(On Violence involving the youth and children)
We are watching a breaking or shattering generation in real time, and our response to the damage is missing the point entirely.
When flash reports surface of a young person taking their own life, or pulling out a knife or gun in a school hallway, the public conversation follows a predictable script. We debate police response times, talk about stricter punishments, and search for immediate villains. But policing a crime scene or lowering the age of criminal responsibility only answers the question of what to do after a life has already been ruined. It does absolutely nothing to stop the next tragedy from building in the shadows. Punishment addresses the act, but it ignores the rot beneath it.
This is not an abstract crisis happening somewhere else—it is landing directly on our own doorsteps. In our locality, for instance, in Sibagat, the cases of suicides among the young are rising at an alarming rate. One dead body is already one too many, yet we have lost more than five young lives four months before this year ends. Five empty seats at family dinner tables, five futures quietly erased in a single small community. When a silent epidemic strikes home with that kind of force, we can no longer afford to look away or pretend these are isolated misfortunes. Publicly known or not, these are real.
What we are witnessing in modern society is not just a sudden spike in bad behavior or random bad luck—it is a structural crisis. Youth depression, self-harm, and extreme violence are different symptoms of the very same underlying disease. To understand why a young person turns a weapon on themselves or others, you have to look at the intersection of psychology, biology, and the radically altered social environment we have built around them.
According to studies, the human brain does not fully mature until a person reaches their mid-twenties. The prefrontal cortex—the area responsible for impulse control, regulating intense emotions, and evaluating long-term consequences—is still actively under construction during adolescence. When you place a developing brain under chronic psychological stress, isolate it, or subject it to trauma, the risk of a breakdown increases exponentially. That breakdown manifests in two distinct directions: turned inward as despair, severe depression, and self-harm, or turned outward as rage, hostility, and extreme violence. Though human behavioral responses to trauma are far more diverse than just inward despair or outward violence - substance use and other diversionary and extreme tendencies.
And right now, we are isolating them like never before.
This is a historically unique moment. Never in human history have young people grown up in a world so deeply ruled by the digital world—an environment where life is lived inside a virtual box. On paper, they are the most globally connected generation that has ever walked the earth. In reality, they are profoundly, painfully lonely in their day-to-day lives. The digital world has systematically stripped away the raw, messy, authentic interpersonal connections that keep human beings emotionally grounded. We have traded face-to-face community, family togetherness, and real-world touch for hyper-curated feeds, online echo chambers, and algorithmic addiction.
When the young today call for academic breaks or climate breaks, it is not a sign of laziness or weakness. It is a distress signal—a clear indicator that they are bombarded by psychological, ecological, and social loads far beyond their natural capacities to process alone. If we continuously demand innovation, resilience, and brilliance from them, then society and adults must also learn how to innovate in our care. We must adapt how we motivate young people, remaining grounded and in touch with their real-world struggles, rather than dismissing their cries for relief from behind outdated standards.
Yet, this crushing burden is not experienced by our young people alone. Adults are breaking under the very same weight. Across households and workplaces, adults are quietly drowning under heavy societal pressures, unrealistic expectations, and rigid norms imposed upon them. From economic survival and provider roles to suppressing emotional vulnerability to maintain a facade of strength, adults are often operating on empty reserves. Compounding the crisis, societal norms frequently tell adults to suffer in silence, leaving parents and guardians ill-equipped to support their children when their own emotional walls are shaking.
When a person—young or old—feels completely disconnected from the real world, their sense of empathy erodes. Their pain becomes an island, and their grip on societal values slips. If family life is fractured by economic pressure, adult burnout, or digital distraction, and there are no strong real-world support systems in towns like Sibagat to catch them, a vulnerable mind can quickly drift toward despair or extreme violence.
Perhaps the most destructive driver of youth volatility is the sheer moral dissonance they observe in public life. How can we expect young people to respect life, human rights, and social contracts when those in power openly violate them, publicly humiliate women, and weaknesses of others are public jokes? When adults defend abusers of power, celebrate the plunder of public wealth, enable environmental destruction, and reward false information, the moral compass of society shatters. Adolescents are acutely sensitive to hypocrisy; when impunity becomes the standard, youth internalize cynicism, alienation, and an affinity for violence.
If we genuinely want to end this cycle, we have to stop treating these events as isolated security failures and start treating them as a mirror reflecting our collective institutional failure. Interventions must not be pointed toward just one section of society if we acknowledge that these incidents are a complex mix of interconnected factors.
Furthermore, our actions cannot remain limited to surface-level information campaigns and awareness talks. What is required is a consistent and systematic capacitation of young people, the family unit, and the broader community as a whole. True healing demands a transformation that spans our political, economic, social, and cultural structures.
Rebuilding What Has Been Broken requires systemic reform. Few suggestions are:
>,Economic Relief for Families: Policies that give working families the time and resources required to foster nurturing home environments.
> Digital and Social Spaces: Reclaiming real-world community spaces and regulating digital platforms that profit from psychological isolation.
> Accessible Mental Healthcare: Integrating mental health support directly into schools and communities to catch distress before it turns into violence.
> Institutional Accountability: Demanding ethical leadership from public figures to restore faith in justice, dignity, and truth.
> Multi-stakeholders and iholistic community response. Church, schools, social associations, etc must be mobilized and unified to acknowledge that this is a collective responsibility and organizations must step up to.compliment among other efforts; and develop.or initiate innovative and creative spaces for the young and old.
We do not need to wait for grand policy overhauls to take action. We can start small, but we must start somewhere to confront the problem—whether that begins in a single home, a local classroom, or a neighborhood gathering in Sibagat.
A society that can only offer handcuffs and prison cells to its suffering youth—or indifference until it is too late—is a society that has given up on fixing itself. Until we repair the broken connections in our homes, our communities, and our daily lives, we will keep paying the price in young lives lost.
It is not a one-way ticket ride. An overall overhaul is needed.
A collective opinion piece of Bagat Notes admins.
Rot Beneath the Surface (On Violence involving the youth and children)
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