Teenagers and Adolescence

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    How Sweden Could End Its Epidemic of Gang Violence

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    We used to believe in Sweden that the rights and well-being of children should always come first. But over the past two decades, a surge in gang violence has shaken that commitment. In 2023, 363 shootings took the lives of 53 people; this year, over 100 bombings stemming from gang violence had already been recorded by November. Our country now has one of the highest per capita rates of gun violence in the European Union. One key factor in the phenomenon: Gangs are grooming and recruiting children as young as 11, the police say, as contract killers.Swedes aged 15 to 17 who commit crimes are usually placed in government-run residential homes instead of prison.Such youth homes have come under scrutiny for mixing children who need housing because of family problems alongside those who have committed serious crimes.A basic tenet of the country’s juvenile justice system was that long prison sentences hurt both children and our society. Until recently, young people who committed crimes were likely to be placed in residential homes, where they received treatment for addiction and mental health disorders. Imprisonment was extremely rare. Offenders ages 18 to 21 often received sentence reductions, known as “youth rebates,” and were also placed in treatment homes.As crime among young people rises, though, the government has moved to toughen sentences for these offenders and eliminate most youth rebates. As a result, two teenage boys were ordered to serve 10 and 12 years in prison in August — the longest sentence Sweden has given to such young people in modern history — after being convicted in connection with a shooting spree that left three dead and injured two others, including a 2-year-old child.Essa Kah Sallah was about 11 years old when he began committing minor crimes. He later founded the Chosen Ones, one of Sweden’s most dangerous gangs. “The gang gives you an illusion of togetherness,” Mr. Sallah said. “But there is no brotherhood, no loyalty — just pointless violence and death.” He left the Chosen Ones four years ago and now works for a program that helps others leave gangs.Politicians have laid the blame for the gang violence on Sweden’s generous refugee policies, and the country has moved to tighten its borders. Some on the far right argue that aggressive repatriation of foreigners, particularly Muslims, is the only solution. And in the aftermath of a deadly shooting this past spring, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced “a kind of inhumane, an animalistic attitude” among the group of youths said to have committed the crime.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Which States Have Passed Bans on Treatment for Transgender Minors?

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      The challenge to a Tennessee law before the Supreme Court this week traces its roots to the spring of 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to pass a law prohibiting gender-transition treatments for minors. Alabama followed in 2022. Tennessee’s was part of a coordinated deluge: Of 28 states where Republicans control the legislature, 24 now restrict doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgery to transgender minors. Two more, New Hampshire and Arizona, ban only surgeries.Why the flood? In exploring the motivation behind Florida’s ban, one federal district judge, Robert Hinkle, concluded that some of the state’s lawmakers acted on “old-fashioned discriminatory animus.” But Republican lawmakers in many states have said that they are seeking to shield adolescents from a path that has become more common, with consequences they are too young to fully comprehend. Republican strategists, for their part, have said that elevating the issue was a winning strategy leading up to the 2024 election.United States v. Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s ban, is one of 18 filed over the last three years, with mixed results. The highest courts in two states, Texas and Nebraska, have upheld their restrictions. By contrast, two federal district judges — Judge Hinkle in Florida and Judge James M. Moody Jr. in Arkansas — struck down bans in those states. But their decisions are being appealed, and preliminary injunctions on enforcement of the bans in Alabama and Indiana, each issued by a federal district judge, were reversed by separate appeals courts. Eleven other cases are in various stages of litigation.How the Supreme Court rules on Skrmetti will almost surely affect how lower courts handle the challenges to similar statutes in states across the country. But the outcome may not be universal.“If Tennessee wins, the states will say ‘Skrmetti controls,’ and vice versa,” said Jim Campbell, chief counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group that is helping to defend Idaho’s ban on transition treatments for minors. “And then the other side, the losing side, will say, ‘No, it’s actually different, and here’s why.’” More

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      Australia Bans Social Media for Everyone Under 16

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      The law sets a minimum age for users of platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. How the restriction will be enforced online remains an open question.Australia has imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16, one of the world’s most comprehensive measures aimed at safeguarding young people from potential hazards online. But many details were still unclear, such as how it will be enforced and what platforms will be covered.After sailing through Parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, the bill passed the Senate on Thursday with bipartisan support. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said that it puts Australia at the vanguard of efforts to protect the mental health and well-being of children from detrimental effects of social media, such as online hate or bullying.The law, he has said, puts the onus on social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Corporations could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (about $32 million) for “systemic” failures to implement age requirements.Neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations. And whether children find ways to get past the restrictions is beside the point, Mr. Albanese said.“We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,” he said in a statement this month.As with many countries’ regulations on alcohol or tobacco, the law will create a new category of “age-restricted social media platforms” accessible only to those 16 and older. How that digital carding will happen, though, is a tricky question.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Kids and Teenagers Are Getting Involved in Elections

