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Popular explanations for the terror Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked on their Colorado high school often mention bullying. But Dave Cullen has been following the story since that deadly day, and in his new book, Columbine, he reveals the real story of their rampage.

In his interview with Neal Conan, Cullen warns of the pitfalls of reaching quick conclusions about the “why” behind tragedies like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. “Key information doesn’t come out for months or even years,” he cautions, “so if you start to come to a determination of why within hours, it may be years before you have the information to make that conclusion.”

Cullen does believe, however, that in the years since Columbine, “people have been much much better about just holding off and saying, ‘we don’t know why yet.'”

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Authors of an ambitious survey of hazing in colleges and universities have turned their attention to high schools and discovered that many freshmen arrive on campus with experience ”” with 47% reporting getting hazed in high school.

As in college, high school hazing pervaded groups from sports teams to the yearbook staff and performing arts, according to professors Elizabeth Allan and Mary Madden of the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development.

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Apparently, the thing [after the Columbine killing spree] to do was to look not at the largest questions posed by the incident but rather at its particulars and to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy toward any behavior that seemed to mimic them. The result was a longish, culturally embarrassing interlude when kindergartners could get tossed out of school for bringing a nail clipper in a backpack. We began to look like a nation of adults who were terrified of our smallest children.

The one aspect of Columbine that seemed unworthy of examination — when it came to pondering the policy changes that might actually make American schools safer places — was the fact that the two killers had a long track record of doing exactly what deeply disturbed teenage boys have been doing since time out of mind: getting in trouble — lots of it — with authority.

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Eighth-grader Savana Redding was scared and confused when an assistant principal searching for drugs ordered her out of math class, searched her backpack and then instructed an administrative aide and school nurse to conduct a strip search.

“I went into the nurse’s office and kept following what they asked me to do,” Savana, now 19, recalls of the incident six years ago that she says still leaves her shaken and humiliated. “I thought, ‘What could I be in trouble for?’ ”

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William Pollack, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who wrote “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood” (Owl Books, 1999), argues that the way we talk to boys and young men about sex often stereotypes them and hurts their feelings.

“One boy said, ”˜They treat us like we’re perpetrators ”” we have sexual needs but we also have other needs,’ ” Dr. Pollack told me.

Somehow, there has to be a way to talk about sex and relationships beyond the anatomical details, and a way to discuss what happens in school and what happens on the cover of People magazine.

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I understand the frustration of adults who see kids doing things like this with no comprehension of the possible outcomes. That New Jersey teen may have intended those nude photos for her boyfriend (disturbing in and of itself), but she didn’t seem to grasp that once those images were out in cyberspace, there would be no controlling where they went.

This is where the debate over who’s really to blame begins to rage. It’s the kids’ fault for being so stupid. It’s the parents’ fault for not raising them with decent values or knowing what their offspring are up to. It’s the media’s fault for producing an endless flood of sexual imagery selling everything from music to breath mints. It’s the youth culture’s fault for normalizing the public sharing of every private thought and act. It’s the computer geniuses’ fault for building an infinite network that has spawned a viral world of unintended consequences.
There may be some truth in all of these. But teens have been known to foil the best intentions of their parents, and the media techno-genies are out of the bottle and not about to go back in.

Surely there is a better way to impress upon kids the importance of exercising common sense than by threatening to make them pariahs for life. “Re-education” classes are probably a good idea, but not under the threat of prosecution, which tends to create a fair amount of resistance.

Read it all. Interestingly, retired South Carolina Bishop Edward Salmon visited the parish which I serve this past Sunday and raised this very (uncomfrotable) subject during his adult Sunday school class–KSH.

Nearly seven in 10 high school students say the struggling economy has affected where they applied to college this year, a survey out today shows.

And yes, they are stressed about it. Most students will find out this month where they have been accepted. The biggest concern: that they will get admitted into the school they most want to attend but won’t be able to for financial reasons.

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The singing of songs at rugby grounds is not something normally associated with demure young mezzo-sopranos, but the one who will give voice to the national anthem at the England v France match at Twickenham today is different. Very different.

Faryl Smith is just 13, but already a double record-breaker, and seemingly set to be an even bigger sensation than Charlotte Church when she burst on to the scene aged 11.

Smith’s £2.3m recording contract was the biggest ever awarded to someone of her age, and since the resulting album was released a week ago, it has become the fastest-selling solo classical debut in chart history.

