Possibly Triggery: What Is Happening To Our Kids?

[Kobi]

TRIGGER: discussion of child abuse and violence against children


I am noticing a lot more stuff in the news about stuff happening to kids in the USA. It's troublesome. I dont know if stuff is happening more or if I am just paying more attention to it.

Just boggles my mind what kids today have to deal with.

So, I thought it might be helpful to keep track of it for a while. I found this today:
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‘Am I Ugly’ Videos Spark Disturbing YouTube Trend

It seems perfectly natural that we value others' opinions of us. People seek feedback. Post a picture, make a comment, "like" us. In this world where everything seems instantly shareable or share-worthy, it is hard to know what to keep to ourselves. A troubling new trend making its way around YouTube has many people begging the question: "Are we obsessed with others' opinions of us?" A search of the phrase "Am I Ugly" on YouTube yields dozens of videos of young girls asking the anonymous, and notoriously judgmental, YouTube community to judge how they look.

Many of the videos have thousands of comments, which range from the nice end of the spectrum with encouraging words, all the way to the extremely cruel with comments that need not be repeated. In one of the more polite comments, someone tells a girl that she is pretty and that she should just focus on doing her homework. Some people suggest that the girls are just fishing for compliments or wanting attention from anyone who is willing to give it.

Trending Now spoke to New York-based child psychiatrist Francisco Gonzalez-Franco, who told us that on a basic level, the videos are "a masochistic way to diminish their anxiety." Gonzalez-Franco adds that the girls feel incomplete, and they want people to confirm their fear that they are ugly. If people confirm it, even though they may be strangers, the girls may stop seeking that confirmation, he said. Gonzelez-Franco does insist that the girls should seek help from friends or family instead. He said the last place girls should be looking for validation is from YouTube commenters.

This is not the first open forum in which girls have asked strangers for feedback on themselves. Popular website Formspring welcomes anonymous replies to open questions that people ask. The topics usually end with similar results as the disturbing "Am I Ugly" trend. Unfortunately, people make cruel comments knowing they may never be identified. Some people believe this is taking cyberbullying to a new level, and could have tragic consequences.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending...171407972.html

[Kobi]

ATTALLA, Ala. (AP) — Roger Simpson said he looked down the road and saw a little girl running outside her home but didn't give it another thought. Police, however, said the man witnessed a murder in progress.

Authorities say 9-year-old Savannah Hardin died after being forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her grandmother about eating candy bars. Severely dehydrated, the girl had a seizure and died days later. Now, her grandmother and stepmother who police say meted out the punishment were taken to jail Wednesday and face murder charges.

Witnesses told deputies Savannah was told to run and not allowed to stop for three hours on Friday, an Etowah County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman said. The girl's stepmother, 27-year-old Jessica Mae Hardin, called police at 6:45 p.m., telling them Savannah was having a seizure and was unresponsive.

Simpson said he saw a little girl running at around 4 p.m., but didn't see anybody chasing or coercing her.

"I saw her running down there, that's what I told the detectives," Simpson said from his home on a hill overlooking the Hardins. "But I don't see how that would kill her."

Authorities are still trying to determine whether Savannah was forced to run by physical coercion or by verbal commands. Deputies were told the girl was made to run after lying to her grandmother, 46-year-old Joyce Hardin Garrard, about having eaten the candy, sheriff's office spokeswoman Natalie Barton said.

Savannah Hardin died Monday at Children's Hospital in Birmingham, according to a news release from the sheriff's office. The sheriff's release said an autopsy report showed the girl was extremely dehydrated and had a very low sodium level. A state pathologist ruled it a homicide.

Full Story

[Kobi]

(AP) — A female high school Spanish teacher in Los Angeles was arrested after two male students said they had sex with her, police said Thursday.

Gabriela Cortez, 42, of Montebello, was arrested late Wednesday on suspicion of two felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, said Montebello police Lt. Luis Lopez.

Cortez was arrested after an 18-year-old youth went to the police station last week and reported that he had a sexual relationship with her from 2008 to 2010 while he was a student at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, where Cortez taught Spanish, Lopez said.

