McCallion
Quest

Why are We Teens Blamed for the Actions of a Few? It Just Isn't Fair...

 By Alexa Love

 You often hear news of ways that society is discriminating against teens everyday. One very popular phrase is, “it’s all those kids causing all this violence." Adults always seem to find a way to create a story or prove to the public that teens are up to no good. If you are like me, you generally hear it on the news or plastered across the front page of the newspaper.

            However, now this discrimination is coming right into our own, everyday lives. Even at our own Hasty Market, the one near our very own school, discrimination faces us teens. If you haven’t already been there the door says, "Only three teens allowed in at a time." If that isn’t bad enough we even have to leave our bags at the front door, because they somehow think that we are going to steal from them. Just because maybe one teen has shoplifted, does that really make all teens shoplifters? Do you ever see them restrict entry to adults? I don’t think so.

            It really bugs me when I go into a store and then all I see is the store workers staring at me while all the adults in the store are just allowed to browse and shop without the evil eye on them. Shop owners and sales people in the stores don’t even care about the adults. Once I went to the dollar store and inside the store there were adults picking up and looking at things and looking at things. When my friends and I went over to look at the makeup, suddenly there appeared a clerk who told US not to break anything. Why wouldn’t they tell the adults to be more careful?

            How do they know adults aren’t the ones shoplifting?? Well, it’s simple. They don’t know because they are not watching them!! Frankly I’m getting really sick of adults always discriminating against us. And, there is no real statistics that prove that adults should discriminate against us. An article entitled, "There is no Epidemic of Teen Violence ", states that 70% of murder victims under the age of 18 were killed by adults, not other teens. It also goes on to report that 91% of all adult homicides were committed by adults.

            Maybe if society paid more attention to adults and teens equally, we could reduce the violence in our neighbourhoods and our communities could become a better place. Better yet, if you are going to discriminate, shouldn’t society start to be a little more specific? Instead of generalizing all the time and labelling all teens for the actions of a few, and protecting them with the Young Offenders Act, perhaps society should publish the names of the guilty so at least the ‘good’ teens don’t get incorrectly blamed for their actions. If the teens that commit the crime are always protected, then what about the rest of us who need to be protected from them! They don’t deserve society to have their backs when really they were just giving us reasons not to support them at all.

            However, if the Young Offenders Act continues to protect the guilty teen, can’t the rest of us escape discrimination? Shouldn’t adults, out of all people, know everyone is their own person and aren’t clones of everyone else? Society can’t just label us as bad just because of the actions of a few. Why do they conveniently forget that they were teens once themselves? They should just see us as how they were when they were younger.

            All in all, I think this whole ‘teen topic’ is getting a little tiring. Every day we see new debates in the news and in government coming out about what to do about teens, and how bad we are getting. I’m tired of hearing “A group of teens were found shoplifting”, or “A teen killed one of their peers”, or “A teen ran away”. It’s funny how that TEEN word keeps coming up. I guess the media is getting lazy, and Teen is just the perfect word to cover all those teens that have done some pretty dreadful stuff. However, they keep forgetting that I am a TEEN too and I know I’M not like that, and I know MY friends and the majority of kids in Hazel aren’t like that. And yet, why am I and the rest of us good kids blamed for all of this?