{"id":13506,"date":"2023-07-19T06:47:35","date_gmt":"2023-07-19T13:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.childabusesurvivor.net\/reviews\/?p=13506"},"modified":"2025-07-12T09:39:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T14:39:22","slug":"dont-get-distracted-big-problems-require-big-solutions-not-simple-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.childabusesurvivor.net\/reviews\/2023\/07\/19\/dont-get-distracted-big-problems-require-big-solutions-not-simple-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Get Distracted – Big Problems Require Big Solutions, not Simple Ones"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have talked previously about how many politicians and media members will offer simple solutions to complex problems. Take youth mental health, for example. We’ve all seen the Surgeon General and just about every media outlet point the finger at social media, but social media is just one of many things teens are facing today. I’ve seen a few people pointing out that this simple explanation leaves too many other things out, like a pandemic, school and social stresses, bullying, and for girls especially, sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

To believe we can solve the teen mental health crisis by forcing kids off social media and doing nothing about all these other things is foolish.<\/p>\n

Now, I’ve discovered this article by Mike Males<\/a> that shows us the things the CDC report also included that the Surgeon General and media decided to not talk about.<\/p>\n

However, leaders, authorities, and commentators on the issue uniformly ignore the Centers for Disease Control’s 116-question, 7,800-subject\u00a0Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey<\/a>\u00a0that documented teen’s “mental health crisis” in the first place.<\/p>\n

The CDC survey found 11% of 12-18-year-olds reporting violent abuses and a shocking 55% reporting emotional\u00a0abuses<\/a>\u00a0by household grownups \u2013 levels two and four times higher, respectively, than those of similar\u00a02014 survey<\/a>. Teens are several times more likely to be bullied and injured at home by parents than at\u00a0school or from online encounters<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 surprising, since the CDC’s definition of\u00a0peer bullying<\/a>\u00a0is broader than for\u00a0parents’ emotional abuse<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is interesting. He also mentions that as bad as school shootings are, kids are 8 times as likely to get shot at home by an adult living with them.<\/p>\n

What Mike goes on to explain is that many kids are dealing with so much more than social media. They live every day with parents and other adults who are having their own mental health crises. They live with parents who bully them, adults who are abusive, who are unemployed, and angry.<\/p>\n

Oh, and that’s on top of everything else we just mentioned. The physical and mental dangers to kids don’t start and end online. They are in it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For some kids, social media actually helps their mental health. It’s a place to get help and information about the things they are dealing with at home. For others, social media might be making things worse. In either case, though, it’s not anywhere near the full cause of the teen mental health situation we find ourselves in. Paying as much attention as we do to that part of the problem just keeps us distracted from the very real problems we could be trying to solve.<\/p>\n

Those problems require more work to find solutions for and those solutions don’t fit into a tweet or a campaign slogan, so we’ll just continue blaming social media, books about gay people, or being taught about racism for the state of kids today, and ignore the fact that so many of them live in danger at home from adults who can’t get any help for their own issues.<\/p>\n

Speaking of distractions, I know many people in the survivor community have been hyping up the Sound of Freedom<\/em> movie. Look, I don’t care if you go see it. I don’t buy much of what the stars of the movie or its subject have to say about conspiracy theories. I’ve said enough about the damage QAnon lies do to actual survivors. Regardless, don’t be distracted by what goes on in the movie. Even the organization founded by the subject of the movie has put out a statement saying that this is not how most trafficking occurs.<\/p>\n

Because it’s not. The number of young children snatched up off the street or in some kind of ploy and trafficked by strangers is incredibly small. I’m not saying it never happens, but much like any child sexual abuse, most sex trafficking victims are victimized by people they know. And most human trafficking victims are not children being sold for sex, but adults sold for labor. The problem is much larger than one movie can cover. Don’t be distracted and start believing this is the only battle there is.<\/p>\n

Like teen mental health, there is so much more to it, and fixing it is so much more complicated.

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