The tragedy of Megan Meier will take another twist Wednesday night when officials in her home town vote on whether to make online harassment a local crime.
Meier is the 13-year-old suburban St. Louis girl who met a cute 16-year-old named Josh Evans last year on the social networking site MySpace. They became close, but suddenly he turned on her, calling her names, saying she was “a bad person and everybody hates you.” Others joined the harassment ”” the barrage culminated in Megan’s Oct. 16, 2006, suicide, just short of her 14th birthday.

Weeks later, Megan’s grieving parents learned that the boy didn’t exist ”” he’d been fabricated by a neighbor, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. The girls had had a falling out, police say, and she wanted to know what Megan was saying about her daughter.

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According to the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, almost 60 percent of teens with a school-age pregnancy drop out of high school. Only 2 percent of teen mothers will graduate from college. Eighty-two percent of children whose parents do not have a high school diploma live in poverty. Seventy-five percent of unmarried teen mothers begin to receive welfare within five years of their first child. Almost 80 percent of fathers to children with teen mothers will not marry the mothers and will pay less than $800 annually in child support. The daughters of teen mothers are three times more likely to become teenage mothers themselves as compared to daughters of mothers ages 20 and 21. The dismal statistics go on and on.

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eople decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed.

Sixty-seven percent support giving contraceptives to students, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many ”” 62% ”” said they believe providing birth control reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.

“Kids are kids,” said Danielle Kessenger, 39, a mother of three young children from Jacksonville, Fla., who supports providing contraceptives to those who request them. “I was a teenager once and parents don’t know everything, though we think we do.”

Yet most who support schools distributing contraceptives prefer that they go to children whose parents have consented. People are also closely divided over whether sex education and birth control are more effective than stressing morality and abstinence, and whether giving contraceptives to teenagers encourages them to have sexual intercourse.

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We’ve spent over two years immersed in high school life, interviewing teens about their sexual experiences. Our research reveals that many teens engage in casual and extreme sexual behavior.

The students told us that many girls and boys raced to have sex before graduation. One girl accepted a ring with the Silver Ring Thing, a youth abstinence program ”” and lost her virginity two weeks later. Many boys believed that stories about sex made “the man.” And a handful of students engaged in sex acts with multiple partners.

Parents might not want to hear these anecdotes, but the motivations behind them need to be addressed on a national and state level, in sex-ed classes and at family dinner tables. Today, teens are bombarded by sex on TV and the Internet, in music and film. In our culture, sex is often depicted as devoid of intimacy, commitment and emotion. But it’s more than popular culture, too. As Perrotta noted in The New York Times: “Speaking as a former teenage guy, the fact that you might someday get lucky was like the only thing getting you through those years. ”¦ It was the basic narrative of male adolescence.”

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Seduction and sensuality aren’t “bad,” just the opposite ”” they are wonderful things that were meant for marriage. So, our children’s response to such things is not something for our kids to feel “guilty” about, but to orient rightly.

What a gift we give our kids when we communicate that to them.

And so, when my children do come across that garbage, I don’t want them to just turn away and say, “I can’t look; it’s wrong.” I want to help them to think: “How sad that God’s gift of sensuality would be used in such a cheap way.”

At the same time, our kids have to understand ”” we have to tell them ”” that they are in a culture that pushes them, particularly our girls, to be hyper-sexualized ”” and it’s all part of the same, empty continuum. A dangerous continuum that will never recognize that sensuality outside of marriage is just not, well, good enough for them.

Now, as a mom to four young kids, I’m not naive to think this orientation offers any magical protection for anyone. But I do think we parents have to parent boldly, and in countless ways stand up against the culture and for our kids. This is one of them.

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“When it’s somebody under age 14, it is a crime and it must be reported,” Anderson said. “The health care provider has no discretion in the matter. It’s up to the district attorney to decide.”

Anderson said she contacted Portland officials after she learned that some employees of the health centers, which are operated by the city’s Public Health Division, believed they could decide whether a child’s sexual activity constituted criminal abuse.

In fact, if a child under age 14 was having consensual sex with someone of a similar age, health center employees weren’t reporting it to the proper authorities, said City Attorney Gary Wood.

