Juvenile crime in America today is a threat to every one of us. It is the most discussed, feared, and blatantly misunderstood phenomenon confronting communities throughout the U.S.A. Who listens to our troubled youth in America today? In their attitudes and often anti-social behaviors, today's young people cry out for help, desperate for someone to listen to them. This book is powerfully focused on listening to the previously silent voices of teens in detention. Incarcerated teenagers (17 and 18 years of age, female and male, all races and ethnic backgrounds) face a critical juncture in their frenetic journey through life. This is their story in their own words. Each story is unique yet alarmingly the same. Almost with One Voice these troubled teens reveal their stories of abuse, neglect and abandonment, struggling to find their place in the harsh world in which they find themselves. These autobiographies represent not so much their failures as ours: parents, educators, communities, social institutions. All have failed to recognize the desperate cries for help from these youths, which are often manifested in various and disturbing disguises. These essays are by teens who are studying for the GED [Graduate Equivalent Degree]. The author, their instructor, invited them to tell their story in their own faltering, often brutally blunt words. To read these thirty-five+ raw, blunt essays is to bear witness to and participate in their troubled world of abuse, drugs, rampant sex, and violence. The author's commentary provides both background and illuminating insight into the core problem: theirs and society's. The aim of the book is to awaken the profound need for societal involvement in these troubled teens so that we can begin to focus more profoundly on how to help them and eradicate or at least lessen the alarming problem of juvenile crime in America. TEENS ON THE EDGE offers a profound and intimate examination of the core factors involved in juvenile crime and violence. American psychological and financial survival are at stake in resolving this problem. Our prisons are full of offenders who were themselves victims of severe childhood trauma or torture. While most children who endure abuse or neglect mature into law-abiding adults, the ones who do not become the menace so feared by the community, sapping it of billions of dollars in the process. Many current books focus on various perspectives of dysfunctional families, troubled teens, child abuse, and youth violence and crime in America. This book complements them all, but is unique in combining all of the above phenomena into one powerful book. No academic study or professional analyses have the same profound impact as listening to the troubled youths themselves!
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