The “teen suicides” and tragedies we don’t care about, Part 2

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

First: the never-mentioned context

Popular discussion of what we call “teenage suicide” and drug overdose is so horrendously messed up that we have to begin with basic context. Below is the CDC’s latest tabulation of suicides and overdose deaths by age group for 2024 and around one-fourth into 2025:

Source: CDC 2025. Overdoses refers to illicit, non-prescribed drugs.

The population sizes from 10-14 through 60-64 are similar, so these numbers indicate relative odds of suicide and overdose by age.

These are tragic numbers, much worse in the United States than in other nations. I would not argue for a second that 4,300 teen age 10-19 deaths from suicides and overdoses in approximately 15 months aren’t heartbreaking, both for the youths and those who cared about them.

Having said that, I will never understand the relentlessly destructive crusade by authorities and media to convince teenagers that suicide and drug abuse are normative to adolescence. In fact, teenagers are substantially less likely to commit suicide or overdose than adults are, a fact that should top all analyses.

In that respect, wouldn’t the 44,500 deaths from suicides and fatal overdoses among 40-49-year-olds – the average ages of teens’ parents, relatives, and nearby adults – also be terrible tragedies occurring at a level 10 times higher?

Deaths are just the iceberg tip of much larger abuse, mental health, addiction, absence, and violence issues that afflict troubled families in which millions of teenagers are growing up.

Have media-featured psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, other popular commentators, political leaders, health professionals, and news reports shown any sensitivity or caring toward children and teens suffering parents’ and nearby adults’ suicide and drug abuse? Have any reported CDC survey findings that teens with troubled parents are much more likely to be troubled themselves? Somewhere between rarely and never.

Second: Teens have told us what drives suicide – we just don’t like their answers

The “teen suicide” discussion veers farther off the rails when we examine authorities’ rampant distortions of causal factors.

As I point out regularly (because no one else is), thousands of America’s teenagers told our largest, most definitive CDC adolescent health survey in no uncertain terms – twice – what the biggest factors contributing to their suicidal feelings and attempts are.

Teenagers’ answers on the massive 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys were so consistent and compelling that CDC analysts concluded in the in-house Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that three major childhood experiences – parents’ and household grownups’ “emotional abuse”, “physical abuse”, and “poor mental health” – were the driving factors in teenagers’ “suicide attempts (89.4%), seriously considering attempting suicide (85.4%), and prescription opioid misuse (84.3%).”

That is, for the factors we know about, nearly all teenage suicide and opiate abuse are associated with parents’ and household adults’ abuse, violence, and troubles. Virtually none are driven by social media.

So, how do authorities (mis)characterize these cold numbers?

Again, let’s look at all the things public commentators and authorities leave out. The 2023 CDC survey finds, not shockingly, that teens who are abused by parents and household adults and have violent homes are far more likely to suffer poor mental health, make suicide attempts, and harm themselves.

Sources for tables: CDC, 2023.

No ambiguity there. Before skeptics shrug that teens always think their parents are crazy and abusive, consider that these are the same teens on the same survey whose answers authorities incessantly cite as proving the teenage “mental health crisis.”

The CDC survey contains another never-mentioned bombshell: abused teens from abusive and violent families, particularly girls, use social media considerably more than teens from healthy families.

I wish I was making this next part up…

… because I can’t believe it, either. The pretzel-twisted consensus of leading officials and commentators from this compelling information seems to be:

· Teens are being truthful when they report their levels of depression and social media use; therefore, social media is causing their depression.

· However, those same exact teens on the same surveys are not being truthful when they report widespread abuse and violence by parents and household grownups; therefore, those survey answers can just be ignored.

Are top health, political, interest-group, and media-quotable authorities like Haidt and Twenge simply incompetent charlatans ignorant of the basic data shown on major health surveys, or dishonest distorters of crucial facts? We can certainly see the mentality that enables the Jeffrey Epstein perfidy.

Now it gets really bad

The CDC survey further shows that for abused teens, more social media use may be associated with less suicide and self harm.

At first glance, this table would seem to validate concerns about social media. Looking only at the top three lines, abused teens who seldom use social media (less than daily) are considerably LESS likely to report frequently poor mental health (48.4%) than abused teens who use social media several times a day (62.4%).

Officials and popular commentators abruptly stop there: look, social media use and the cyberbullying it fosters makes teens more depressed. Don’t go any further!

Of course, that could be a reverse correlation: perhaps depression makes teens use social media more. What evidence suggests this is the more likely scenario?

Look at the next 6 lines. Abused teens who seldom use social media report being LESS depressed but MORE likely to attempt suicide (16.6%) and harm themselves (5.7%) than abused teens who use social media often every day (14.4% and 3.1%, respectively).

Presented more starkly and singling out teenage girls about whom authorities vent so much concern: 40% of abused girls who seldom use social media attempt suicide and 14% harm themselves, compared to 25% and 6%, respectively, of abused girls who use social media several times a day. Those are large differences reported by the most troubled population.

Talk about turning discussion on its head. We’re constantly hammered with zero-evidence emotionalities that more social media use drives more teens to suicide and self-harm when the best evidence indicates the opposite is more likely.

Again, though, we have to be wary of which way associations and correlations (especially ones that conveniently seem to validate our pet theories) really go. Perhaps teens who use social media more are simply more social, more inclined to seek help from others, in the first place. That would make social media less a savior of troubled teens and more just one of their self-help tools.

In any case, I can’t be the only one who looked at the CDC’s 2021 and 2023 surveys who noticed this obvious but fascinating pattern. So, wouldn’t you think these intriguing numbers from our largest, best surveys of teenagers would give authorities pause – at least provoke calls for further investigation – before rushing to demand wholesale bans and restrictions on teens’ cellphone and social media use?

If so, please send me your bank account passwords

I credit authorities, politicians, and media-beloved figures like psychologists Haidt and Twenge with scholarly awareness of teens’ complicated answers. It doesn’t take a post-doctorate stat-phenom to do cross-tabulation and regression analyses.

The CDC even tried to help them by issuing a colorful public report weakly blaming social media, cyberbullying, and peer bullying for teen troubles. Unfortunately for that cause, the report’s own numbers showed that even assuming social media and peer bullying are the only factors in teens’ lives, they are still associated with only trivial fractions of teens’ poor mental health and not at all with teens’ suicides… nothing like the 84%-89% associations the CDC found for parents’ abuses and afflictions.

