This story was originally published on LA Youth.

Author's name withheld.

When I was 6, my brothers and sister and I went to live with my aunt because my mom used drugs. I was happy when my aunt took us all in because we could be together. There are five of us and we always took care of each other because our mom couldn’t.

At first Aunt Charlotte was nice to us all—my older brothers Tyler and Roland, my little sister Alicia, my little brother Christopher and me. For our first Christmas and birthdays with her, she bought me and my sister Barbie dolls and my brothers a basketball and all of us bikes and scooters.

But after about six months, for some reason that I still don’t know, she stopped being nice. If things didn’t go Aunt Charlotte’s way, she would yell at us and hit us. We’d get whoopings if she thought our facial expressions were disrespectful (even if we weren’t trying to be), if we didn’t eat all of our food or if we didn’t flush the toilet. She’d say, “Who didn’t flush the toilet?” None of us would say anything, but my big brother Tyler, who is three years older than me, would say, “I did it.” Even though he hadn’t, he’d take the whooping for us.

Tyler was always taking care of us. No matter whose turn it was to clean the bathroom or the kitchen, Tyler would help and most of the time he’d even clean for us.

I tried to be like Tyler and keep an eye on my younger siblings. Christopher struggled with his grades. I protected him by sometimes lying to Aunt Charlotte and telling her he was doing OK in school. This kept him from having to stand in the corner for hours by himself and getting another whooping. If Alicia got hit I would try to cheer her up by doing a silly dance in our bedroom just to make her laugh. I didn’t want her to feel sad, because whenever she was sad, I felt sad with her. I wanted her to know that she has someone who loves and cares about her.

When I was around my brothers and sisters, I could joke around without worrying about getting in trouble, but I was quiet around Aunt Charlotte to save myself from the abuse. Aunt Charlotte would call me ugly and talk about my dark skin and short hair. I was almost always scared.

UNICEF released its State of the World’s Children 2011 report today, entirely focused on the teenage period of transition. According to the report, this focal switch is urgent because while the world has seen drastic improvements in the quality of life and survival rates of children under the age of 10, teenagers still face overwhelming hardships.

The introduction of the report demonstrates this imbalance. “In Brazil for example, the lives of 26,000 children under one were saved between 1998 and 2008, leading to a sharp decrease in infant mortality. In the same decade 81,000 Brazilian adolescents aged 15-19 were murdered.”

In addition, the report states that after primary school, education for teenagers in developing countries is absent, which makes teenagers more vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and violence.

Statistics about the teenage pregnancy rate demonstrate another barrier that adolescent girls face as they try to advance out of poverty in developing countries. For example, the study reports that complications due to pregnancy and childbirth are within the leading causes of death for girls between 15 - 19 years old.

The report talks about a study done in Orellana, an Ecuadorian province in the Amazon Basin, "Where nearly 40 per cent of girls aged 15–19 are or have been pregnant, found that the pregnancies had much less to do with choices made by the girls themselves than with structural factors such as sexual abuse, parental absence and poverty.”

Cyber bullying is often something that is overlooked. It is the act of verbally abusing someone through comments, blogs, or messages on the internet. Admittedly, much of the time, simple teasing on Facebook or other social messaging websites is not a big deal. It’s something that I do all the time, but there is definitely a range of cyber bullying. It’s one thing to tease a friend, but a completely different thing to post racial insults on somebody’s blog. Many of the comments on the web fall into the latter category. In fact, if you ever want to feel depressed over humanity, go to any YouTube video and I guarantee that you will find at least one nasty comment. What these “web terrorists” as I like to call them don’t realize is that just because you have a keyboard and a computer doesn’t mean you can say whatever you like. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t have the courage to say something in person, then you shouldn’t be saying it online. This subject is very personal to me. This past year, one of my best friends passed away for mysterious reasons. In an online news article, it mentioned how he passed away at a party for mysterious reasons. Many of the comments following the article read similar to “finally that party town gets what it deserves” and “it served that stupid kid right for drinking under-age.”

By Rachel Krantz

In the Persian Gulf, on the island of Bahrain, the U.S. Navy has a special division made up of bomb-sniffing dogs and the sailors who handle them. The Bahrain Military Working Dogs Division was featured in a Navy News spot highlighting the work involved in deploying these highly trained canines to sniff out narcotics and explosives coming through the Persian Gulf and into the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

(See a Navy video of the dogs that can detect small amounts of explosives with a sense of smell "10 times greater" than their trainers'.)

Developing trust between the dog and the handler is at the core of what makes canine detection work, as together, their job is to step into situations that can be deadly at any moment. However, that trust between the individual sailor and dog does not necessarily extend to the overall culture of the unit.

A Youth Radio investigation has found that between 2004 and 2006, sailors in the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain Military Working Dogs Division, or "The Kennel," were subjected to an atmosphere of sexual harassment, psychological humiliation, and physical assaults.

Joseph Christopher Rocha with an MWD in Bahrain.

It was inside that Bahrain kennel in July 2005 that Petty Officer Joseph Christopher Rocha, then 19 years old, says he was being terrorized by other members of his own division. "I was hog-tied to a chair, rolled around the base, left in a dog kennel that had feces spread in it."

Rocha says that beginning six weeks into his deployment, he was singled out for abuse by his chief master-at-arms, Michael Toussaint, and others on the base, once Rocha made it clear he was not interested in prostitutes. "I was in a very small testosterone-driven unit of men," Rocha says. "I think that's what began the questioning-you know-‘Why don't you want to have sex with her? Are you a faggot?’"

Youth Radio has conducted interviews and obtained documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showing that the hog-tying episode was not the first or only case of harassment and abuse during Rocha's deployment. In another incident cited in the documents, Rocha was forced to appear in a twisted "training video." A member of the Working Dogs Division, Petty Officer Shaun Hogan, recalls the scene.

Petty Officer Shaun Hogan

"Petty Officer Rocha and another junior sailor…were instructed to go into a classroom by Chief Michael Toussaint, who orchestrated the entire training. And Chief Toussaint asked them to simulate homosexual sex on a couch," Hogan says.  

Next in the simulation, Hogan says a handler and his dog barged onto the scene, and that's when "one person…would sit up, kind of wipe off their mouth, the other would get up, and they would be fixing their fly."

Rocha says Toussaint bullied him, "telling me I needed to be more believable, act more queer, have a higher pitched voice, make the sounds and gestures more realistic...I didn't think I had a choice…It made me feel that I wasn't a human being, that I was an animal, rather."

Rocha says at the time, he had no gay friends, no male lovers, and wasn’t even fully out to himself about his sexuality. "The fact that I was starting to figure out that I was a homosexual, it was the most degrading thing I've ever experienced in my life." Still, eight thousand miles away from home, he was afraid to report the constant hazing. And Rocha was not the only one.

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