Our Hostile Society Holds Youths Hostage
Congratulations to Michael Quintanilla for his insightful article, “Looking Bad,” about teens and the complexity of their clothing statement (March 6).
Our teens are deeply affected by violence, and that violence seems to be everywhere: in schools, on the streets, at home and also in entertainment. They simultaneously resist and embrace the violence for the purpose of survival. This contradiction is fundamental to their lives, but not readily apparent to adults.
In a way, the whole youth culture is being held hostage by a hostile society that tolerates an enormous amount of violence in the lives of its children.
What can help us understand this is to look at the way battered women suffer from Hostage (Stockholm) Syndrome. (They) stay with the batterer, identify and accommodate, as they try to figure out how to survive when they have no other place to go.
Children need and deserve more respect from the adults in their lives--parents, teachers, police and politicians--in their struggle to cope with the violence that their elders seem powerless to change.
PATRICIA OCCHIUZZO
GIGGANS
Executive Director
Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women
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