Then, former Surgeon General Vivek Murtha issued a generally informative report on parents’ disturbingly widespread, rising mental health, drug/alcohol, and abusiveness that, well, just might, sort of, maybe, in the nicest wording possible, help explain teens’ mental health problems. That report, like the CDC’s survey analysis, was largely ignored by popular authorities and commentators.

Bummer

Even if science decidedly is not on their side, political leaders, pop-commentators, and media reporters can still invoke the old fallback: wildly hyping rare anecdotes in which a teen’s suicide or overdose possibly could be blamed on social media, peer bullying, and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI) and embellished as a “wake-up call!” revealing a heretofore hidden teen crisis.

The New York Times and dozens of popular media recently featured a teenager who committed suicide after receiving bad advice from an AI robot. The New Yorker ran a lengthy article on a teen who committed suicide after encountering bullying on social media, also a media theme when a case can be found.

Their stories deserve coverage (which they get) – and, even more, their full stories and context (which they never get).

The best evidence suggests small fractions of teens and adults have prior troubles that make them vulnerable to exacerbation by social media and AI technology, just as to family abuses, religion, harsh schooling, and other aspects of life. (For example, 82% of teens who tell CDC surveys they’ve been cyberbullied also report being emotionally abused by parents and household adults, yet another never-mentioned fact.)

If we only consider externally-driven destroyers of young lives, why aren’t stories like the mentally disturbed mother who hounded her severely troubled husband and young son into killing themselves – exactly what the NYT feature accused one teen’s AI robot of doing – as well as more parent-inflicted murders and suicides victimizing children featured just the week this is written, far more prevalent “wake-up calls”?

Because we care only about child and teen deaths that buttress profitable political agendas. “We are rushing into the same mistakes we made with social media,” declares a prominent commentator regarding AI and youth. I agree – for exactly the opposite reasons he cites.

We are allowing rampant misinformation and extremely rare, sensational cases (including those in which key facts have to be suppressed) to throttle discussion and policy that vitally affects children and teenagers. This isn’t caring about young people. It’s betrayal and cruelty.

The murdered kids we don’t care about, Part 1

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

The nation remains fixated on last week’s shooting at a Minneapolis school, in which 2 children were killed and 17 children and 1 adult injured. Mass shootings deserve the anguish they engender and the vital context they rarely get.

Around 25 to 30 American children and youths are killed in mass shootings every year, including in school shootings. If we take the worst recent year on record, 35 children and teens died in homicides at school, including both mass shootings and individual murders.

School shootings garner massive press, politician, and public attention, each fostering emotional declarations that schools are so drastically dangerous compared to the presumed safety of homes that parents must fear sending their kids to school, along with demands that parents monitor their “children’s” internet behaviors (the Minneapolis shooter was 23).

Survivors and parents victimized by school shootings understandably focus on these tragedies. But health officials (especially the Surgeon General), medical and mental health professionals, academic “experts,” and political leaders owe a larger duty to young people to advance sound policy that prioritizes dangers.

Even if we consider only mass shootings, one 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in all 130,000 U.S. schools in four years.

Very few provide crucial contexts – and they’re ignored

One rare exception is the Giffords Law Center: “Schools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so prevalent elsewhere… at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5–18 occurred away from school than at school.”

“Mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States,” adds Dr. Los Lee, Harvard Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine professor. “For children, it’s also less than 1%… a very small number.”

No one touches that reality – and it gets worse.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that 1,996 children and youths under age 18 were victims of homicides in 2024, 1,355, or two-thirds, by guns. The United States’ child homicide rate is 10 times that of Canada, 15 times that of France, 20 times that of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Australia; and 60 times that of Japan.

Where, then, are most children murdered?

While 25 to 30 children and youth are killed in mass shootings (including at school) every year, 850 to 900 are murdered in substantiated cases of violence at home. Another 1,000-plus children, nearly all infants, die from criminal neglect every year, often the result of parents’ poverty, mental illness, addiction, jailing, and/or absence.

“When American parents are surveyed about their concerns, everyone is worried about school shootings,” a JAMA Pediatrics study author said. “The message from our data is really simple: Our fears are incorrectly placed. Our homes may, in fact, be more dangerous than schools.”

May be? Thirty times more children and teens are murdered, and 8 times more school-age kids are shot to death, at home by grownups than at school.

Nine in 10 of the killers are parents, parents’ partners, or other legal caretakers. In fact, 6 in 10 children killed in mass shootings (the ones you don’t hear about) are murdered by parents, not by school shooters, gangs, other kids. FBI cross-tabulations show 85% of child victims are murdered by adults; half of the murderers of children are 25 and older.

We see fleeting mentions of their deaths: “Father admits lining up 3 young sons, shooting them;” “Father in custody after 3 boys, mother shot to death… 8 year-old girl also shot, in serious condition;” “Father who murdered daughter shot son in head;” “Stepdad in custody after boy, 9, is shot dead;” “Stepdad fatally shoots 15-year-old stepson over unfinished chores” … the devastating headlines just from recent months march on and on, quickly shrugged off.

No agonized commentaries, zero official attention, in contrast to the avalanche that followed the Minnesota and every other school shooting. Mass shootings that get intense attention are rare, sensational, devastating, and public, the definition of “news.” That doesn’t excuse the fact that few care enough about “the children!” to talk honestly about the most fundamental issue: who is murdering them, and where.

Instead of acknowledging the harsh truth that the biggest single reason guns are “the leading cause of external death for America’s children and adolescents” is because American adults are shooting them, officials and commentators indulge pleasing pretenses. 99% of the official/media discussion fixates on children killed by other children, teens, or “young men” – powerless groups at whom it is easy to point accusing fingers.

Confronting the enormous toll household grownups take on children and youth raises questions no politically-attuned entity would ever raise: are American grownups responsible enough to keep guns, especially in homes?

The result is that decade after decade, thousands of murdered American kids remain unrecognized, uncared-about, too inconvenient for America’s fragile politics to acknowledge.

The same rush to exploit the tiny number of youths’ suicides that anti-youth and anti-online critics believe they can blame on social-media or Artificial Intelligence versus the vastly larger numbers connected to abusive and severely troubled parents and families will be the subject of Part 2.

Breaking Points’ co-host Saagar Enjeti parrots the right wing’s wrong, dangerous crime myths

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

Crime (both violent and all offenses) stands at 55-year lows, driven by huge drops in cities and among increasingly diverse youth – exactly the opposite of Saager’s panic mode. (This article originally appeared in LA Progressive).

