Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: The Dangers Kids and Teens Face
7 Figures: The Dangers Kids and Teens Face
Dec 24, 2025 4:06 PM

Parents worry a lot about their kids. But which dangers are most probable? Pew Research recently conducted a study examining the data on the dangers that teens and kids face.

Here are seven figures you should know from the report:

1. Around 15 percent of eighth-graders, three-in-ten high-school sophomores and four-in-ten seniors report some use of illicit drugs in the past 12 months. More than 1-in-3 (35.3 percent) high school seniors reported any alcohol use in the past 30 days, and 11.4 percent reported smoking cigarettes. Seniors were also as likely to have smoked marijuana in the past 30 days (21.3 percent) as to have gotten drunk (20.6 percent).

2. Nearly 1 our of every 4 (24.7 percent) high-school students say they’ve been in a physical fight at least once in the past 12 months before the 2013 survey. (Only 3.1 percent needed medical attention after the fight.)

3. In 2012, the arrest rate for youths ages 10 to 17 was around four of every 100 youths. While the rates for all racial subgroups has been declining, the arrest rate for black youths is still more than twice that of any other group.

4. There were 24.2 births per 1,000 teen females in 2014, a record low. The rates, however, differ considerably between racial subgroups: the highest subgroup birth rate was Hispanic teens (41.7 per 1,000) while the lowest was Asian teens (8.7 per 1,000).

5. About one-in-ten adolescents, or around 2.6 million, have experienced major depression in the past year, with 7.7 percent saying their depression caused severe impairment.

6. In 2013, the last year for which there plete data, 1,258 youths were reported killed by firearms (equivalent to 1.71 per 100,000), and 6,104 suffered nonfatal firearm injuries (8.29 per 100,000). Broken out by subgroups, the rate of nonfatal firearm injury was 1.68 per 100,000 for white youths, 5.3 per 100,000 for Hispanic youths, and 24.67 per 100,000 for black youths.

7. According to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, only 332 stranger abductions were reported last year; since 2007, the number of stranger abductions has ranged between 200 and 520.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Radio Free Acton: Jeffrey Tucker on Capitalism and Love
Jeffrey Tucker speaks at the 2015 Acton Lecture Series It’s always good to e old friends to the Acton Building. Last week it was our pleasure to e Jeffrey Tucker, author, speaker, and the founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.meto Grand Rapids in order to deliver the first Acton Lecture Series lecture of 2015, entitled “Capitalism is About Love.” (We’ll be posting audio and video of his address later this week.) Jeffrey took some time to join me in...
How ‘Downton Abbey’ Shows Income Inequality Doesn’t Matter
After what seemed to be an interminably long wait, Downton Abbey, a British period drama on PBS, recently returned to America. Many of us who have been hooked on the show for four seasons tune in each Sunday night to watch the new twists in the saga of the Earl and Countess of Grantham, their household, and their servants. But as with most pop culture artifacts, this series about Victorian England is having a subversive effect on the views of...
Spirit Empowerment in the Economic Order
In the latest Journal of Markets and Morality, Joseph Gorra reviews Dr. Charlie Self’s new book,Flourishing Churches and Communities, calling it a “joyous, practical, and insightful primer to the integration of ‘faith, work, and economics” that will inspire “a pathway for leaders of Pentecostal thought to reflect on public life in a renewed way.” The book is one of four tradition-specific primers from the Acton Institute, and although it focuses specifically on a Pentecostal perspective, Gorra rightly observes that Self...
Get Useless: Stewardship in the Economy of Wonder
“This is useless. This is gratuitous. This is wonder.” –Evan Koons When we consider the full realm of Christian stewardship, our minds immediately turn to areas like business, finance, ministry, the arts, education, and so on — the placeswhere we “get things done.” But while each of these is indeed an important area of focus, for the Christian, stewardship also involves creating the space to stop and simply behold our God. Yes, we are called to be active and diligent...
When is a Ban not a Ban? When it’s a Target
When is a ban not a ban? One answer might be when it is based on moral suasion rather than legal coercion. (I would also accept: When it’s a Target.) In this piece over at the Federalist, Georgi Boorman takes up the prudence of a petition to get Target to remove smutty material and paraphernalia related to Fifty Shades from its shelves. Boorman rightly points to the limitations of this kind of cultural posturing. Perhaps this petition illustrates more of...
The Government Is Hungry: Detroit and ‘The Grapes of Wrath’
Detroit home owners are being put out of their homes, but it’s not because of bankers. Then by who? It’s the Detroit city government seeking to collect back real estate taxes. There are always tax foreclosures, but foreclosures are growing from 20,000 in 2012 to an expected 62,000 in 2015. Who is putting poor people on the streets in Detroit? The government. There is a twist here based on the fact that Detroit homes have an old (and therefore way...
Video: Jeffrey Tucker Explains Why Capitalism Is About Love
The 2015 Acton Lecture Series got off to a rousing start last week with the arrival of Jeffrey Tucker, Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me, to deliver the first lecture of this year’s series, entitled “Capitalism Is About Love.” If you go by the conventional wisdom, that seems to be a counterintuitive statement.Jeffrey Tucker explains how the two are actually bound up together. You can watch the lecture via the video player below, and if you haven’t had a chance to...
Does Slave Redemption Increase Slavery?
Thousands of girls and women in Iraq and Syria have been captured by the Islamic State and sold into sex slavery. But one Iraqi man is trying to save them by buying sex slaves in order to free and reunite them with their families. As the Christian Post reports, “an Iraqi man, who remains nameless, disguises himself as a human trafficking dealer in order to ‘infiltrate’ the Islamic State and get the militants to sell him sex slaves. But in...
Communion and Consumerism
“Consumption serves, sustains and munity—above all the munity,” says Rev. Gregory Jensen in this week’s Acton Commentary. Consumption is not an end in itself but has a purpose. We are, Schmemann says, called by God “to propagate and have dominion over the earth”; that is to say, consumption serves human flourishing. The first chapters of Genesis portray creation as “one all-embracing banquet table,” foreshadowing a central theme in the New Testament. In the Kingdom of God we will “eat and...
Why a Christian Anthropology Matters for Liberty and Love
Dorothy Sayers, playwright, novelist and Christian scholar, wrote an important work in the 1930s entitled,Are Women Human?In her essay,shepresents the biblical case for gender equality in a humorous and insightful way, grounding mutuality in theological anthropology. From the Genesis narratives to the new earth of Revelation, she affirms this thesis: We are all human beings, made in the image of God with a job to do. And we do our jobs as a man or a woman. This theological vision...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved