On 8 September 2010, Lorraine Thorpe from Ipswich, aged 16, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after killing two people on separate occasions, she was only 15 at the time. One of the victims was a 41-year-old woman who was beaten to death by the teenager, the other suffocated her father. Another case of young killers includes that of the murder of James Bulger in 1993, this infamous case showed how two 11 year old boys from Liverpool could kidnap, torture and then kill a 2 year old boy. These two cases, although 17 years apart, show a connection in how youth violence is a serious and ongoing problem in our society. In this essay I will examine the factors that influence youth violence and try to prevent such life-destroying crimes. Violence is a term defined as behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, harm, or kill someone or something. Youth violence is something we all know, very often we hear about the latest teenager arrested for stabbing a schoolmate, often over a stupid argument, which they chose to resolve with a weapon. But why do young people resort to violence to solve their problems? I believe some of the reasons include; the media, as younger and younger generations grow up with media as an important part of their daily lives, with video games in particular having a hold on the younger generations. Secondly, the education system also has a great influence on the behavior of a child in old age, the purpose of the system is to teach skills and qualities to help a person in his life and career, so with this responsibility education systems should adopt punishments strict on acts of violence, ensuring that the child knows the consequences of his actions. Another factor... half the paper... is put into schools on this topic, even if a parent wasn't fully committed to a child, they would still benefit from the basics of right and wrong and how to behave. As for video games, the issue could easily be resolved; if people actually showed more concern, it would be easily fixable to remove the large amount of unnecessary violence from these games. But even if all these possible influences were resolved, would it help? Perhaps this is a growing problem due to dozens of factors, we constantly hear that it is becoming more and more difficult to be a child in today's society, the media is constantly judging and commenting on our behavior, guns are becoming more and more accessible to young people, so it really exists a quick solution to our problem? No I don't think so, to properly address this problem we should look at ourselves as a society and see what we are doing wrong.