Saager Enjeti, self-described conservative co-anchor on the leftist Breaking Points (1.4 million subscribers), prides himself as the meticulous, well-read realist reining in liberal-left excesses.

On crime and youth issues, however, he’s wildly wrong, venting incessant alarmism that can do real damage to reasoned policy.

Saager (Breaking Points hosts seem to prefer first names) contradicts himself in such rapid-fire delivery it’s hard to sift out a coherent argument beyond rage at Black Lives Matter (BLM) and “liberal… soft on crime do-gooder policies like oh, these poor little juveniles” whose “leniency” has “led to an explosion in carjackings” and kids “wreak(ing) havoc.”

Washington DC’s “two huge problems” are “juvenile offenders” and youthful “carjackings,” he declares, tossing in “quality of life” affronts, a codeword for annoyance at homelessness and drug addiction (just as “youth” is the codeword for “Black”).

Saager constantly shifts on exactly when DC and other cities “went to shit” and what exactly the shit is. He variously lauds 2000 as the year when crime, particularly violence by youth, “wasn’t happening” due to tough policing. Then, 2010 was when the pro-criminal-coddlers took over. Then it was 2014. Then “the last five years,” following BLM.

Cherry-picking years to compare is proof of deception. Re-cherry-picking different years multiplies the sins. Getting crime trends wrong is the final crusher.

Nothing Saager says on crime and youth is even remotely true

…as he’d know if he glanced at readily available FBI, Centers for Disease Control, and DC Metropolitan Police numbers instead of rehashing media and right-wing quips.

In fact, crime and violence rates now stand at half-century lows, both in Washington DC and San Francisco, two “unlivable” cities he singles out for “soft-on-crime” lambasting, and nationwide. These improvements are driven by youth, who have shown by far the biggest, 80% to 90% drops over the last 30 years in violence and crime, including homicide.

Some areas of both cities and rural America remain dangerous, but general “feelings” of endangerment are driven by media histrionics like Saager’s. The charts below summarize the real crime trends.

Figure 1. Major violent and property offenses reported per 100,000 population, 1970-2024 

Source: FBI, 1970–2024.

By the best of flawed measures, national and Washington DC crime has not risen since 2010, or 2014 or 2019 or whatever year Saager randomly miscites to mis-blame “Ferguson and BLM [Black Lives Matter] anti-police policies” for whatever made crime “skyrocket,” whenever it skyrocketed.

Saager focuses vitriol on Washington and San Francisco, which he accuses of becoming “unlivable” due to “soft on crime” policies. Figures 2 and 3 show these cities’ crime trends per 100,000 population over the last 25 years:

Figure 2. Washington DC crime rates, 2000-2024

Source: MetropolitanPolice, 2025

Figure 3. San Francisco crime rates, 2000-2024

Source: California Open Justice (2025).

Saager alternatingly complains about violent crime (which stands at near-record lows), then, when challenged, insists he’s really talking about “quality of life” (which means encountering unpleasant things). I’m guessing Saager has never been victimized by an assault or armed robbery, as I have, or he’d appreciate that violence diminishes “quality of life” infinitely more than seeing a homeless addict.

Crime statistics are eminently criticizable. But to refute them, critics have to show they have better sources of information than FBI, state, local, National Crime Victimization, and CDC tabulations that consistently show crime, violence, and youthful offending all are down big time, everywhere. to paraphrase, the plurals of “my feelings” and “what happened to me” are not “data.”

That said, even in the two cities he singles out, both violent and total crimes are down, often substantially, compared to all the previous, pre-soft-on-crime years when he insists police were tough and unhampered by BLM. San Francisco’s mid-2010s spike in property crime was due entirely to the temporary presence of roving “smash and grab” car burglary rings, not policy.

Contrary to Saager’s claim, the “Ferguson effect” of police being too “scared” by “anti-police” BLM rhetoric to enforce laws is not “proven fact;” not even nearly. It is highly disputed, solidly refuted, and not confirmed by trends – unless he wants to admit less harsh policing yields less crime.

Nor are carjackings DC’s biggest crime problem. All robberies, of which carjackings (robbery of a vehicle) are just one part, comprise less than 12% of the city’s Part I violence and property felonies.

What, then, is Washington DC’s real “crime problem”?

Imagine how radically different Saager’s “crime is bad!” rants would be if he admitted his own 30-agers (he’s 33) – not easily scapegoated “youths” – were by far Washington DC’s and the nation’s the most serious crime, violence, murder, disorderly conduct, and drug abuse problem.

Not only are youth (mobbers, carjackers and all) NOT DC’s, the nation’s, or any city’s worst crime problem; they are lesser and declining contributors far down the list.

Figure 4. U.S. violent offenses per 100,000 population, youths versus 30-agers, 2000-2024. 

Source: FBI, Crime Data Explorer, 2025; Crime in the United States, 1995-2019.

Figure 4. U.S., all criminal offenses per 100,000 population, youths versus 30-agers, 2000-2024. 

Source: FBI, Crime Data Explorer, 2025; Crime in the United States, 1995-2019.

Criminal behavior by Saager’s age cohort, 30-34, makes the city’s juveniles look tame. In 2024, DC police reports show:

• All ages under 18: 967 violent crimes, 2,250 total criminal offenses
• Age 30-34: 1,502 violent crimes, 7,102 total criminal offenses

• DC juveniles account for 9.8% of violent and 5.3% of total crime (you’d think it was 95% or 98% by politician and press bellowings).
• Meanwhile, 30-39-agers account for 26.6% of violent crime and 25.9% of all crime – 2 to 3 times more than teenaged youths do.

Go back to 2010, which Saager seems to regard as some nirvana when tough, pre-BLM policing prevailed resulting in low crime and youth offending, Metro police stats show that juveniles accounted for 9.7% of DC’s crime (1.8 TIMES MORE than today’s youthful crime), while 30-agers accounted for 12.4% (just HALF of today’s 30-age crime toll).

That is, DC’s juvenile crime volume has fallen during the supposed “lenient” era, while 30-age crime has skyrocketed.

Today, juvenile crime today is less of a problem than crime by ages 30-34, 25-29, 35-39, 18-24, and 40-44. This isn’t a fluke. Figures for 2023, 2022, and other recent years and cities are similar.