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A portrait of a troubled, depressed teenager with easy access to an unsecured pistol has begun to emerge in the days after the youth went on a rampage, killing 15 people before taking his own life.

The police have established that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, 17, last year broke off a round of psychological counseling for depression.

Searching his bedroom, the police found violent computer games ”” in which, experts say, players digitally clothe and arm themselves for combat ”” plus brutal videos and play weapons that fire small yellow pellets, said Siegfried Mahler of the Stuttgart prosecutors’ office.

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As high school hallways and the entertainment press are abuzz about the alleged beating of pop star Rihanna at the hands of her pop star boyfriend, Chris Brown, some state lawmakers plan to send a message that dating violence is never acceptable.

Wednesday, a committee of senators approved a bill requiring the state Department of Education to train school personnel and students to recognize the signs of abusive relationships.

“A lot of young people have no idea what is the appropriate response to dating violence,” said Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, who is the chief sponsor of the Senate bill. “They sure wouldn’t be able to figure it out by the media and what they see on television.”

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What to say to all this?

First, to give him his due, [Michael] Medved does provide an important corrective. In every age there are two extremes: Those who see nothing wrong with the times they live in, and those who see their times as hopeless.

We religious folks tend to fall into the second extreme. We romanticize history and forget that other ages were also marked by grievous sins: Feudalism was a nightmare system of oppression; the Industrial Revolution turned human beings into cogs; the casual racism of the beginning of the 20th century makes us wince when we glimpse it. We have abortion; our forefathers had slavery. We objectify women with pornography; others did it by denying them rights.

But second, the moral crisis we pointed to didn’t depend on rising teen sex rates. What about child sexual abuse? What about pornography? What about suicide rates? We did mention that casual sex is common from a young age, and I think that’s a justifiable thing to point out: The rates may have dropped, but calling their drop “dramatic” doesn’t change the fact that they are still very high.

And third, as Pope John Paul II and others have pointed out, the greatest sin in our day isn’t any particular sin, but the loss of the sense of sin.

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But perhaps the problem is not so much this ‘me culture’, but the lack of another ‘me culture’. Yesterday, the social commentator Polly Toynbee said on this programme that good sex education was about giving girls the chance to say “no”. It is interesting that girls, post-feminism, should not be able to stand up for themselves. Yet sexual freedom appears to have made it harder for them to admit they don’t want to have sex, especially when they are bombarded with sexual imagery, and pressured by their peers into believing it’s great to be having sex.

Young people often lack confidence, and young teenage girls in particular can lack self-esteem. There’s certainly a ‘me culture’ today that’s an entirely self-centred one. But there’s another ‘me culture’ that’s about having regard for yourself, having a strong sense of your own worth. When people quote Christ saying love your neighbour as yourself, the emphasis is usually on how you treat others. But his words also make clear that you cannot reach out to others unless you love yourself.

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Fewer and fewer teenagers are attending church, the most recent statistics from the Church of England reveal. Although overall attendance numbers have remained largely steady since the millennium, provisional figures for 2007 show that the overall drop in attendance by under-16s has increased by four per cent over the previous year.

The statistics found that among children and young people around 9,000 less were attending Church of England churches on a weekly basis. Records show that in 2006, approximately 228,000 children and young people attended whereas in 2007 the figure was down to 219,000. The numbers are more alarming if compared to 2005 which recorded 232,000 children and young people as attending church. Meanwhile the same figures for monthly attendance fell even more with just 424,000 attending in 2007 compared to 442,000 and 444,000 in 2006 and 2005 respectively.

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“Personally I like talking to a lot of people at a time,” says Amelia, a Pittsburgh area teen. “It kind of keeps you busy. It’s kind of boring just talking to one person cause then like”¦you can’t talk to anyone else.”

–Diane F. Halpern and Susan E. Murphy, From Work-family Balance to Work-family Interaction: Changing the Metaphor (Routledge, 2002), page 145

Lengthy television viewing in adolescence may raise the risk for depression in young adulthood, according to a new report.

The study, in the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, published by the American Medical Association, found a rising risk of depressive symptoms with increasing hours spent watching television.

There was no association of depression with exposure to computer games, videocassettes or radio.

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The prepubescent children of days gone by have given way to a cooler kid ”” the tween ”” who aspires to teenhood but is not quite there yet.

