November 13th, 2016
Juvenile Delinquency
Juveniles on Drugs Beating the Odds Drug abuse has been a very big issue for a very long time not only here in America but all around the world. Not many people realize all the harm and effects it has on the human body alone until it is too late. More importantly in adolescence and it can be potentially worse because the body of a child is not fully developed, and can have affects on the body all the up to and into adulthood. It is known that children that start to use drugs at a young age have experienced some form of trauma in their life, but that is not the always the reason. Most children go through phases and these phases can in a way make or break a person as to whether they …show more content…
I feel as though the best theory that could help explain reasons for becoming frequent drug users would be the Strain Theory created by Emile Durkheim with anomie playing a part because it follows the same social processes and Robert Merton’s slightly different version of the Strain Theory as well. For children these types of children they experience feelings of anger, frustration, all negative emotions that all can cause/lead to deviant behaviors like using drugs and eventually becoming addicted to them. The Strain theory says that children become deviant when they feel excluded from economic rewards. Meaning that if a child is poor and sees that one of his classmates has something that he knows his family cannot afford he will do whatever he has to, to get what he wants. Such as stealing, fighting with other children, or even displaying disobedient behaviors in classrooms that will get him into trouble. I believe that when a student or child acts out under the Strain theory they become a mastermind of their own. For the example above, the student may have had to suffer some academic consequence like out of school suspension, or detention. Robert Agnew added to the Strain Theory to expand on the ideas of Durkheim and Merton. He proposed that one form of strain is caused by either removing valued stimuli such as a cell phone, if a student were to get into trouble in school for stealing an object that belonged to another student. He proposed two other ideas one being that stress or strain can be caused by the disjunction between fair or unfair outcomes; another being the presentation of negative stimuli around a