Prejudice & Discrimination

The discrimination of adolescents has increased over the years. Adults and media of modern day society discriminate all adolescents’ behaviour based on a small minority of teens. This is due to the behaviour of adolescents, the media’s perception of teens, and as a result, the only way to end this madness is a compromise.

First of all, the behaviour of adolescents is a main cause of discrimination. Adolescents want attention from society by acting inappropriately and claiming it as individualism. The new generation of adolescent’s acts differently mainly because they have too much freedom; there is no one to discipline them. In the past, when adolescents did poorly or behaved inappropriately in school, they were often punished in the form of physical abuse. Youths were disciplined back then but nowadays there are no consequences for their faults, so they abuse their rights on a regular basis. Additionally, youths are jealous of adults. Adults possess privileges which youths do not such as smoking, watching X-rated movies, and drinking. This factor forces youths to act older than they really are so they can receive the same privileges but youths fail to realize that they are not adults. So by smoking, watching X-rated movies, and drinking, adolescents have earned a bad reputation. However it is a small minority of youths that act this way, and they are ruining the reputation of adolescents as a whole. These individuals are the rotten apple spoiling the barrel.

In another case, adolescents are discriminated because of the way youths are portrayed by the media. First of all, the media mainly focuses on negativity. There are rarely any reports on positive events. In movies, teens are hooligans and thieves. In the movie True Lies the protagonists’ daughter stole money and had a punk boyfriend on a motorcycle. The media is also famous for producing bad role models such as Eminem. All adolescents have role models to look up to. The message Eminem sends out through