During the interview with detectives, another student was mentioned. That student later told detectives that he also had sexual relations with Cortez at her home in Montebello, a suburb of Los Angeles east of downtown, Lopez said. Both youths have since graduated.

The first student came forward because his conscience was bothering him, Lopez said.

Cortez, whose arrest was first reported by KTTV-TV, was released on $140,000 bail and placed on administrative leave from her job. She could not be reached for comment. She is scheduled to appear in court on March 22.

The arrest was the seventh involving allegations of sexual misconduct between students and Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and school employees in the past month.

The uptick in arrests comes in the wake of a particularly egregious case of alleged sexual abuse of students at a South Los Angeles elementary school that roiled the district last month. The arrest of former third-grade teacher Mark Berndt, 61, who was charged with 23 counts of lewdness for allegedly feeding children his semen on cookies, blindfolding and gagging them as he took pictures, spurred a flood of reports of other cases to law enforcement.

One resulted in the arrest of a second teacher at the same school on a charge of fondling a second-grader.

The scandal has since expanded with the discovery this week that the district failed to report Berndt and another former teacher, George Hernandez, charged with molesting children to the California Teacher Credentialing Commission.

District Superintendent John Deasy has ordered officials to comb through the past four years of cases of teachers charged with misconduct to ensure they have all been reported to the commission.

In the Hernandez case, he was later hired by the Inglewood Unified School District after the commission showed he had a clean disciplinary record. He is now charged with sexually assaulting a student there and is believed to have fled to Mexico.

http://news.yahoo.com/la-teacher-arr...175715197.html

[girl_dee]

This is why i refuse to watch the news, including the God awful CNN.... of course i stay in touch but i also believe there is a lot of good in the world which of course never makes the news.

I think when there is a lot less going on in the world these stories make the news, i don't think it ever stops happening.

makes me ill !

[The_Lady_Snow]

I firmly believe pedophiles have made lower income, Latino populated, single parent/working parent household and social networks the sick pedophile playground that we are starting to hear of now.

It's chilling and it upsets me to the core how many children of color are being hurt by these monsters...

[girl_dee]

Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow

I firmly believe pedophiles have made lower income, Latino populated, single parent/working parent household and social networks the sick pedophile playground that we are starting to hear of now.

It's chilling and it upsets me to the core how many children of color are being hurt by these monsters...

yup and i KNOW for a fact this is true about the single parent homes and kids with low self esteem...they think with no dad around to kick their sorry ass it will be easier for them if and when they get caught.

[aishah]

that and poor people and people of color can't exactly reach out to the police or other institutions for help as readily. so we're easy targets. same reason there's such a high rate of child abuse towards indigenous kids and kids with disabilities.

i think part of why it seems this might be occuring more often is just that it's becoming more visible - which i believe is a really good thing (and i work on some initiatives to make bullying and other forms of violence more visible in my work with youth). in order for anything to happen, people have to first be aware that there is even a problem and it's one so big that it can't be ignored anymore.

http://www.generationfive.org/ is an amazing org that's working to end child sexual abuse. they're definitely worth checking out.

[apretty]

It would have been nice for you to post a warning on this thread.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by apretty

It would have been nice for you to post a warning on this thread.

A warning? In regards to what? I'm missing something here.

[Corkey]

Possible triggery subject is my guess.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Corkey

Possible triggery subject is my guess.

Oh. Sorry, didnt think of that. Good point. Will correct.

[aishah]

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning

this link has more info on trigger warnings. usually it's customary to say something like TRIGGER: discussion of child abuse and violence against children - it's necessary to add the topic just so people know what the thread is about or what might be triggering if they want to avoid it.

hope this helps

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by aishah

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning

this link has more info on trigger warnings. usually it's customary to say something like TRIGGER: discussion of child abuse and violence against children - it's necessary to add the topic just so people know what the thread is about or what might be triggering if they want to avoid it.

hope this helps

Thank you. My apologies for not thinking of this at the time. Waiting to hear back from Medusa seeing they need to ammend it. Too late for me to change it myself.

