The Incidence of Drug Abuse in Youth Is on the Rise - Essay Example

Pornography has become an epidemic with teens because they can find hardcore information with just a few clicks of their computer mouse. All of these addictions are important to study because the teenage years are some of the most vulnerable for many things for our youth.

Addiction will stop youth from having a successful life. Getting them to rehab and helping them through it takes time and energy for the family as well as for the teen. Pornography also causes youth to act in sexually inappropriate ways, may cause them to have nightmares, and can stimulate them to engage in premature sexual behavior (Haney, n.d.). All of these issues present a problem for youth and their caregivers.

My capstone will be centered around youth and addiction and will look at drug abuse (including alcohol abuse) and pornography addiction. I want to find the challenge for youth and addiction and the best practices for effective interventions. My target group is teens 12-16. I selected this topic because I have two teenage daughters and I am constantly monitoring them to be sure they are not falling into any addictive behaviors. In my work, I see many teens who are going through various forms of rehabilitation and some of them make it through, while others do not. I would like to explore the reasons why this is and how we as counselors can help them become successful after addiction.

Topic and problem related to the topic
My capstone will be centered around youth and addiction and will look at drug abuse (including alcohol abuse) and pornography addiction. The problem that I will concentrate on is teen addiction to pornography. This area is a growing problem for teens because they can gain exposure to hardcore pornography by surfing the Internet. Many studies have been done on teen addiction as it applies to drug abuse, but few studies have concentrated on pornography addiction. In a Google search for “teen pornography addiction” there were 297,000 sites that gave information about this problem. There are a few journal articles on the subject of pornography and youth addiction, but many more on youth and pornography. I believe this is a problem that has grown over the years. As an example, Flood (2009) states that exposure to pornography for youth has a damaging effect on their psychological well-being. Children who are exposed to pornography early develop sexist views of sex and relationships. The idea of children being exposed to pornography can be deliberate, it can be accidental, voluntary, or involuntary. There are many situations that children can find themselves in about pornography. Boys seem to be more susceptible than girls to this issue and this may be because of the difference in the way that boys and girls are raised. Flood makes the point that “The deliberate consumption of pornography is highly gendered among young people, as it is among adults” (p. 386). In this researcher’s opinion, this is an addiction that must be stopped because it causes the loss of innocence for children.

In the literature, the exposure to pornography for teens seems to be attached to crime rather than the early exposure that they may find on their own. As an example, Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor, (2007) conducted a telephone survey of 1500 youth who used the Internet in 2005. The youth were between the ages of 10 and 17 years of age. The results were that 44% of these youth had been exposed to pornography within the last year and 66% stated that the exposure was unwanted, and this was only in the case of file sharing according to the respondents. In other words, they had received files from someone else that had pornography images in them. The authors concluded from their study that more research had to be done in this area because of the high exposure to the Internet. Also, this study shed light on the fact that some youth are particularly vulnerable to this exposure.

Justification of problem
In my work as a counselor, I would like to work with youth and addiction. I believe that if children are to be our future, we need to help them with their challenges before they become greater challenges. Because youth are susceptible to many different types of addictions, it seems natural that we as counselors would be at the forefront of helping these youth. When I think about this in the context of social change, I think that there is already a great social change taking place and that it is affecting our youth. Read More