The school year is finally over and everyone’s out partying. A girl’s friend knows a person who knows a brother of this person who got them into the party, the one that “everyone” talks about. There is a girl that’s drunk for the first time in her life at the young age of 14 and is not feeling too good, on her way to the cold hard ground the last thing she sees is a guy she has never seen, walking towards her, undoing his belt. Speak by Marie Halse Anderson is a gripping story, one with surprises at every turn.
Peer and/or self pressure happens in everyday life, whether we want it to or not. Sometimes it’s as little as someone copying of your homework, really little at the time so long as he understands it just doesn’t have the time to do it. But it eventually turns into “I’ll help you next time” when he doesn’t, and he ends up failing the test because of it. Or when a kid offers a younger one a cigarette and everyone is pressuring him into it, so he tries it and dies on the spot. Now this typically doesn’t happen, a kid dying on the spot like that but it still does occur occasionally, like Len bias. Len was a basketball player drafted to the Boston Celtics in the first round second overall pick of the 1986 draft behind a little known player who goes by the name “Michael Jordan”. But what happened was Len got all this money from the Celtics and at the time very little was known about a drug called “cocaine” and so Len and his buddies got together and someone brought some of the white death, he would end up being convinced to try a line and in one snort possibly one of the greatest players to-be in NBA history was dead. This all shows just how terrible peer and self pressure is and how when it comes down to it, it has the potential to kill.
Even though peer pressure is bad, at least that means people are willing to talk to you. Possibly the worst thing that could happen to a teenager would be to get alienated, to be unaccepted almost unanimously by the entire student populous. When this happens it hurts a child emotionally, lowering their self esteem, and doing just about everything bad socially and mentally to a child. A sure example of this is in a book called Carrie by the Genius Stephen King. Carrie is a girl who basically has a crazy mother, nothing is weird about her except she’s a little overweight but because of her mother’s reputation of being a crazy Christian the students at her school think she is also weird. With the help of Stephen King she eventually goes on a psychotic rampage and kills almost everyone in her class by burning down the building during prom, but King did accurately show the lengths of which some alienated teenagers wish to go.
After this hopefully you fully understand the true dangers of leaving a child out or pointing them the wrong way, but now you truly should know that if you see something like this happening to a child, you should know to stop it immediately.