Tag: youth

Black Mothers Are At The Center Of A Fight To Keep Youth Out Of An Adult Prison In Louisiana
IN OTHER NEWS

Black Mothers Are At The Center Of A Fight To Keep Youth Out Of An Adult Prison In Louisiana

Parents and legal advocates in Louisiana — chief among them Black mothers — say a plan to temporarily transfer incarcerated youth to an adult facility once known as “America’s bloodiest prison” will traumatize the children and limit their access to education and rehabilitation opportunities. Under the plan from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, about two dozen juveniles are being transferred from the Bridge City Center for Youth to the Louisiana State Prison at Angola until some time in 2023. According to reports, the first set of youth was transferred this week. Governor Edwards’ office did not immediately respond to The 19th’s request for comment. Angola — which is notorious for its violence — is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States and is named for the former sla...
How Youth Have Changed The Climate Movement
Journalism

How Youth Have Changed The Climate Movement

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children,” affirms the Oglala-Sioux version of a belief common to several indigenous cultures. To David Brower, the “archdruid” founder of Friends of the Earth, and other environmentalists, “stealing it from our children” better characterizes modern humans’ degradation of the earth. The only hope, Brower declared nearly 50 years ago, is “what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.” The youth-led climate strikes in September that drew some 4 million marchers worldwide demand a far broader concept of democracy if the environmental goals they advocate are to be won. The climate-strike revolution represents a huge new step for human rights that expands hierarchical oppressions to include the dim...
Black Youth Yearn For Black Teachers To Disrupt The Daily Silencing Of Their Experiences
EDUCATION

Black Youth Yearn For Black Teachers To Disrupt The Daily Silencing Of Their Experiences

The annual Black History month school assemblies is fading away with February. The 2022 theme picked by the Canadian government for Black History Month, “February and Forever: Celebrating Black History today and every day,” itself is an admission that Black history month is currently a performative annual ritual. Yet the realities raised in Black History month assemblies are year-long priorities requiring proactive enduring action. Black students and families continue to urgently express concerns about something education scholar George Dei documented over 25 years ago: the marginalization of Black youth in schools, absences of Black and African Canadian history and an absence of Black teachers in the classroom. My research drew from data from a study that used Afrocentric approaches to...
A New Study Finds Youth Largely Underestimate The Risks Of Contracting STIs Through Oral Sex
LGBTQ

A New Study Finds Youth Largely Underestimate The Risks Of Contracting STIs Through Oral Sex

Young people are largely unaware of the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, or STIs, through oral sex. That’s the finding of our recent study, published in Annals of Family Medicine. Research and education on oral sex are critical because it is a very common sexual practice. And many STIs are transmitted orally, including herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV). Why it matters The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 85% of sexually active people ages 18 to 44 have engaged in oral sex at least once. A separate survey found that 41% of adolescents ages 15 to 19 reported having oral sex. Historically, research on reducing STI transmission among young people has focused primarily on heterosexual vaginal intercourse rathe...
New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse
LIFESTYLE

New Study Finds In One Urban School District Nearly 10% Of Youth Identify As Gender-Diverse

It seems that more and more teens are identifying as transgender, gender-fluid or nonbinary. But because linguistic and cultural norms are always evolving, it’s been challenging to pin down an exact number.   CC BY-NC-ND The 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 1.8% of high school students identified as transgender. But my team – made up of pediatricians, adolescent medicine specialists and public health researchers – suspected that this study underrepresented the prevalence of gender-diverse youth. That’s because not all people who are gender-diverse – an umbrella term for those whose gender identity does not fully align with the sex they were assigned at birth – identify as “transgender.” So we put tog...
A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet
CULTURE, LGBTQ

A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet

Follow coverage of trans issues, and you’ll hear some people say that teens who change their gender identity are participating in a fad, and that social media is the culprit. As one proponent of legislation that would restrict access to care for trans teens claimed, social media platforms are where trans youths are falsely “convinced” that their feelings of identifying as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth – known as gender dysphoria – are valid. These fears of Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok as breeding grounds for instilling gender dysphoria in young people recall other moral panics over new media, from the Victorian-era paranoia that serialized stories called “penny dreadfuls” were going to incite a youth crime wave to 20th-century anxiety over children’s exposure to v...
Lack Of Training – Doctors Treating Trans Youth Grapple With Uncertainty
HEALTH & WELLNESS, LGBTQ

Lack Of Training – Doctors Treating Trans Youth Grapple With Uncertainty

Last month, the Arkansas Senate passed legislation prohibiting medical providers from offering gender-affirming hormones or surgeries to trans youth. If you were to read the bill – titled the Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act – you might think the law was protecting children from physicians like Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who experimented on Jewish people. “It is of grave concern to the General Assembly,” the text reads, that trans youth are being allowed “to be subjects of irreversible and drastic” treatments “despite the lack of studies showing that the benefits of such extreme interventions outweigh the risks.” This language is at odds with the growing evidence that blocking people from accessing gender-affirming care creates increased risks for social isolation, suicide ...
Youth: A Critical Stage In Life
LIFESTYLE

Youth: A Critical Stage In Life

I enjoy writing to young people like myself not because our old folks know better and do not need the information (which of course they do, and in fact should read it), but because a youthful psyche is one which is easily and readily flexible to both the positive influence (principles, knowledge, truths) about life or the negative appeals in our society. The youthful life is the period where characters are materialized, values are developed and choices are made. The choices and decisions that would transform our lives and even forthcoming generations, in spite of our present dilemma, will be taken during this phase of life. Steven Covey, who was an author and great teacher wrote, "I am not a product of my circumstance. I am a product of my decisions." Hence, the need for enlightenment ...
Youth Turned Out In Droves To Turn The Tide In The 2020 Election
POLITICS

Youth Turned Out In Droves To Turn The Tide In The 2020 Election

Until a few months ago, Ella Chenai Tunduwani saw themselves as the quiet, back-of-the-classroom type, one to offer thoughts privately on the way out the door. Tunduwani, a 14-year-old from Seattle, was already stepping out of their comfort zone by volunteering with Kirsten Harris-Talley’s campaign. Harris-Talley was running for an open seat in Washington’s legislature, and Tuduwani’s leftist politics aligned well with the candidate’s. Tunduwani couldn’t have guessed, but would shortly learn, that they excelled at asking strangers for money. For young volunteers like Tunduwani, campaigning usually means stints phone banking, text messaging, and knocking on doors—the grunt work, basically, that powers politicians of all political shades. Tunduwani did that, and much more. Within weeks of...
Today’s Youth Are Done With It
SOCIAL JUSTICE

Today’s Youth Are Done With It

Climate change has joined racism, sexism, and related aggressions in creating a new dynamic demanding redress of America’s inequalities and defining its divisions. On the Republican right, President Donald Trump’s constituencies pursue restoration of an idealized American “greatness” lionizing the superiority of nativist White, aged, wealthy, Christian, publicly avowed heterosexual men to exploit the environment at will. On the liberal left, an emerging multiracial activism surrounding environmental degradation has become visible. But it isn’t just limited to climate change: mass impoverishment and indebtedness, combined with the dismantlement of education, employment, and shared social systems, is forcing today’s young activists to confront the intergenerational implications of “nowism.”...