Youth As In Crisis

What is it like to be called an abomination by your religious leaders? To live in fear of losing your family's love? To be afraid to go to school because of the torment that awaits you? To lie to everyone about whom you love? In Youth in Crisis, Mitchell Gold and Mindy Drucker asked forty LGBT Americans--from celebrities to youth-- to share their very personal answers to these difficult questions. Many discuss their long-buried feelings here for the first time. Several young adults opened up about suicide attempts, depression, fear, and isolation that are still a part of growing up gay. Gold calls this a silent epidemic and a mental health crisis affecting millions of gay teens. And he emphasizes that this crisis can be solved, with compassion and fair-mindedness-and by getting those whose words and deeds cause harm to finally stop. The book's contributors reveal what made them feel alone and unloved -- and at times so hopeless suicide seemed the only option. And they suggest ways to help the next generation of teens. These stories are also lessons in perseverance and achievement, showing inner strength and inspiring us all with their triumphs. Learn the harm religion-based prejudices cause, see the dangers of "cures" like reparative therapy, and get insight into the question of sin and homosexuality that divides many churches and families today. Our book will help you become better able to help gay kids in your family, congregation, or classroom.

The recent recession has led to an ongoing crisis in the youth labour market in Europe. This timely book deals with a number of areas related to the context, choices and experiences of young people, the consequences of which resonate throughout their lives. The focus of the contributions to this volume is on issues which, whilst undoubtedly important, have thus far received less attention than they arguably deserve. The first part of the book is concerned with issues related to education and training, covering matters such as the role of monopsony in training, the consequences of over-education, and the quality of educational institutions from primary to tertiary. The second part is primarily concerned with the long-term consequences of short-term choices and experiences including contributions on health-related choices, health consequences later in life, factors affecting the home-leaving decision, as well as an analysis of the increasing intergenerational transmission of inequality; a trend which accelerated during the recession. The last part of the book deals with issues related to youth unemployment and NEET – the direct consequence of the recession. This book contains a number of innovative analyses reporting significant findings that contrast with standard models. Some of the more interesting results directly contradict conventional wisdom on a number of topics from the importance of monopsony in training markets to the importance of transitory income changes on consumption of addictive goods. This book is suitable for those who study labor economics, political economy as well as employment and unemployment.

Few issues attract greater concern and censure than those that surround youth 'gangs'. Paradoxically, youth researchers have conventionally been reluctant to even use the term 'gang' but, more recently, such reluctance has receded. Indeed, it is increasingly claimed that – in particular urban 'territories' – youth gangs are commonplace, some young people are deeply immersed in violence and the carrying and use of weapons (particularly knives and firearms) is routine. Comprizing a series of essays from leading national and international researchers, this book subjects such claims to rigorous critical scrutiny. It provides a challenging and authoritative account of complex questions pertaining to urban youth identities, crime and social order. This book: locates the question of 'gangs' in both historical and contemporary contexts engages a spectrum of theoretical perspectives and analytical positions presents and analyzes cutting-edge empirical research addresses a range of previously neglected questions, including those pertaining to girls, young women and 'gangs'. Youth in Crisis? provides a vital resource for researchers, educators, policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in key questions facing criminology, sociology and social policy.

What is the social condition of youth in modern society? This is the question taken up by this passionate and substantive book. The author argues that youth are at a crisis state. The crisis has been brought about by the general state of social crisis; violence, questions of political legitimacy, educational decline; as well as the decline of compassion as a core principle of culture. The author draws on a variety of trends and scholarly research to examine the problems of growing up in a high risk society and offers pathways to spiritual renewal and cultural renewal, esential for salvaging the next generation. The study takes on the youth crisis as a compelling public issue, exploring various manifestations of the crisis; endangered youth, gang participation, youth addictions, unworkable schools, violence in the home and on the streets, homelessness, and the near genocidal conditions that plague African American and urban youth. Students, educators, and policy makers, as well as anyone interested in the plight of youth and the steps necessary to successfully overcome the crisis will find this book invaluable and memorable.

First published in 1982, this book considers the position of young Afro-Caribbean people in Britain, in the 1980s. It looks at how, at the time, this group of young people were disproportionately hit by growing unemployment, seemed to be over-represented in crime statistics and were often disadvantage at school. The authors of the book analyse the struggles of the time and look at the reasons for their existence.

Identity: Youth and Crisis collects Erik H. Erikson's major essays on topics originating in the concept of the adolescent identity crisis. Identity, Erikson writes, is an unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. It deals with a process that is located both in the core of the individual and in the core of the communal culture. As the culture changes, new kinds of identity questions arise—Erikson comments, for example, on issues of social protest and changing gender roles that were particular to the 1960s. Representing two decades of groundbreaking work, the essays are not so much a systematic formulation of theory as an evolving report that is both clinical and theoretical. The subjects range from "creative confusion" in two famous lives—the dramatist George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher William James—to the connection between individual struggles and social order. "Race and the Wider Identity" and the controversial "Womanhood and the Inner Space" are included in the collection.

In this book, Charles R. Acland examines the culture that has produced both our heightened state of awareness and the bedrock reality of youth violence in the United States. Beginning with a critique of statistical evidence of youth violence, Acland compares and juxtaposes a variety of popular cultural representations of what has come to be a perceived crisis of American youth. After examining the dominant paradigms for scholarly research into youth deviance, Acland explores the ideas circulating in the popular media about a sensational crime known as the "preppy murder" and the confession to that crime. Arguing that the meaning of crime is never inherent in the event itself, he evaluates other sites of representation, including newspaper photographs (with a comparison to the Central Park "wilding"), daytime television talk shows (Oprah, Geraldo, and Donahue), and Hollywood youth films (in particular River's Edge). Through a cultural studies analysis of historical context, Acland blurs the center of our preconceptions and exposes the complex social forces at work upon this issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Acland asks of the social critic, "How do we know that we are measuring what we say we are measuring, and how do we know what the numbers are saying? Arguments must be made to interpret findings, which suggests that conclusions are provisional and, to various degrees, sites of contestation." He launches into this gratifying book to show that beyond the problematic category of "actual" crime, the United States has seen the construction of a new "spectacle of wasted youth" that will have specific consequences for the daily lives of the next generation.