Anderson said doctors and other health care providers in private practice may falsely believe they have similar leeway, but they must follow the same laws.

“It’s clear that it’s going on all the time,” Anderson said. “Either the law is going to be enforced or it needs to be changed. I don’t think a law should be routinely violated.”

Portland’s six school-based health centers had no formal policy on reporting sexual activity involving students under age 14, said Douglas Gardner, director of Portland’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Gardner said it’s unclear whether any health center employee failed to report suspected cases to the state Department of Health and Human Services, but they did fail to report cases to Anderson’s office.

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Almost a quarter of teen births in Texas are to girls who have had a baby before, according to a state-by-state analysis of federal birth rate data to be released today.
The U.S. average is 20%. Texas has the highest percentage of repeat births (24%) among girls 15-19; New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont have the lowest (12%), according to Child Trends, a non-profit research group that studied state data from the National Center for Health Statistics for 2004, the most recent year available.

The highest percentages of repeat teen births are in seven states, primarily in the South, the report says. In only four, including Massachusetts (14%), did they account for less than 15%.

“We thought it was really important to highlight such a high percentage of teen births to mothers who already had a child,” says Child Trends researcher Jennifer Manlove. “It’s not on people’s radar screens.”

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At Temple Israel, in this small Massachusetts town, young Tehreem Zaidi begins his talk on Ramadan by reciting from the Koran in Arabic. The teenager then explains to the several hundred guests that the main purpose of this Muslim month of fasting is to “attain God consciousness, and to clean up our lives and our souls.” He does not consider the fast a burden, “but an honor, to thank God for all my blessings.”

Henal Motiwala follows with a vivid description of the Hindu holiday, Navratri, the “nine divine nights” celebrating the victory of good over evil.

And Jennifer Levy tells the story of Sukkot, the joyous Jewish holiday that expresses “appreciation for nature, food on the table, and friends in our lives.”

The three poised high school students are hosting “Sacred Seasons,” an evening of interfaith hospitality, including a dinner they and other teens have prepared for families in Sharon.

As members of Interfaith Action (IFA), they are part of an eight-year-old experiment to create understanding and respect across religious and ethnic divides among youths and to spread that healthy pluralism to the entire community. Their endeavors have captured the attention as a model for people as far away as Canada, Poland, and the Middle East.

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In addition to provoking shame about a nearly universal activity, abstinence-only sex education is ineffective and dangerous. Last April, a 10-year study found that students who took abstinence-only courses were no more likely to abstain from sex than other students. Previous studies revealed that abstinence-only students avoid using contraception.

Programs in public schools teach patently false information like “the chances of getting pregnant with a condom are one out of six” and H.I.V. “may be in your body for a long time (from a few months to as long as 10 years or more) before it can be detected.”

The results are tragic. The United States has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world (about the same as Ukraine’s), and the highest abortion rate in the Western world. Sexually transmitted infections like syphilis and gonorrhea are on the rise for the first time since the 1980s, and chlamydia is being diagnosed twice as often as it was a decade ago.

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In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

Mary Nalls, an 81-year-old retired social worker here, has some thoughts about the matter. Her granddaughter Ashley Jones was 14 when she helped her boyfriend kill her grandfather and aunt ”” Mrs. Nalls’s husband and daughter ”” by stabbing and shooting them and then setting them on fire. Ms. Jones also tried to kill her 10-year-old sister.

Mrs. Nalls, who was badly injured in the rampage, showed a visitor to her home a white scar on her forehead, a reminder of the burns that put her into a coma for 30 days. She had also been shot in the shoulder and stabbed in the chest.

“I forgot,” she said later. “They stabbed me in the jaw, too.”

But Mrs. Nalls thinks her granddaughter, now 22, deserves the possibility of a second chance.

“I believe that she should have gotten 15 or 20 years,” Mrs. Nalls said. “If children are under age, sometimes they’re not responsible for what they do.”

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Adults are often too scared to work with young people for fear of being branded a paedophile, according to a new report.

A survey by Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People revealed that the fear of being accused of harming young people was the main deterrent.

Kathleen Marshall’s study found a shortage of adults prepared to take work roles and volunteering posts.

