This book reviews broad social changes affecting youth development and the inconsistency of the legal system in updating its approach to adolescents¿ rights. Legal experts examine current adolescent protections and offer research-based proposals for revising laws that underserve or criminalize youth under the rubric of protection. Focusing on the key areas of technology and media, education, and personal relationships, chapters discuss legal responses to a range of challenges impacting young people, including sexual exploitation, the right to privacy, military family issues, and the school-to-prison pipeline. The book¿s nuanced concept of legal protection credits youth with greater competence than currently afforded, in hope that adolescents can take more ownership of their evolving lives in a rapidly changing society.

Topics featured in this volume include:

How to balance freedom of expression with adolescents¿ right to data protection. The sexualization of media and its effects on youth attitudes and behaviors.
The rising phenomenon of teenage sexting.
Protecting students¿ sexual identity in private schools.
Youth sex and labor trafficking and possible solutions to alleviate the widespread crime.

Adolescents, Rapid Social Change, and the Law is a must-have resource for researchers and professors, clinicians and related professionals as well as graduate students in developmental psychology, family studies, public health, educational policy and politics, and social policy.

Roger J. R. Levesque, JD, PhD, is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University and Maurer School of Law. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence as well as the New Criminal Law Review and Adolescent Research Review. He is an award-winning author of over a dozen books, most recently Adolescents, Discrimination, and the Law (NYU, 2015), Adolescents, Privacy and the Law (Oxford, 2016) and soon-to-be-released, The Science and Law of School Segregation and Diversity (Oxford, 2017).

Part 1. Introduction.- Chapter 1. Adolescents, Rapid Social Change, and the Law.- Part 2. Media.- Chapter 2. Protecting Youth from Themselves in the Media: The Right to be Forgotten.- Chapter 3. Protecting Youth from Sexualized Media: Media Literacy.- Chapter 4. Protecting Youth from Dangerous Media: Online Predators.- Chapter 5. Protecting Youth's Rights to Engage Media: Sexting.- Part 3: Education.- Chapter 6. Protecting Students from Racial Discrimination in Public Schools.- Chapter 7. Protecting Financially Disadvantaged Students' Educational Rights.- Chapter 8. Protecting Students' Sexual Identity in Private Schools.- Part 4. Families and Communities.- Chapter 9. Protecting Financially Successful Youth's Incomes.- Chapter 10. Protecting Youth's Relationships with Deployed Parents.- Chapter 11. Protecting Youth from Trafficking.