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Topics - Covergaard

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The Troubled Teen Industry / Re-educating from a danish viewpoint
« on: August 21, 2006, 04:37:13 AM »
We have no an industry in Denmark yet. Because we are a quite small country there is not many places where you can hide and mis-treat children without being discovered.

And our laws allows people to have sex from the age of 15 and buy alcohol from the age of 16. Still we have problems with drug mainly caused by the resently introduced age-limit of 16 regarding alcohol. Drugs are easier to obtain than alcohol when a person is 15. Alcohol are sold in shops with control. Drugs are sold on the street without control.

The age-limit is not a law against drinking from the age of 16. It is a law to ensure that the parents have knowledge of their childrens alcohol intake when they are 15 or younger. As a fact a lot of parents do buy alcohol to their children when they are 13 or older. Resent studies (2005) shows that about 57 % of all people in an age of 15 have been serious drunk at one time.

In Denmark, we believe in taking care of the problem at home. We have discovered that even stays in government controlled home can result in bad treatment of the childs. Just 4 months ago, it was discovered that a certain youth facility ordered children about 10 years to walk 10 kilometres alone in the night along a highway without adult presence as punishment.

We have also experienced that some people from the far east send their children back home, when the children do live as we other danes do and deny marriage to a fellow countrymen or women. Those children comes back totally unprepared to live in our society.

I personally do not se any difference between shipping a poor child away to a strict muslim society and shipping a poor child away to a "brat camp".

It is all about denying the child to live in a democracy and learning the child about both the dangers and the benefits of a free choice which is the basis of our way of living.

Troubled teens is also a question about when a the parenthood stops. Last week video of childs about 11-12 drinking and stripping in front of others childs were published. Some parents in a town not so far away from my home did not record where their children was during the night. So the children joined a publicly sponsered rave party (Yes, we have something like that), older children attended.

The message from both youth and officials were clear. The youth have to establish self-control and send younger children home from their party and prevent them from joining. The parents have to keep youth below 15 at home after 9 p.m.

It seems that a lot of the problems with troubled teens are that there is too much control and the abitions of the parents are too high. We all like our children to succeed but we also have to acknowledge that our children are exploiting during their upbringing.

I personally do hope that we also in the future can prevent the industry from establish themselves in Denmark. Solving problems at home in the family shoud be the way of doing it.

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