More than 1,100 people took part in the detailed survey.

Some 48% of adults surveyed said fear of being falsely accused of causing harm was a barrier to contact with children and young people.

This same fear also made adults much less likely to help when they saw a young person in danger or distress.

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Boy: I’ve had no contact with religion anywhere in my upbringing. Both my grandparents were very secular, my parents were very secular, so it’s almost religion to me, and growing up in sort of North Canberra, all my friends have been secular, so it’s almost like an abstract thing for me, I’ve had almost no contact with it throughout my entire life so far. I’ve never been to Church, like to a mass, or anything like that. So I suppose it’s all a bit of an intellectual thing, I don’t think religion is a particularly good force, I think it does a lot of bad in the world, sort of increases I suppose intolerance and bigotry in sort of within the community. But on the other hand people can believe what they want, I just don’t think it has a particularly positive force on lots of parts of society anyway.

I think don’t that the sort of moral high ground that religion proposes is valid at all in our society, I think most of the things have come despite religion through free thinkers and those things, and I don’t think the individualistic thing, I think that it’s equally there especially in Judaeo Christian religions, there’s that real focus on individual morality and individual sinning, it doesn’t see the wider picture, so I mean while everyone here at this table might be living in sin in terms of religious ideas, I think most of us want to try and make the world a better place.

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Teach the apostolic faith full on”¦no compromises on basic doctrine or dogma. This generation of college students can smell an intellectual/spiritual weasel a hundred miles away. They would rather hear the bald-faced Truth and struggle with it than listen to a priest/minister try to sugar-coat a difficult teaching in the vain search for popularity or “hipness.”

Preach the gospel full on”¦ditto. Tell it like it is and let the students grow in holiness. Yes, they will fail. Who doesn’t? But let them fail knowing what Christ and his Church expects of them. Lowering the moral bar comes across as expecting too little from them. What does that say about the Church’s view of our future ecclesial leaders? They can’t cut it, so we have to shorten the race.

Give them charitable work to do”¦present this work as a kind of “churchy social work” and they will not stay away in droves. I regularly cite Matthew 25 as my scriptural backing for asking them to do volunteer work in the community. Frankly, They have been beaten with the Social Justice-Work stick all their lives and most of what they hear sounds like the socio-economic engineering agenda of a modernist, socialist political party. This is attractive to some, but my experience is that students yearn for a chance to do something Truly Good for their community. If their leaders loudly and proudly attach volunteer work to the Gospels as a an exercise in charity rather than an experiment in social engineering, they will come.

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A sharp jump in suicide rates among young Americans has left researchers puzzled as to the cause and wondering what lessons to draw from it. Some researchers are even suggesting that regulatory warnings about the safety of antidepressant drugs might have triggered the problem, leading doctors and their patients to shun potentially life-saving medications.

The new findings on suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds, reported yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are a startling reversal. From 1990 to 2003, the rate fell by more than 28 percent, from 9.48 to 6.78 suicides per 100,000 young people. From 2003 to 2004, the rate jumped back up to 7.32 per 100,000, an increase of 8 percent, the largest single-year rise in 15 years. Whether this is a short-lived increase or the start of a long-term upward trend is not yet clear.

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“You are stupid.” “You are a failure.” “You will never amount to anything in life.”

Young people often hear such messages from others – to the point that they begin to believe these words and feel that way about themselves, according to Ray Buckley, a Native American storyteller and United Methodist layperson from Palmer, Alaska.
“I meet many young people across the world who describe themselves this way, and the sense of some youth in our communities is one of despair,” Buckley said during a workshop focusing on both “names of derision” and how names are sacred during Youth 2007, a July 11-15 event sponsored by the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.

Buckley said he frequently talks with young people who have been told all their lives that they are worthless, that they won’t graduate from high school or college because no one in their family ever has, that their future is to become alcoholics, and that there is no way out of the situation in which they live.

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It’s the question that preachers, teachers and parents dread, especially if they were shaped by the cultural earthquakes of the 1960s.

But no one fears it more than youth ministers, who hear the private questions that young people fear to ask their elders. Youth pastors work in the no man’s land between the home and the church.