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      Teens around the country are volunteering, canvassing and registering voters.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.You have to be 18 years old to vote in national elections. But you don’t have to be 18 to care — or to play a role. Young people can advocate for issues they care about, support candidates and make sure everyone is able to have their ballots counted. Here’s how kids and teens are getting involved in the election before they’re old enough to actually vote in it.Registering New VotersIt bothers Shivansh B., 17, that some people where he lives in Pleasanton, Calif., don’t seem to care much about voting. He wants to make people in his generation more active in democracy. For Shivansh, that means starting now. “I read an article that said that if you can get people to vote in their very first election, they’ll be voting for a lifetime,” he says. So he spent seven months organizing a rally for all 1,100 juniors and seniors at his high school to encourage them to register to vote for the first time. (In California, you can preregister at 16, so as soon as you turn 18 you’re able to vote.) Shivansh says he hopes to create “a ripple effect of people feeling empowered by their government.”Knocking on DoorsFor Bayly H., making a difference requires some serious footwork. The 17-year-old volunteers for her local state representative in Connecticut by canvassing, which means going door to door to speak directly with voters. She reminds them about the upcoming election, asks what issues matter to them and shares how her candidate promises to address their concerns. “You’re going to trust people in your community who have a conversation with you a lot more than you’re going to trust an ad you see on TV,” she says.Helping at the PollsThis Election Day, Maggie M., a high school senior, will be at a middle school that will serve as a voting site near her home in Fairfax, Va. She’ll show people where to cast their ballots, assist with curbside voting and hand out stickers. One thing she learned in a two-hour training session to be a high school election page is that poll workers have to keep their political views to themselves. The job isn’t to influence anyone’s decisions — it’s to make sure everyone has the “opportunity to vote and choose who gets to go into office,” she says. More

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      U.K. Plans Disposable Vape Ban in England

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      The measure, which echoes plans in Scotland and Wales, aims to protect young people’s health and reduce environmental damage.Disposable vapes will be banned in England starting in June under a government plan announced on Thursday, a move aimed at protecting young people’s health and reducing waste.Single-use vapes, which are often sold in brightly colored packaging, have become the “product of choice for the majority of kids vaping today,” Andrew Gwynne, the minister for public health and prevention, said in a government statement.An estimated five million disposable vapes are discarded each week in Britain, according to the government.The proposed ban — which requires the approval of Parliament, where the governing Labour Party holds a large majority — would prevent plastic, lead and mercury from single-use vapes leaching into the environment, the government said.It is also aimed at reducing problems caused by the disposal of lithium-ion batteries. Even when sent to recycling facilities, the government said, the products usually needed to be disassembled by hand, and the batteries posed a fire risk to workers in the waste industry.“Single-use vapes are extremely wasteful and blight our towns and cities,” Mary Creagh, an environment minister, said in the statement, adding that the initiative was part of an effort to combat Britain’s “throwaway culture.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teens Think Movies and TV Shows Have Too Much Sex, Study Finds

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      At least that is what they told researchers at U.C.L.A. The high popularity of romance plots in movies and shows suggests otherwise.Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn online as it is.) We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into story lines. It’s cringe.That is what young people — ages 10 to 24 — think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Thursday.The study, Teens & Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 63.5 percent of participants said they wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5 percent last year. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a raunchy comedy; “Emily in Paris,” an impassioned romance; and “Tell Me Lies,” a steamy soap.Movies like “Poor Things,” which found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank “All of Us Strangers” attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, according to box office analysts.This year’s study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, which is based at U.C.L.A. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their children in Los Angeles are doing, and that does not remotely represent what young people really want.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

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      The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TikTok Faces Lawsuits From 13 States Around Teens and Mental Health

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      More than a dozen states sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an app designed to be addictive to children and teens.Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teens while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.In separate lawsuits, a bipartisan group of attorneys general cited internal company documents to paint a picture of a multibillion dollar company that knowingly contributed to a mental health crisis among American teenagers to maximize its advertising revenue. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.TikTok “knew the harms to children,” Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general of California, said in an interview. “They chose addiction and more use and more eyeballs and more mental and physical harm for our young people in order to get profits — it’s really that simple.”The lawsuits add to a rapidly expanding list of challenges for TikTok in the United States, which now counts 170 million monthly U.S. users. A federal law passed in April calls for the app to be banned in the United States as of January unless it is sold. A federal lawsuit against the company in August also claimed that TikTok allowed children to open accounts, gathered information about them and made it difficult for their parents to delete the accounts.TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The states, many of which started investigating the company’s harms to minors in early 2022, are generally claiming that TikTok’s conduct violates their consumer protection laws. The states say that TikTok plays videos in a manner that aims to make young users lose track of time and sends them round-the-clock notifications and ephemeral content like livestreams to compel them to keep checking in. The longer users stay on the app, the more targeted ads TikTok is able to show them.The attorneys general say that TikTok has misled users about its so-called 60-minute screen time limits for young people and other features that promise to curate the videos that they see.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More