Notice that little post-2020 blip at the far righthand sides of Figures 2 and 3, in which crime increased for all ages as the country re-opened after the record lows coinciding with the COVID lockdowns? That’s what all the media ranters mean when they talk about crime “skyrocketing”!

No matter. Police, politicians like President Trump, and the press eagerly seize on any juvenile offense (such as the alleged youthful assault on Trump-Musk minion “Big Balls”) as “illustrating” some scourge of “youth violence!” and “juveniles out of control!” – a perpetual mantra they regularly bray year after year, decade after decade.

For example, sensational reports of “unruly mobs” of youths have grabbed headlines when a small number in a group of hundreds are disorderly. Teenagers (especially Black ones, who comprise 90% of DC’s youth arrests) are politically powerless, easy for armchair pundits to scapegoat.

Yet, when grownups go to bars weekend after weekend and collectively cause more crimes, no one blames all adults. No bad press or curfew demands afflict older ages, not even when police numbers show that Saager’s own age causes far more disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and assault offenses than teenaged youths do.

Good for them! United Kingdom teenagers are easily defying the dumb, dangerous “Online Safety Act”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

Teenagers are mass-defying UK leaders’ dangerous, ill-motivated crusade to restrict and ban young people from social media and expose them to dangerous “age verification” privacy violations, global tech analyst The Register reports:

“With the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) now in effect, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy under-18s figured out how to bypass the rules and regain access to adult content.… the more obvious workaround was to simply install a VPN [Virtual Private Network] and browse the web as if from another country where such age verification laws don’t apply… some VPN companies reported a 1,400 percent increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.”

Another global web monitor quipped of youths’ ease in getting around censorship schemes: “An authoritarian legal apparatus that all understood would never accomplish its stated aims, implemented by lowest-bidding private companies while imposing vast regulatory costs, casually defeated instantly by any kid with an IQ above room temperature. But don’t worry, taxpayer: more can always be spent on being seen to do something.”

Some dodges are hilariously easy. The “Use-Their-ID” campaign has already generated 100,000 imposter drivers’ licenses (hijacking Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s own ID is a fave) to get around the OSA, UK Metro reports. Evasion strategies, wildly diverse, are rapidly evolving.

What can official nannies endangering the kids they pretend to protect do about it? Not much, Register experts say: “Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that.” Grownups, international corporations, and governments find VPNs highly useful. Adult interests and pleasures are at stake, so restrictions are “not gonna happen.” Shutting down VPN and fake-ID and -facial recognition sites is like Whac-A-Mole.

Meanwhile, The Register reports, “a digital petition to repeal the OSA has now reached north of 423,000 e-signatures at the time of writing, a figure well beyond the threshold triggering a Parliamentary debate on the matter.”

Some of the OSA’s privacy provisions benefit all users, but its youth restrictions, if not repealed, should just be disobeyed. UK, Australian, US, and other Western lawmakers, under the scam of “protecting children,” are implementing “age verification” measures so slipshod one would suspect their purpose must be to expose young people to identity and information intrusions by corporate marketers, government spies, and predatory criminals.

“The most widely adopted methods of digital age verification involve users sharing sensitive information such as facial scans, official ID cards or banking particulars with third-party companies—details which, in the process, inevitably get linked to individual data on pornography consumption,” Scientific American warns.

So, UK kids and grownups – just hold your government ID, picture, home address, phone number, email, webpages, identifying numbers, credit card, bank credentials, and facial, retinal, and/or fingerprint images up to the screen for permanent digital recording by random website and wink-wink “third party verifier”! Trust us! They would never exploit your info!

What could possibly go wrong?

“The UK’s censorship catastrophe is just the beginning,” warned Power User’s Taylor Lorenz. “Entire forums, websites, communities, and essential journalism is being censored.” Platforms are “classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material, and information about reproductive and public health as ‘explicit’ or ‘harmful’ content, thus blocking anyone under 18 from accessing it.”

Already, Reddit and other sites are classifying information about Israeli war crimes, protests, and any potential “violence” as “explicit content” under-18s are forbidden to access. That broad-based censorship is exactly what officials intend by rushing ahead with vigorous enforcement. The government is “working with regulator Ofcom to implement the act as quickly as possible… those who wanted to overturn it were ‘on the side of predators,’ Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said.”

What a grotesque, upside-down lie. The real reason government regulators like Kyle are negotiating the OSA with government, tech giant, and corporate overlords is to help all gain easier access to millions of teens’ personal information.

Authorities are panicking over teens and social media… why?

Teens provably face far more dangers to their physical and mental health in the real world than online. In the UK, Australia, and especially, the U.S., severe drug abuse and family abuses inflicted by grownups are widespread and soaring. The leading U.S. health agency, the Centers for Disease Control, reports that parents’ abuses and troubles underlie two-thirds to 90% of teens’ mental health, drug abuse, and suicide problems; social media, just about none.

What, then, is driving exploding official panic over the trivial issue of teens and screens? It’s not teen safety or mental health.

Rather, during the U.S. Congress’s TikTok-divestment debate, lawmakers’ fury fixated on young people’s audacity to access information questioning official pro-Israel and climate-change-denial dogmas drove the censorship crusade.

“British support for Palestine is at an all-time high since October 7, particularly among the younger demographic,” the July 27 Sunday Times poll reports. U.S. polls show similar results. Young people’s anti-Israel views in particular seem to have triggered visceral, gut-level rage in Western officials.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a vocal supporter of Israel who sees young people’s pro-Palestine views as driven by social media, has been hardening his stance against any online access by teenagers. In the past, Haidt acknowledged the internet has many benefits for teens. Lately, coincidentally or not, Haidt is demanding sweeping bans on under-16s (and soon, under-18s) ever going online for any reason. Haidt has ginned up anti-social-media “porn” hysteria and the very “stranger danger” paranoia he shrugs off in public life to decree that “children have no need to connect with strangers” or access disapproved-of information.

Defying and repealing “kids’ online safety” censorship is essential not just to teenagers’ safety and well-being, but democracy’s survival

The biggest dangers by far to children and teens are not online or public strangers, but nearby adults and family members. There’s no argument here.

No matter. U.S., U.K., Australian, and other Western authorities have made it clear: they will not even acknowledge, let alone redress, the family abuses that are the real drivers of many teenagers’ poor mental health. Yet, policy makers tirelessly strive to ban teens from online communities, education, and health resources by which young people help themselves.