[Kobi]

Medusa is working on it. Again my apologies.

[Glenn]

These three news stories promulgate society/teachers/parents has having complete and total control over the minds, bodies, and souls of young folk's id's and personalities. This breeds low self esteem, and anger issues which can find a comfortable nest in any of the personality disorders, s/m, and anxiety/conversion disorders. Also forensic psychiatry has estimated up to 55% of these folks to have inate temporal lobe abnormalities. The cause of the rise, in the words of my psychology professor, "Jerkettes are breeding jerkinas."

[Gemme]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...6pLid%3D138119

This happened where I lived for more than 4 years. Our town was known for a few things: being a military town, having a huge shipyard that people from all over the world worked damn hard to get into, being the hometown of Sir Mix-a-lot, and for being about an hour outside of Seattle.

Now, this.

What are parents TEACHING their children? I see that the uncle is the legal guardian, and obviously there was a good reason for it, but yet....it's like this kid was doomed to do something stupid.

[girl_dee]

No what's worse than a kid getting hurt by someone?

a kid getting hurt by someone they trust.


ANY abuse is bad, no doubt, but i feel when a person we are supposed to trust violates the relationship, a teacher, the clergy, a parent the damage is way worse.

[Kobi]

As a father to three young girls, I have been particularly struck over the past several months by the flurry of public activity related to childhood obesity.

Like most parents, I have been aware of our country’s epidemic for a number of years, but I haven’t seen this kind of concentrated attention since the early 2000s. While the efforts are well-intentioned, it’s worrisome to watch the movement gain logarithmic momentum when we still don’t really know whether what we’re doing is actually working — nor do we really know if there will be any downsides to the anti-obesity initiative.

The most recent major move in the fight against childhood obesity came on Jan. 25 when First Lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that school meal options were going to get a lot healthier. This represented the first major shift in school nutrition policy in 15 years. It is, undoubtedly, a good idea to make school lunches more nutritious, although some research suggests that by the time a child gets to school, his or her tastes for high calorie or otherwise unhealthy food is already in place and that changing lunch doesn’t make them eat healthier at home. In other words, school-based initiatives may be too little too late for those children who may be predisposed, whether through genetics or environment or both, towards obesity. Which brings us to another problem with the “fight”—it doesn’t target those most at risk.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 17% of all children and adolescents in the U.S. are obese. Yet the majority of obesity programming, especially in our schools, is applied to the child and adolescent populations as a whole. Sure, promoting healthy eating, regardless of one’s weight or age, seems like a positive thing on the surface. But here’s the potential downside: We know kids and teens react differently than adults to external pressures like persistent messaging. Sometimes these pressures can translate into incredible waves of anxiety and fear. At the extreme, a healthy-weight youth could be pushed to monitor his weight more frequently or even begin an unsupervised diet — behaviors that might represent an impending eating disorder.

So the real question is what are children saying and how are they behaving in light of our anti-obesity effort? A nationally representative survey, conducted last September by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, attempted to answer this question. The results, released in January, showed that 30% of parents of children age 6-14 report worrisome eating behaviors and physical activity in their children; 17% of parents report that their children are worried about their weight; 7% say their children have been made to feel bad at school about what or how much they were eating; and 3% of parents report their children had a sudden interest in vegetarianism. Certainly these data do not directly link the anti-obesity effort and eating disorders. They also do not offer any insight into whether obese children are actually losing weight. They do, however, serve as a reminder of how vulnerable these “worried” children already are to disordered eating and that everything we do, no matter how well-placed our intent, carries risk.

Some programs have already come under criticism for being too harsh. Strong4Life.com, an Atlanta-based childhood-antiobesity organization, recently launched an advertising campaign that has attracted national and international attention because of its stark images of obese children. Critics said that the images might serve more to ostracize overweight kids than to help them. And, there’s no telling how kids with already-fragile body-images, whether they are overweight or at a healthy weight, might be affected by such a campaign.

