The anthropologist David Le Breton has studied risk behaviors in adolescence from a humanistic perspective, taking into account the multiple factors of emptiness and pressure that young people are subjected to in today’s world.
Risky behavior is when a person, voluntarily and repeatedly, is exposed to danger. This danger has to do with the ability to put into play your physical or mental integrity and even life itself.
However, those who have this type of behavior do not have a clear reason to motivate them.
Adolescence is a stage particularly characterized by risky behaviors. These include unprotected sex, “extreme sports,” peer challenges, and different types of suicidal behaviors, such as driving at high speeds or entering dangerous areas or groups.
“Young people have always had the same problem: how to be rebellious and submissive at the same time?Quentin Crisp?
Adolescents often engage in risky behaviors characterized as experiences in which they release a lot of “adrenaline. “
They see experiencing intense emotions as a positive thing, because it apparently makes them feel more alive. For them, it means “living life intensely. “
While adolescence can be a difficult time, where exploration is a fundamental component, not all young people feel the same motivation to explore their limits, don’t everyone feel they are losing their lives?If not.
Several news items appear throughout the year that include the death of a teen as a result of one of these risky behaviors.
Take a bottle of tequila from a sip, for example, or jump off the top floor to a pool. Some even engage with illegal gangs or groups, all for a different experience.
Until a few decades ago, this desire was otherwise channeled (risky behaviors are also fashionable), and according to anthropologist David Le Breton, this type of behavior began to become popular in the 1970s.
In his view, the first risky behavior that occurred was substance abuse, drugs began to be synonymous with youth beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had already become a common practice.
Soon after, the guy from? Epidemic anorexia that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century.
In turn, the first reports of teenagers committed massacres date back to the 1990s. Generalized vandalism also dates back to this time.
It was also during this decade that the custom of making skin incisions was born, tattoos and piercings have become a painful but tolerated fashion.
In addition, other patterns of risky behavior have emerged in recent years, such as the sinister challenges offered on social media; Finally, there are those who tend to get in touch and join radical groups.
Breton reminds us that today’s world produces risky behaviors for a fundamental reason: basically, everyone is fighting their own battle.
Deinstitutionalization is widespread in society, the first of the institutions in decline is the family, it is no longer a nucleus that places young people in a classroom, in values and within limits.
Something similar is happening with other social institutions, such as church, school, political power, etc. All these social workers no longer form a framework for new generations.
Many young people try, with risky behaviors, to find those limits they do not know, to find the limits of the tolerable and intolerable and yet they do not find them.
When a child has no references or is inadequate, his relationship with the world is built on very fragile foundations, so he begins a journey in search of meaning, which often leads to these dangerous explorations.
Many children grow up in the same homes as their parents, but far from them, they don’t need to have you by their side all the time, but it’s critical that they’re in their lives and, in many cases, they don’t. it won’t happen.