Teenagers can handle online predators, bullies, Nazis, misogynists, and porn; what teens need protection from is grandstanding officials’ ignorant, malicious endangerments. Sadly, there’s no <delete> button for a youth to block legislative, attorneys general, prime minister, psychologist, and agency charlatans.

Thus, it’s heartening to see teenagers so easily getting around officially-forced censorship and privacy hazards. Teens should understand that authorities’ sanctimonious clownishness is not to “protect” youth from seeing a boob or untoward message, but to control and repress young people.

Young people, like adults, have non-negotiable rights to information, privacy, resources, communication, and expression. Civil disobedience is in the best tradition of democracy, but now it is also proving crucial to younger generations’ and their societies’ survival.

Given the broad censorship and vastly expanded surveillance state the OSA and similar “child safety” policies are forcing across all platforms, teens’ defiance of the OSA is essential to maintaining the UK’s, US’s, and West’s threatened democratic traditions.

Despite teens’ currently successful defiance, this isn’t over. The history of repression indicates the UK and other governments will respond to failure with ever-more draconian crackdowns, asserting power while proving futility with schemes to punish, perhaps even criminalize, young people who go online. Cataloguing individuals by the sites they visit, as Scientific American warned, is a necessary step. Orwell’s panoptic telescreen is the prototypical surveillance-state dream.

The UK’s useless school cellphone ban instigated by official panic combined with “weak” evidence is the political model: if an official crusade enables authorities to deride a young population they clearly despise, who cares if it works?

Hopefully, young people’s resistance savvy will keep evolving faster than government repressions. Freedom of the press, thought, association, and expression now depends on sabotaging official authoritarianism.

Ban smartphones from schools? If we’re truly concerned about safety, we’d ban kids from schools and let them keep their phones.

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

OMG! Have you seen the FBI’s latest Crime in Schools report? “From 2020 to 2024, agencies reported 1,299,063 criminal incidents occurring at school locations… There were 1,504,310 offenses; 1,539,149 victims; and 1,250,077 known offenders associated with those incidents.”

And those are just the school crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, including for pandemic months in which many schools were shut down! Obviously, major media panics and draconian legislated bans are demanded.

The FBI report finds 652,000 kids victimized by assaults, 54,000 by sex offenses, over half a million by property crimes, and 300,000 by social crimes like drugs, porn, and weapons at school. School-associated violent death reports find some 150 children and teens were murdered at school during the period.

Predators? Some 188,000 children and teens were victimized by grownup criminals at school during 2020-2024. That’s one every 2 minutes! A child or teen is twice as likely to be victimized by an adult offender age 19 and older than by a young peer compared to the proportions of over-19 versus school-age youths at school.

And here’s one for anti-social-media crusader Jonathan Haidt, whose substack has been obsessed with pornography amid supposedly terrible “dangers” kids face online: 19,000 kids are exposed to porn at school, along with 244,000 to drugs and 50,000 to knives and guns. And these alarming numbers are certainly underreported.

A day spent on social media versus a day at an American school is like comparing a Sunday school picnic or Boy Scout campout to the Battle of Verdun. (A bad analogy, I admit; churches and Scouts have proven bad at protecting kids from predators.)

But you get the point. Teens spend relatively equivalent time on social media as at school, but nothing – nothing – bad happening on social media even remotely approaches the cataclysmic victimization toll on our kids of going to school.

State attorneys general’s court filings hyped by Haidt struggled to produce a half-dozen cases in which damage to children and teenagers was even arguably caused by social media. They had to dredge up a case of grownups well past teen ages buying bullets online later used to kill a couple of youths as somehow proving teens should be banned from social media.

Anti-social-media crusaders truly concerned about youth safety and mental health should reverse their campaigns to ban smartphones from schools. Let students keep their phones but ban kids from schools!

Removing tongue from cheek…

Okay, enough of my anti-school rant, largely senseless when put in perspective but still a thousand times more sensible than anti-social-media junk. Let us remember two things:

(a) This is the United States of America. We’ve got big problems – all ages, everywhere. In fact, kids are far, far safer in school than in any other venue to which anti-social-media crusaders would send them, such as streets, churches, youth programs, and especially, homes.

(b) Over 50 million children and teens and 3 million teachers and personnel attend 131,000 primary and secondary schools every weekday for 180 days a year. That’s well over 30 billion child-school-days during 2020-2024 even if we assume in-school attendance was partly shut down in 2020-21.

That is, according to the FBI’s figures, a student would have to attend school for 20,000 days, or over 50 years, before having even odds of being victimized by a crime of any kind; over a century before being victimized by violence; 300 years before being injured by violence at school; and 3,000 years before being at a school where any kind of shooting takes place.

During those same 5 years, over half a million children and youths were substantiated – not just reported, but substantiated – victims of physical and/or sexual violence inflicted by grownups in their homes. Some 2,000 school-agers age 5-17 were murdered at home during 2020-2024, a dozen times more than the 150 murdered at school. Of course, crime in both places is grossly underreported, so these are relative odds.

Overall, a child or youth is many times safer from gunfire, violence, and crime surrounded by peers at school than at home with adult family members, even after adjusting for the hours spent in each locale. And social media is by far the safest place of all.

Finally, is physical “safety” (especially when very low risks are hyped to promote panics) always paramount? Living a full life entails risks. That’s why I argue for full access by all ages to both outdoors and social media spaces.

Trashing youth, part zillion

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| August 2025

To those who seek accuracy: believe nothing – nothing – cops, politicians, “experts,” and media splashes say about youth. Better yet, assume the opposite of what they say.

In an honest society that cared about facts, fairness, and young people, Gloucester Township, New Jersey, Police Chief David Harkins, township officials, and sycophant reporters would be facing disciplinary proceedings following stories such as the Daily Mail’s grotesque, “The town rocked by youth violence where parents face jail time if their kids commit crime.”

Gloucester Township leaders won fawning national and international attention for mass-trashing their 6,500 teenaged youth for the behaviors of 10 “unruly juveniles” arrested with 2 adults for disruptions at last year’s Community Day and ongoing “threats of violence.”

“Speaking on ‘youth violence,’” Harkins declared of those he accused of spitting on, cursing, and assaulting officers: “I’ve never experienced anything like it in 30 years as a police officer the disrespect, the violent behavior that ruined a family event.”

Black youth and adults comprise just 18% of Gloucester Township’s population. Harkins’ police department reports that Black people comprised 15 of the 16 arrested for disorderly conduct in June 2024. That fact was not mentioned in any news story or commentary I could find.

