Feature image credit: Malaysiakini
If you’ve been following the news, you must be aware of the basikal lajak incident.
A Johor clerk was on her way back from work at 3.20 am on February 18, 2017, when she crashed into a group of teenagers riding the modified bicycle known as “basikal lajak”. Eight kids passed away from the accident.
Investigation revealed that the driver, Sam Ke Ting, who was 22 years old at that time, was driving within the speed limits, had her seatbelt on, was not on drugs or alcohol, nor was she using her phone. In other words, she was following the law.
As for the teenagers, they were snaking down a highway in the wee hours of the morning on modified bicycles with no lights, no brakes, no protective gear, and no safety protocol. What a terrible idea, kids.
Yet… I admit that a small part of me understands them.
I was a teenager before too. And although I didn’t own a basikal lajak, I did have a mountain bike that I challenged my mortality with. (More than a decade later, I have learned the errors of my ways.)
Sometimes, I shudder at the memory of how I used to weave through PJ traffic and wonder what I was thinking, and then it hit me recently. At the age of 16, I thought I would never die.
What went through the heads of that group of teenagers as they mounted their basikal lajaks that fateful day? Surely they were aware of the kind of danger they were about to (literally) head into. Maybe they thought they would never die too.
Is that a thing? Do teenagers think that they would never die?
Or maybe, they just don’t think dying now is a real possibility
A 2012 study by the Yale School of Medicine suggests that teens don’t like danger; they just don’t understand consequences.
Ifat Levy, assistant professor in comparative medicine and neurobiology at Yale studied 65 people aged 12 to 50. The participants were asked a series of hypothetical questions about the lottery, each involving varying degrees of risk. Sometimes, the subjects were told the exact probability of winning the lottery. Sometimes, they were not—a scenario with uncertain risk.
The researchers discovered that when the risks were exactly stated, the teenagers tended to avoid the risks, either as much or even more than the adults. However, when a situation was ambiguous, they were more accepting of risk.
Levy thinks this makes sense biologically. Younger organisms need to be open to the unknown so that they can gain information about the world. Unfortunately, this also means that they have a higher chance of engaging in risky behaviour.
Nonetheless, teenagers can absolutely understand their actions. They are just as smart as adults. They just need to be properly informed about the cost and benefits of their risky behaviour.
What teenagers need is education, not to be confused with scolding. If you’ve ever been a teenager before, you know how teenagers feel about a preachy adult.
This is where it gets tricky. How do you get a teenager to listen?
One suggestion: offer exact statistics. For example, “In 2009, 200 cyclists died in road accidents“. See, that would have scared me.
Or, “In 2010, 150 cyclists were involved in major car accidents. They ended up bedridden for the rest of their lives. Now, all they can move are their eyes.” Okay, I added the second part. But you get the idea. What matters is having the hard numbers.
But that’s just what I think would have worked on me when I was a teenager. Every kid is different, which is why there is no single solution when it comes to education.
It might take work, but we have to get teenagers to understand that risky behaviour has consequences.
Chow Ping Lee is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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