This is the question: “Well, didn’t you do any of this stuff when you were a kid?” The young person may be asking about sex, drinking, drugs, cheating or, perhaps, lying to parents about any of the above.

If youth ministers stop and think about it, they will realize that they usually say something like the following while trying to answer these questions, said the Rev. David “Duffy” Robbins, a United Methodist who teaches youth ministry at Eastern University near Philadelphia.

“If I answer that it’s none of your business and the answer is between me and God, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll hear that as a ‘yes,’ ” said Robbins, writing in Good News magazine. “If I answer ‘yes’ to your question, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll take that as permission to make the same mistakes that I’ve made. If, on the other hand, I say ‘no,’ there’s a good possibility that you might reason that then I couldn’t possibly understand what you’re facing or what you’re going through right now.

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From ABC News:

Girls who’ve just barely become women ”” teen idols like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton ”” are also, very often and publicly, barely dressed.

These young stars have tremendous influence over the fashion fantasies of young women and girls.

“It’s just fashion,” said one teen about today’s revealing styles. “Like, we have to fit in.”

Another teen girl said she almost couldn’t avoid dressing immodestly.

“That’s what they see these days,” she said.

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From the Washington Post:

Attending what Muslim American activists say is the highest-level meeting ever between Muslim American youths and U.S. officials, Mohamed Sabur couldn’t help but notice a frustrating paradox.

Part of what motivated the 23-year-old to leave computer science for politics was anger at seeing his community constantly defined by extreme topics such as religious violence. And yet Sabur sat last week through unprecedented meetings with officials from the departments of Homeland Security, State and Justice, and one subject kept coming up: Muslim American youth radicalization.

“I’m trying constantly to figure out: How can I be a civically involved Muslim, interact with other Muslims as well as the government while not seeming like a sellout, like my allegiance is in one camp or another?” the native Minnesotan said Friday, just before dinner on Capitol Hill with the two dozen other participants of the first National Muslim American Youth Summit, which ended yesterday. The summit was organized by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of the largest U.S. Muslim advocacy groups, to expose future leaders to the workings of a government many Muslims feel speaks about them but not to them.

Six years into a serious political and religious awakening prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks, American Muslims know why such meetings haven’t happened before. The community, 65 percent foreign-born, is just starting to build the type of institutions that can produce young Muslim civic leaders (some call this period “embryonic”). On the government side, things were just too brittle for a lot of invitations to be extended, officials say.

But what young Muslim Americans don’t know, summit participants said, is precisely what to do with their newfound drive.

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From the Associated Press:

Fewer high school students are having sex these days, and more are using condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low.

More young people are finishing high school, too, and more little kids are being read to, according to the latest government snapshot on the well-being of the nation’s children. It’s good news on a number of key wellness indicators, experts said of the report being released Friday.

“The implications for the population are quite positive in terms of their health and their well-being,” said Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics. “The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is lower.”

In 2005, 47 percent of high school students ”” 6.7 million ”” reported ever having had sexual intercourse, down from 54 percent in 1991. The rate of those who reported having had sex has remained the same since 2003.

Thirty-four percent of the students reported having had sex during a three-month period in 2005. Of those, 63 percent ”” about 3 million ”” used condoms. That’s up from 46 percent in 1991.

The teen birth rate, the report said, was 21 per 1,000 young women ages 15-17 in 2005 ”” an all-time low. It was down from 39 births per 1,000 teens in 1991.

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In the latest release of the 2006 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) on Tuesday, the Sydney Anglican Diocese’s congregants are getting younger and are being integrated into church life.

The survey showed a significant rise of 4 percent in the current period from 3 percent of total teenage attendants in 2001. This rise is used as a benchmark for Australian Churches.

Reverend Zachary Veron, the incoming YouthWorks CEO, has attributed the rise in youth attendance to the diocese holding the Bible as the ultimate authority and placing an emphasis on sharing the message that Jesus is Lord. On average, he said, this approach had a higher youth attendance compared to a liberal approach.

He told Christian Today Australia: “Anglican churches in Australia which hold the Bible as the ultimate authority over our lives as God’s written word to his created beings, and therefore place an emphasis in their ministry on Bible teaching and sharing the message that Jesus is Lord with others, on average have many more young people attending church than most Anglican churches which have a more ‘liberal’ approach to the Scriptures.”