Tweens are in-between ”” generally the 8-to-12 set. The U.S. Census estimates that in 2009, tweens are about 20 million strong and projected to hit almost 23 million by 2020.

Among them now are Malia Obama, at 10 already a tween, and sister Sasha, who turns 8 this year. With the Obama daughters in the White House, the nation’s attention will focus even more on this emerging group ”” and the new “first tweens” will likely be high-profile representatives of their generation.

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[TIM] O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes ”” like armed robbery ”” can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.

Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So what we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him. So we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.

(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?

Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children….

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“We are identifying teen dating abuse and violence more than ever,” said Dr. Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, who began doing research on abuse in teenage dating relationships nearly a decade ago.

Dr. Miller cited a survey last year of children ages 11 to 14 by Liz Claiborne Inc., a clothing retailer that finances teenage dating research, in which a quarter of the 1,000 respondents said they had been called names, harassed or ridiculed by their romantic partner by phone call or text message, often between midnight and 5 a.m., when their parents are sleeping.

Such behavior often falls under the radar of parents, teachers and counselors because adolescents are too embarrassed to admit they are being mistreated.

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Despite a multi-million pound Teenage Pregnancy Strategy the number of girls under 16 falling pregnant has remained almost static over the last four years.

In the worst areas one in every 66 underage girls becomes pregnant while still at school – giving England and Wales one of the highest teenage birth rates in Western Europe.

The figures were released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Of the 21 who become pregnant each day, nine will go on to have the baby while the other 12 have an abortion.

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Each year, approximately one child in every 150 is diagnosed with autism. Eleven-year-old Andrew Skillings is one of those children. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism.

For Andrew’s older sister Marissa, her brother’s diagnosis has affected every aspect of her life from the time he was born. She was almost 5 and shared a room with Andrew. Marissa says she remembers those first few weeks he was home.

“I decided he needed to go back where he came from, because as a baby he never, ever stopped screaming,” she says.

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Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.

As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.

So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.

“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”

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They played the oddest game in high school football history last month down in Grapevine, Texas.

It was Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School and everything about it was upside down. For instance, when Gainesville came out to take the field, the Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for them to run through.

Did you hear that? The other team’s fans?….

“I never in my life thought I’d hear people cheering for us to hit their kids,” recalls Gainesville’s QB and middle linebacker, Isaiah. “I wouldn’t expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids. But they wanted us to!”

Makes the heart very glad–read it all (Hat tip: TCW).

The Legislature sparked national debate two years ago when it passed a law allowing all Georgia high schools to teach about the Bible.

But few schools are teaching state-approved Bible elective classes, because leaders say students aren’t interested in the nondevotional course and school districts fear lawsuits if it is taught wrong.

The 2006 bill ignited a loud debate over the difference between preaching and teaching. Many questioned whether schools could teach the history and literature of the Old and New Testaments without proselytizing.

The rollout of the program has been quiet.

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The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

(For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)

According to a report released this spring by Child Trends, a Washington research group, there are now more high school seniors saying that they never date than seniors who say that they date frequently. Apparently, it’s all about the hookup.

When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm.

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Other results noted by the institute included:

— More then eight in 10 students — 83 percent — admitted that they lied to a parent about an issue of some importance, while 43 percent of the students in public and private schools said that they have lied to save money.

— In a 2006 survey, 60 percent of the students said they cheated on at least one test and 35 percent cheated two or more times. This year, the numbers rose to 64 percent and 38 percent on the same issues.

— The Internet makes plagiarism easy, with 36 percent of the students confessing that vice — up from 33 percent in 2004.

— Self-esteem is not a problem, since 93 percent of the students reported that their ethics and character were satisfactory and, in a popular quote from the survey, 77 percent said that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”

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Abuse of prescription drugs continues to be a major problem among teenagers although fewer of them are smoking cigarettes, according to the 2008 Monitoring the Future survey released today.

The survey, which has been conducted for 33 years, found that nearly 10% of high school seniors reported nonmedical use of Vicodin and 4.7% reported abusing OxyContin. Both are strong opioid pain pills. Seven of the top 10 drugs abused by high school seniors were prescription or over-the-counter medications.

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Passing a flirtatious note to get someone’s attention is so yesterday. These days, young people use technology instead.

About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they’ve sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be “fun or flirtatious,” a survey finds.

A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they’ve seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they’ve sent suggestive text messages.

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