Overall in 2024, Blacks comprised nearly 60% of those arrested by Township police for violence, 80% of those arrested for disorderly conduct, and nearly half of all people arrested. Black and Hispanic populations have risen 5-fold in Gloucester Township since 1990 as the White population, still a large majority, fell.

Could there be something more to this issue than just inexplicable “youth violence”? Hidden racial dimension and potential conflicts leading up to the June 2024 disturbance were buried by the color-coded euphemism, “youth violence.” Only the police and official view was allowed, and they weren’t talking about race. So, neither did the press.

If police and commentators ever wonder why teenagers, especially Black teens, might hate cops and show “disrespect,” consider Chief Harkins’ gratuitously nasty, racially-coded disrespect toward his town’s entire young population.

Regardless of how offended Harkins feels, his implication that youths today are more violent and disruptive can be tested numerically. Lazy, pliant reporters never make authorities who claim youth behaviors are rising, out of control, worse than ever, etc., produce a shred of factual justification for their alarmist quips, or take 5 minutes to look up the numbers themselves before rushing to publish.

That’s journalistic malpractice. Law enforcement consistently proves shockingly ignorant and/or dishonest about their own data.

Investigating real statistical trends reveals the same amazing, never-mentioned – and clearly threatening – reality found nationwide, from Gloucester Township to Washington DC, Los Angeles and New York City.

What do Gloucester’s own police numbers show?

Had Chief Harkins so much as glanced at his own department’s statistics compiled at taxpayer expense – or had reporters bothered to check – for literally any year prior to COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, all would know the festival-disrupting year, 2024, was among the lowest on record for violence and crime of every type by local youth.

Although just about any years would yield the same result, let’s use Harkins’ own “30 years” comparison by going back to 1995, and further randomize by including the mid-year, 2010:

Source: Gloucester Township Police Department (2025). *2024 is the most recent year, which includes the June 2024 festival disruption arrests.

As Gloucester Township’s Black, Hispanic, and other Nonwhite youth population leaped 5-fold since 1990 to become 40% of all teens by 2024, the township’s teenaged total crime and serious violence volume plunged by 75%, and lesser violence and disorderliness fell by 34% — with massive drops since 2010 alone.

This may sound radical, but…

… the following approximates what a police chief who actually respected facts, fairness, professionalism, young people, and his community’s intelligence would have said:

“Crime and violence by our young people is down dramatically today compared to past generations as our youth population became more racially diverse, and youths now have lower crime rates than most adults. Our department’s policy, regardless of age or race, will be to proactively address the few who cause problems, leave the large majority who are not causing problems alone, and not manufacture artificial ways to criminalize more people.”

Further, Chief Harkins could have pointed out that his own police statistics show that in 2024, the worst levels of violence and crime “rocking” Gloucester Township and other communities were not by youths, but by adults ages 30-34, followed by 25-29 and 35-39. One in three violent offenses and total crimes are by persons in their 30s. This pattern also holds nationwide.

Is citing the facts shown in one’s own statistics so hard? Apparently. Youth, especially Black youth, make handy scapegoats – even if it takes deception.

The coded racist euphemism, “youth violence”

Gloucester Township youth (like youth across the country) have changed dramatically for the better over the last 30 years as the young population became more racially diverse. You’d think progressives would be loudly celebrating that trend for affirming their core belief that a multicultural society can be a safer one, a powerful counter argument against today’s growing racial fear and xenophobia.

Unfortunately, the irrational hostility by authorities Left to Right toward young people keeps poisoning their attitudes, which is why we keep getting scapegoating, alarmism, and useless crackdowns.

Does reality even matter? Traditional commentators insist that how people “feel” about crime is more important than what is actually happening, because feelings drive perception and perception drives policy.

How, then, does the public form its “feelings” about crime? Research consistently finds the public, overwhelmingly, gets its feelings about whether crime is up or down, low or alarming, from news reports. That is why cops, leaders, “experts,” and reporters should respect their professions enough to stop aping alarmist, bigoted propaganda and instead respect fairness and accuracy – yes, even toward teenagers.

How to go viral with dire-sounding – but phony – “statistical trends”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| August 2025

“Breaking Points” August 11, 2025, alarmingly headlined: “Viral Chart EXPOSES Internet Fueled Personality Destruction,” with blaring subheads: “Studies show internet is ruining our cognitive abilities.” “Especially for young people,” podcast hosts Saager Enjeti and Krystal Ball warned, reeling off terrifying claim after claim about online perils (but somehow failing to foreswear that personality-destroying cognition-ruining internet themselves).

The evidence? Statistician John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times created charts from the Understanding America survey, which “Breaking Points” uncritically featured. Popular media presentations of the 2016-2025 trends, shown in the following charts for two key measures, certainly look frightening, illustrating a society in calamitous decline:

However, those who look closely for even a few seconds – certainly not Saager, Krystal, or other media sources I found – will notice two severe problems. First, the vertical axis showing averaged responses to questions on a scale of 1 to 5 is severely truncated in order to grossly exaggerate age differences and trends. Differences and trends are further embellished by presenting them in tall, narrow charts.

In contrast, below is a presentation of the same numbers in honest fashion, using the full 1 to 5 scale in figures that have equal vertical and horizontal dimensions:

Presented accurately, these statistics and trends would never have gone “viral.” They look like the near-nothings they are.

Psychologist and statistician Christopher Ferguson takes a deeper look at the Understanding America and Financial Times data and concludes: “No, conscientiousness hasn’t collapsed among young people in recent years.”

Further, neither media commentators nor the study in question even tries to show that “the internet” (as opposed to, say, reasoned assessments of real-world developments) is to blame for these minimal trends. Like social-media panickers, they just assume it must be – a highly arguable assumption, given that internet and social media use was well established back in 2016 when things were supposedly rosy.

Nor do they show whether, to cite the most salient trend, people of all ages (especially younger ones) might be acting rationally to be somewhat less trusting today than in 2016.

An individual, especially a younger one, might see our leading institutions are acquiescing and even backing genocidal foreign policy, doing nothing about climate change, widening economic inequality, financing more sumptuous lives for the privileged by dumping massive debt on young and future generations, and retreating back into openly Jim Crow racism, among other evils only barely anticipated back in 2016. That could be seen as untrustworthy and depressing, depending on one’s politics.