He also said that if any Anglican churches abandon the authority of the Bible over our lives, then young people will usually abandon them.

Dr Philip Selden, Archbishop Jensen’s Executive Officer, described the latest result as “very encouraging” in the Sydneyanglicans.net, but acknowledged that more work is required since a third of Sydney Anglicans aged between 19 and 25 were not satisfied with their church.

From Christian Today (Australia).

Another commentary about the data regarding religious belief and church growth / decline from Australia can be found here

Baby boomer mothers who take their daughters to the film expecting the classy heroine of their youth will find instead a 99-minute mockumentary of what Martha Stewart must have been like as a tweener. This character is Nancy Drew in name and convertible only. They began filming when actress Emma Roberts was still 14, and she was grounded by her mother for impudence the week before her publicity tour began.
What accounts for Nancy’s newfound youth? Perhaps Hollywood wanted to make her believable to a modern audience.

When Edward Stratemeyer invented the character in the 1930s, Nancy Drew followed the formula of the other books in his fiction factory: no touching, kissing or violence, according to Marvin Heiferman, co-author of “The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys,” which chronicles the series’ success. But when was the last time you saw a chaste 18-year-old in any Hollywood production? Quick, Nancy: Look 13.

In the books, Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s “special friend,” is a hunky college football player. Theirs is a chaste relationship; they dance sometimes and take strolls in the moonlight, but rarely do they even kiss. In the movie, there is no mention of college, and boyish Ned is little more than a sycophantic satellite for Nancy. They share one kiss, and it’s fleeting and sweet, in one of Mr. Fleming’s few nods to the original. But for a movie heroine to be sexually innocent these days, she can’t have graduated from ninth grade yet.

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Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll. The poll also found that they are more likely to say the war in Iraq is heading to a successful conclusion.

The poll offers a snapshot of a group whose energy and idealism have always been as alluring to politicians as its scattered focus and shifting interests have been frustrating. It found that substantially more Americans ages 17 to 29 than four years ago are paying attention to the presidential race. But they appeared to be really familiar with only two of the candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both Democrats.

They have continued a long-term drift away from the Republican Party. And although they are just as worried as the general population about the outlook for the country and think their generation is likely to be worse off than that of their parents, they retain a belief that their votes can make a difference, the poll found.

More than half of Americans ages 17 to 29 ”” 54 percent ”” say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans.

Among this age group, Mr. Bush’s job approval rating after the attacks of Sept. 11 was more than 80 percent. Over the course of the next three years, it drifted downward leading into the presidential election of 2004, when 4 of 10 young Americans said they approved how Mr. Bush was handling his job.

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A 19-year-old virgin walks into a bar. He’s got his lucky cross in his pocket and his best jersey on. Please God, he says to himself, let this be the night. He spies a girl sitting at a table””blonde, wholesome-looking, just his type. He sidles up closer to the girl, who is chatting with some friends. Over the din, he can make out snippets of her conversation: at Bible study the other night ”¦ Pastor Ted says ”¦ saving it for marriage. Discouraged, he walks away in search of a more promising target.

Did he make the correct decision? Or did he make a hasty judgment and miss a chance for a possible love connection? The answer to such a question can be found in Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers by Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. The book is a serious work of sociology based on several comprehensive surveys of young adults, coupled with in-depth interviews. But it could also double as a guide for teenage boys on the prowl (who’s easier, a Catholic girl or a Jew?) or for parents of teenage girls worrying about what will happen if their daughters keep skipping church.

Regnerus goes to some length to justify his unusual pairing of subjects. Most researchers of youth behavior tend to ignore the influence of religion, he argues, and instead focus on other factors””parental input, peer pressure, race, or socioeconomic status. But sex is one area where religion has a strong impact, at least on attitudes. When academics do consider religion, they tend to make lazy assumptions that religious communities are inherently conservative, universally condemn sex, and encourage abstinence. Regnerus complicates the picture by examining the varying attitudes of different religious communities. And while sex surveys are notoriously unreliable, his great innovation is to compare conservative attitudes with actual practices.

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