school.
Politicians and experts what adults call "cyberbullying" experienced by most young people just as bullying. In this society, however, we often lack the language to talk about bullying as a structural problem in itself. When the children were abused, intimidated and attacked by other children, only "ritual", something that needs to be silent or be treated in therapy decades later. If what is happening in the field is as bad as all that, something would have been done about it since. But the solution is not to block the technology or to prevent children from accessing information that can change lives, even save lives. The solution is to take bullying seriously as we should have taken over several generations.
Comfortable adult society tells children that if they steal from the store or break a window, it is a crime, and there will be consequences, but the consequences of the fact that they have a lot of growing to do. Harassment, however, is not punished; physical, sexual and emotional towards peers do not begin to accumulate serious consequences when you leave school, so the stitching pattern already established behavior - a pattern that we see play in society today that everyone is clear.
What is needed is not less technology, but more love. It is not easy being a teenager these days. Access information indefinitely, and the power to build friendships and share information across boundaries of distance and nationality, is one of the best thing about the future is more uncertain, full of academic and economic pressure is present, the culture in which social attitudes toward anyone who hardened a little different every day.
Adult creating this world but it is the children who have to grow into it, and blamed the internet for the problem they are not only easy way out - it's very humbling.
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