My humble assessment is that anyone who feels “trusting” today – along with anyone who is not getting more depressed at leaders’ rising brutalities and betrayals – is either not paying attention or brainlessly delusional.

But the point here is that even by the Understanding America data, the most salient decline in the averaged trust score, from around 4.1 in 2016 to 3.8 in 2025 on a scale of 1.0 (totally untrusting) to 5.0 (totally trusting) among ages 16-39, is hardly unexpected or catastrophic. The age 16-39 score in 2025 still approaches “strongly trusting,” well above the scale median of 3.0.

I don’t know how Burn-Murdoch characterized these data, and I’m not about to pay the firewall fee to find out. I’m more interested in how the “viral” media communicates them to the public. To listen to Saager and Krystal (and others) rant, we should immediately shut down the internet entirely, confiscate everyone’s cell phone, computer, laptop, and tablet, and mandate daily in-person coffee klatches and beer-bowling.

Either that, or inaugurate authorities’ and media’s critical responsibility on youth and culture-war issues, an American first, to replace the endless shrieking.

As I’ve documented repeatedly, young people were not better behaved, less troubled, thriving educationally, or more pro-social in pre-internet decades. In fact, they acted much worse than Gen Z does today.

Our top officials have refused – flatly – to pay any attention to what teenagers tell us on leading surveys is causing their depression and anxiety. Teens overwhelmingly cite household grownups’ abuses, violence, mental illness, and addiction – and self-aggrandizing authorities stubbornly refuse to listen. In this reality vacuum, demagogues blaming the internet and social media based on thin evidence have hijacked discussion, sabotaging badly needed confrontations toward real problems.

For the record: I am not affiliated in any way with social media, tech, or related interests, nor have I ever been paid by them. I despise Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, and the lot. Nothing here should be construed as approving of the way social media and tech moguls operate.

Not another “teenage panic.” Call in the National Guard!

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| August 2025

Jesse Pomeroy took extreme exception to people making fun of his deformed eye. From ages 11 to 14, he brutally beat, sexually assaulted, tortured, and dumped at least 10 children; his final murder was of a 10-year-old girl. Easy as it would be to blame “social media,” Pomeroy’s mayhem took place in the 1870s. He remains America’s youngest multiple torturer and killer.

Shocker: pre-teens are American humans. Like other Americans, they commit violence, though far less than us older folks did back when we were youngsters or do now. The FBI reports around 100 people have been killed by pre-teen murderers across the country in the most recently reported decade. Before we indulge another outraged panic at “kids today,” note that 163,203 people were murdered in the United States over the period.

Pre-teen killers murder 4 or 5 victims age 25 and older (that is, important people) per year. Meanwhile, killers age 25 and older murder over 600 pre-teens.

Part 1: Let the mindless panic begin

Amid his usual crate of lies about crime being “out of control” in Washington DC and other liberal cities, “Trump’s primary targets are those he describes as criminals — in this case often teenagers, many of them Black,” NPR reported. (Many? 85% of persons arrested in DC are Black). Added NPR: “Washington has struggled at times with violence caused by young men who sometimes ride motorcycles and four-wheelers.”

One could demur that Trump, ordered by two courts to pay $89 million to a victim he sexually assaulted and who pardoned hundreds of fellow thugs to roam the streets, is DC’s costliest, most prolific violent criminal.

In addition to the president and his pardonees, who actually commits violent crime in our nation’s capital? The DC Metropolitan Police report perpetrator ages in 8,724 violent crimes and 42,551 total offenses in the most recent 12 months tabulated. Of these, genuine “pre-teens” (those too young to have “teen” in their ages) committed a terrifying 0.4%. Further,

· All under-15 ages account for 3% of violence and less than 2% of all crime;

· Age 15-17: another 8% of violence and 4% of all crime;

· Added up, the total “juvenile” and “youth violence” and “teenage mob” toll the press, cops, and “experts” endlessly bang on about perpetrate just 11% of the city’s violent crime and less than 6% of its total crime.

· Add age 18-24, and a total of 27% of Washington’s violent crime and 22% of its total crime is committed by all persons under age 25. You’d think it was 97%.

So, it isn’t pre-teens, teens, or young men, four-wheeling or otherwise. Washington DC’s worst ages for rates of committing crime and violence are:

· 30-34: 17% of violent crime, 17% of all crime;

· 25-29: 15% of violent crime, 17% of all crime; and

· 35-39: 12% of violent crime, 12% of all crime.

· Age 40-44 is no slouch either: 10% of violent crime, 9% of all crime.

Why do 25-44 ages commit 55% of Washington’s violence and crime, twice as much as the entire crime volume perped by all pre-teens, teens, and young adults under age 25? Isn’t that the real news, the big mystery for the grant-funded academics? Aren’t these 25-44-agers supposed to enjoy fully developed, executive-reasoning cerebral cortexes as well as higher economic status that render them immune to committing crime?

Let me repeat: police figures show Washingtonians under age 18 account for less than 6% of violent crime and 11% of all crime.

If officials and the media wanted to address the truly high-crime and high-violence ages, why aren’t the president, cops, “experts,” press, and liberal podcasters hollering about the “30-age” crime scourge and demanding curfews for grownups? Urging kids to help keep the adults out of trouble? (Or at least implementing mutual deterrence, like GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson enlisting his 17-year-old to keep both Dad and Son away from porn.)

Because that’s no fun

Over the last year, we’ve seen a barrage of official statements and news stories complaining of “a number of violent crimes in recent years involving young people,” as well as large gatherings where some “young people” allegedly commit crimes. The city has imposed another pointless nighttime curfew and banned gatherings of 9 or more, applied only to persons under age 18. In a city in which over 200,000 people were arrested, including 40,000 for violent crimes, over the last 5 years – and those were low years for DC crime – it would be shocking if juveniles didn’t commit some of them.

Crime, like violence, like drugs, like suicide, like mental health, become disturbing topics if grownups have to admit our own outsized numbers. Americans need powerless scapegoats to point outraged fingers at, like teens and “pre-teens.”

If a group 300 teens gathers (often we later find media-dubbed “teenage” or “juvenile” groups are mostly adults), a few will do something bad that commentators can mass-blame on all youth. Of course, when crime-prone 25-44-agers go to bars and crimes result (450 people that age are arrested every week in DC), no one blames all adults.

The one thing far Left to far Right agree on is shutting down cerebral reasoning when talking about young people. All sides slurp from the shallowest dish: wildly exaggerate anything the commentator doesn’t like, then blame “social media.”