With that said, we shouldn’t stop promoting healthy eating habits in our children. And we shouldn’t necessarily downplay our anti-obesity efforts for fear of increasing the rate of childhood eating disorders. Instead, we should just be mindful — as parents and as organizations — of a potentially evolving, complex situation. At the most basic action level, this might mean making the warning signs of an impending eating disorder more accessible to all of us. A simple notation, for example, on a childhood obesity website (like Let’s Move or Strong4Life) of what parents should look for takes little effort and could have a significant impact. And, on a more advanced level, striving to tailor and target our efforts to those kids who need it most should be a priority.

In the end, this is about health and food. But, more importantly, it’s about our children. With their wonderful and special abilities as well as their unpredictabilities, they surely deserve an approach and awareness that is as well-thought out and balanced as the meals we’d like them to eat.



Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/21/is-...#ixzz1nP7SnWGk

[Kobi]

On Wednesday afternoon, when I asked my 14-year-old daughter Julia what she’d done that day at school, she said she’d learned about relationship violence and self-defense.

This, I thought, was time well spent.

Julia’s school is a short hop across the Potomac from the Landon School, the prestigious all-boys prep school in Bethesda, Md., formerly attended by George Huguely V, who was convicted Feb. 22 of second degree murder in the beating death of his on-and-off girlfriend Yeardley Love, who died in May 2010, shortly before the pair, both lacrosse players, were due to graduate from the University of Virginia.

“Landon boys” are a big topic of conversation in Julia’s world. They’re said to be really bad news: good-looking and rich and often super-athletic but also (and here the eyes of the speaker widen with a mixture of delight and fear) entitled, obnoxious, even dangerous.

You never drink from a cup offered by a Landon boy, say these girls, who don’t necessarily know any Landon boys and aren’t necessarily up on the news of Huguely and Love but have heard about the school’s 2002 SAT cheating scandal, in which eight lacrosse players were suspended and two other students withdrew under threat of expulsion. Many have also heard some version of a story about a “fantasy girls league” game allegedly concocted by some former 9th-graders planning to compete to win — and chart their progress winning — certain girls’ sexual favors.

“It isn’t fair to prejudge a whole group of guys because of the bad behavior of a few,” is the kind of thing I say to her and her friends, and I try to actually believe it. For it’s true we shouldn’t prejudge people like Landon lacrosse players, who count among their former ranks not just Huguely and most of the Landon SAT scammers but five of the rowdy revelers on the Duke University lacrosse team accused — and exonerated — of having raped a stripper in 2006. We shouldn’t give in to blanket prejudice about their parents or their coaches (one of whom took the boys out for a good time at Hooters) or school administrators who parents have accused of treating misbehavior by deep-pocketed athletes with much greater leniency than similar acts by less high-ranking boys. (Landon denies any unfair treatment of students and a lawsuit by the family of one of the boys who withdrew from the school under threat of expulsion over the SAT cheating incident in which they claimed that their son was defamed was later dismissed.)

Despite all that, I stick by my “don’t judge frat boys and jocks by their labels” stance. But it’s not out of some abstract desire to do the right thing; it’s a gut level urge to protect my daughters from ending up like Love or the singer Rihanna, beaten black and blue by her former boyfriend Chris Brown before the Grammys in 2009 or any of the 1 in 4 women who experience domestic violence in their lifetimes or one of the approximately 1 in 5 female high school students who reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a person she’s dating.

This is a matter of practicality: I don’t think it’s at all useful, in the sense of being proactively protective, to point fingers at a group and say those kinds of boys (or men) do these kinds of things. Doing so both normalizes bad behavior and attitudes (like binge drinking or the disrespect of women) and creates a false sense of security. Avoid lacrosse players or entitled rich guys or guys covered in muscles who drink a lot, girls might think, and you’re safe.

The real message to our daughters from the Huguely/Love tragedy out to be instead: avoid sick guys, whose problems manifest themselves in verbally or physically abusive ways. And if you’re not sure whether an angry outburst crosses the line, ask someone you trust. Preferably a parent. Assuming, that is, that your parent is able to recognize and acknowledge out-of-bounds behavior in the first place, which, unfortunately, isn’t always a given.

