Last week Planet Improv facilitated our third 2022-23 eight hours’ worth of sessions within the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department’s (CMPD) Youth Diversion Program.

The Youth Diversion Program is designed and administered by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in partnership with several social service agencies in Mecklenburg County. Its purpose is to offer qualified juveniles the opportunity to avoid prosecution in the court system. Parent and Juvenile attend an 8-hour life skills class or Teen Court to successfully complete the program.

Before we started in the program, we had a black and white certainly (no racial implications meant) about what we would experience.

These would be “bad” youth, doing awful things for which they probably had no remorse and would have no interest in listening to or verbalizing the lessons we were contracted to teach.

Or, how wrong we were.

Often these youth were in the wrong place at the wrong time and/or responding the way most of us would have when we were their age and prone to, often, impulse, emotional decisions of youth.

They, for the most part, are very intelligent and thoughtfully explain why they did what they did and why they, to the best of their knowledge, will never do it again, if placed in similar situation.

A specific transgression that we have heard from the youth time after time is the bullied finally being fed up with being bullied and lashing out with violence to make it end.

(Below) is a post from consumer.healthday.com that discusses this potential transformation from bullied to bully.

Bullying Can Turn Victims Into Bullies

Greater risk for aggressive behavior when both cyberbullying and in-person taunting took place, study found A combination of face-to-face taunting and cyberbullying may greatly increase the risk that victims will become bullies themselves, a new study suggests.

“Students who are victimized are more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviors towards others,” said study principal investigator Alexandra Hua, from Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York. “This phenomenon may lead to a vicious cycle whereby bullies create bullies out of those they victimize.”

In the study, researchers analyzed data from U.S. students aged 10 to 17. The investigators found that 43 percent of the children had experienced face-to-face bullying and 7 percent had been subjected to some form of cyberbullying through text messages, social media and other means.

Kids who experienced either in-person or online bullying were more likely to display aggressive behaviors, such as physical fighting, verbal hostility, property damage and peer coercion, the findings showed.

But the risk of those behaviors was more than twice as high among victims of both types of bullying, the study authors said.

Of the kids who experienced both forms of bullying, 38 percent showed aggressive behavior. This compared with 15 percent of those who were cyberbullied and 4 percent of those who were victims of face-to-face bullying alone.

The findings were scheduled for presentation Saturday at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting, in Baltimore.

The results are concerning, but not surprising, study senior investigator Dr. Andrew Adesman said in an American Academy of Pediatrics news release.

“These behaviors may involve retaliatory measures against their aggressors, acting aggressive in order to fend off future bullying attempts, or worse, learning by example and engaging in bullying of previously uninvolved peers,” Adesman said. He is chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

Hua also noted that with the high rates of mobile device use by young people, there should be greater focus on cyberbullying and its harm, especially when combined with face-to-face bullying.

Research presented at meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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In Planet Improv’s opinion there are no “bad” youth.

There are only youth who, often through no fault of their own and traumas from within and outside of their home, use the defense mechanisms of an immature, still growing/forming brain to protect themselves as best they can.

We are overjoyed to continue to do anything we can to help as many of these youth as possible.