Part 2: Why did young men (and older people, but ignore that) vote more conservative in 2024?

I talked about this before, but the progressive media keeps harping on this point. The bar set by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein’s “Why Trump Won” show and Democratic pollster David Shor recites an endlessly-repeated mantra that Gen Z is “potentially the most conservative generation.”

That’s baloney. Major-media exit polls in the 2024 election showed men ages 18-29 were more likely to vote AGAINST Trump (49%) than any older male age group – more anti-Trump than Klein’s and Shor’s generation. Gen Z were overwhelmingly anti-Trump (61%).

Anyway, who do they blame for their non-fact? Of course, it’s just “social media.” “The ‘manosphere’” online has “had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions,” Klein declared, without a shred of evidence. Agreed Shor: “Suddenly shifting a bunch of young people’s social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.”

But wait. In April 2025, the Harvard IOP poll showed men age 18-29 disapproved of Trump by a stunning 34-59% margin. How can this be? Did the “toxic manosphere” suddenly veer Left? Or – ponder this – could young men’s attitudes relate more to personally lived experiences than just aping shallow social media vibes?

Part 3: Netflix’s “Adolescence” – brainless hate speech

The wildly acclaimed Netflix series ”Adolescence”, in four tedious, muddled hours, didn’t even try to show its 13-year-old male protagonist was driven to kill a female classmate by online “manosphere” misogyny (which he said he didn’t like)… as opposed, say, to his family’s history of male violence, led by the lad’s father’s and grandfather’s rampages. In fact, boys’ murders, including of girls, plummeted in the UK and US as social media proliferated.

Again, family violence, is no fun to talk about. So, screw the facts. Incited by actor Stephen Graham’s demagoguery, the gullible media and academic herd stampeded: just blame boys and social media!

Part 4: The decline in boys’ support for women’s rights

This is a troubling even if nuanced trend, one I discussed 3 months ago, now returning again to re-alarm leftist media. Among 8^th and 10^th grade boys surveyed by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future, support for women’s job opportunities and equal pay fell sharply from 2018 to 2023.

Liberal/Left podcasters’ nanosecond-rushed explanation (no one even pretends critical thought any more): It must be social media! All those boys sitting alone in front of screens, snarfing misogynist toxicity.

What crap. Economist David Waldron actually researched the trend and applied rare analytical thinking. “Many commentators on the topic of misogyny among boys are quick to blame social media and internet subcultures such as the ‘manosphere’ or ‘incels’” along with “social media algorithms [that] tend to amplify misogynistic content,” he noted.

Sadly, Waldron’s analysis found, “this particular hypothesis is not confirmed by data from this survey.”

In fact, MTF “data shows that the sharper drops in the share of boys endorsing gender equality occurred in those who spend the least time using social networks.” Further, boys who spend less time watching videos and playing video games show the LEAST decline in and a HIGHER level of support for women’s rights.

It isn’t the “loners in their bedrooms” (UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s demons) who show the biggest drop in support for women’s rights – it’s boys who spend the most time hanging out with other people.

Ponder that. Now, the big puzzler.

While fathers have little effect, boys with college-educated mothers (much more supportive of women’s rights prior to 2018) show a bigger drop in support for women’s equality since than boys with less educated mothers. That ain’t spozed to be. Educated moms are supposed to raise enlightened liberal boys, especially now that more education is correlated with more liberal politics. We need to figure this one out.

Finally, and most crucial, a non-surprise: “That the popularity of gender equality plummeted so much among religious boys seems to be the main clue available in the survey about what factors might be driving this trend,” Waldron finds.

In 1990, boys who reported religion is important and those saying religion is unimportant showed about the same “completely agree” support for women’s job equality (52%). But by 2023, full support for women’s job equality plummeted among religious boys (to 38%) while bouncing around and winding up the same among non-religious boys (52%).

Anti-social-media dogmatists’ pet remedies — just get boys away from those screens, out in public with people, and going to church, and their attitudes will improve — actually would exacerbate boys’ sentiments against women’s rights.

The obsession with social media is obscuring vital social factors, as I detailed earlier. The gender pay gap has dwindled among under-20 workers to near parity while remaining distressingly large among older workers. Enjoying their lucrative, sexist pay gap privileges enables older-male commentators to smugly deride young men’s anxieties.

The biggest challenges in this area are to confront the manufactured panic against youth, the manufactured panic against social media, and the very real political backlash against the remarkable progress of young women in educational, career, and activist realms. Meanwhile…

Progressives: youth issues are not an excuse to send your brains on vacation. Get a grip.

Gen Z, Mental Health, and the Impacts of Systemic Neglect

Milo Santamaria | October 2024

Many major research reports have come out showing that abuse and domestic violence are often the main causes of youth mental health issues, not the internet or social media like many new outlets claim.

Gen Z is one of the most politically active generations, we are passionate about reversing climate change, achieving racial justice, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights. We are not a hopeless or apathetic generation, yet we are also facing high levels of depression and anxiety.

Many people think of mental health as a very individual challenge, that all it takes is talk therapy and medication. However, young people are not only individually facing neglect and abuse at the hands of their families and caretakers. Some teenagers and families are also currently experiencing systemic neglect on a widespread scale. This week, families from Florida to West Virginia, have lost their homes and livelihoods, with little to no support from the federal government.

Every year many teenagers watch as their classmates are killed or injured by school shooters, they protest and walk out to make their schools safe from gun violence, but their voices continue to be dismissed. I was born on the exact day Columbine happened, and I was 6 years old watching people being airlifted out of their homes in New Orleans, during Hurricane Katrina. A city that is still rebuilding, almost 20 years later.

This year, we have also watched the genocide in Gaza unfold on our phones, as the US government continues to send billions of dollars to fund Israel’s genocidal war.

How are children and teens supposed to grow up without mental health issues, or feelings of despair, after constantly witnessing such destruction and pain? After getting told time and time again, that their families are not worth saving from floods? That they don’t deserve to feel safe from gun violence at school? That an entire city could be leveled to the ground or completely underwater and the US wouldn’t lift a finger if they were born in the wrong area of the world?

If neglect and abuse correlate to mental health issues and depression, then what is the impact of our government failing to protect us from harm and provide support during disaster? Being abandoned by the people we rely on to protect us is devastating and traumatizing.

But hey, what do I know? Maybe it’s just that damn phone.