That’s another message we have to take in from this sad story: mothers (and fathers) have to force themselves to look hard at themselves and their homes and be willing and able to identify and stop sickness there before it gets replicated in the next generation and spreads to other families. Girls need to know what being safe and respected looks and feels like. If their mothers don’t know, they need to push themselves to learn.

There doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of that sort of self-and-other awareness going on in George Huguely’s home. His father, George Huguely IV, described to a reporter by friends as a barfly, was accused by his ex-wife Marta of physically barging into the family home to reassert his dominion according to divorce court records acquired by Washingtonian magazine. George V, who beat his way through Love’s door before assaulting her on her last night, was a young boy at the time of that incident. On the morning of the murder, his former teammate later testified that George had started drinking while out playing golf with his father and was visibly intoxicated by the time they left the golf course. George later admitted to having at least 15 drinks on the day of the murder.

In the wake of Love’s death, the Landon School embarked upon an extended period of “self-examination,” the Washington Post reported in 2010. The University of Virginia began a “Are you your sister’s or brother’s keeper?” awareness campaign, and students launched a program aimed at training their peers in recognizing and combating alcohol abuse and relationship violence. These are undoubtedly good things and will, one hopes, raise awareness in such a way that students in the future who see a friend veering down a self-destructive path will speak out to their teachers, coaches and school counselors. But the most meaningful intervention that could have changed the course of the lives of these two particular UVa students would have been for Huguely’s parents to have recognized the pathology making its way down the family line and to have forced their son to seek help while he was still a minor, and they still had the ability to do so.

Unfortunately, even today, few parents, particularly in the privileged and status-obsessed sorts of milieus in which Love and Huguely were raised, are willing to look hard at the ugly problems playing out amidst the hustle-bustle of their everyday family lives. No matter how much our awareness and knowledge of domestic violence and mental illness have evolved in recent decades, it’s still all too common to shrug off verbal abuse as Mommy or Daddy’s “bad mood.” Too easy to dismiss night after night of nonstop drinking as a way to “relax” after a hard work day. Too common still to shrug off unacceptable behavior — red flag sorts of behavior — as boys-will-be-boys hijinks.

Girls are forever, it seems, attracted to boys’ “swagger” and “prankster ways,” as the Washingtonian’s Harry Jaffe described the traits that drew Love to Huguely. That’s fine — so long as we adults make sure to draw an immoveable line in the sand between what’s fun and what’s just plain sick.


Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/24/the...#ixzz1nP9K6CzR

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Glenn

These three news stories promulgate society/teachers/parents has having complete and total control over the minds, bodies, and souls of young folk's id's and personalities. This breeds low self esteem, and anger issues which can find a comfortable nest in any of the personality disorders, s/m, and anxiety/conversion disorders. Also forensic psychiatry has estimated up to 55% of these folks to have inate temporal lobe abnormalities. The cause of the rise, in the words of my psychology professor, "Jerkettes are breeding jerkinas."

This post has been bugging me for a few days and I cant figure out why.

First off, let me be clear. I do NOT have an issue with Glenn posting it. So Glenn please do not take this personally.

I have an issue with the words of this psychology professor i.e. "Jerkettes are breeding Jerkinas".

I keep trying to figure out why this feels icky to me.

I dont know if it is because I think it is an odd choice of words for a professor to use. It seems very unprofessional to me.

Or if it feels like the use of the word "breeding" and the "Jerkettes" which is making me think only women "breed" so to speak and "ettes" is a female thing. So is this professor calling women jerks? And, in turn, are they blaming women for what their assessment of what is happening to kids in the world?

Or, if it feels like the use of the word "jerkinas" is a derivation of a racial slur and the "ina" part refers to females so is it insulting to women of color? So, would this be directed at just minority persons?

Or, maybe I am in an overly analytical and sensitive mood today. Dunno. Anyone else find this professors choice of words troublesome??