Sociology
High risk behaviors in adolescence often experience multiple difficulties, often socialized in economically stressed families and communities. Adolescent delinquent behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, failing in or dropping out of school, and unprotected sex are interrelated. An involvement in one problem is generally a sign of some participation in other socially undesirable actions, which are most likely underlined by a common factor. There are many factors that can influence an adolescent to go the wrong way, such as society, family life, the media, magazines, movies, and the internet. The media, magazines and movies tend to focus on the bad, lower-class, typical stereotypes of youth and young adults, and violence. Nothing sells like violence, depicted in a serious or comical way.
Television seems to draw the most attention, since it is found in 98.2 percent of American family homes and is the primary media source immediately accessible to youth on a day-to-day basis. For television is free, on 24/7, it is in the privacy of your own home, and acts like an electronic baby-sitter for parents who are too busy or too preoccupied to spend time with their children. Since television is so obviously the most influential media, I chose movies. Movies are one step beyond reality, that is companies spend millions on taking a social norm and kicking it up a notch. Showing our delinquent youth in movies, such as Boyz n’ the Hood, only lessens the impact of hardship and true misfortune that the inner-city youth have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Throughout movie history there has always been movies detailing the cruel reality that African American’s have had to withstand generation to generation. Early on there were movies about slavery and the degrading inequality between blacks and whites. Blacks were treated inhumanly and less than human from the whites and left to fend for themselves after being brought to American from Africa by force....
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