The 21st-century guidebook of life safety skills for teens, their parents, and other caregivers, covering physical safety, sexual consent, social media, your rights with the police, situational awareness, dating violence, smartphones, and more.
Gold Winner, IBPA Ben Franklin Award for Best Parenting & Family Book of the Year Gold Winner, NIEA Award for Best Parenting & Family Book of the Year Silver Winner, Foreword INDIE Award, Family & Relationships
Young people coming of age today face new risks, expectations, and laws that didn't exist when their parents were young. What They Don't Teach Teens provides teens, tweens, and young adults with up-to-date, realistic strategies to protect themselves against the pitfalls of modern adolescence.
Author Jonathan Cristall, once a troubled teen himself and now a veteran prosecutor for the City of Los Angeles and a sexual violence prevention instructor, works extensively with teenagers and their families to teach physical, digital, emotional, and legal safety skills. Drawing on Cristall's hands-on experience, What They Don't Teach Teens gives parents and other caregivers techniques for talking to their children about these urgent issues.
What They Don't Teach Teens gives sound advice on police interactions and personal safety (your constitutional rights, what to do/not do when stopped by the police while driving, situational awareness, street robberies, gun violence); sexual violence and misconduct (sexual consent, sexual harassment prevention, dating violence, sextortion); and staying safer online (digital footprint and citizenship, cyberbullying, underage sexting, online porn).
A must-read for all families, What They Don't Teach Teens is filled with practical guidance, thoughtful insight, and simple-to-use tips and tactics that will empower young people to make good choices now and into the future.
Jonathan Cristall, Esq., spent his own teen years taking unnecessary risks and getting into avoidable trouble. Now a veteran prosecutor for the City of Los Angeles, he went from disregarding laws to enforcing them.
Cristall is a certified sexual violence prevention instructor. He frequently speaks to young people and their families about the topics in this book. What They Don’t Teach Teens is his first book. Cristall lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three adolescent sons.
Read an Excerpt
Can I End a Police Interaction? (Detentions versus Consensual Encounters)
Imagine you are on foot or in a vehicle and the police stop to question you. After a while, you haven’t been arrested and want the interaction to end. Should you just walk or drive away if you haven’t committed a crime? Of course not. Can the police keep you indefinitely without an arrest? No. So how are you supposed to know if you can leave? You ask.
As background, the police are allowed to detain you for investigation—which may or may not lead to your arrest—when they have reasonable suspicion that you may be engaged in criminal activity (and since I get this question all the time, if you’re being pulled over for a traffic stop, yes, you are being detained). While being detained, you are not free to leave for as long as is reasonably necessary for the police to conduct their investigation.
Other times, the police suspect that you might have done something wrong, but they don’t have the requisite “reasonable suspicion” needed to lawfully detain you for an investigation. So, in this situation, they chat you up to find out more. This interaction is known as a “consensual encounter.” In these encounters, the police will try to get you talking to determine whether you’ve committed a crime. Consensual encounters can evolve into a detention or an arrest based on things the person says or does.
Consensual encounters (which are voluntary) and detentions (which are not) often feel identical because you don’t know what the officer knows. The only way to find out whether it’s a consensual encounter and you are free to leave is to ask: “Am I free to go, officer, or am I being detained?”
If you’re being detained, you cannot leave. Most often, the officer will tell you why you’re being detained. If the officer doesn’t, you can ask for the reason. The bottom line: unless you are being detained or arrested, you have a right to terminate an encounter with the police.
Although the officer cannot lawfully prevent you from leaving during a consensual encounter, it is unlikely that you’ll be released without some sort of push-back. The officer may say, “I’m just trying to talk with you” or “What’s the problem? Have you done something that I should know about?” At that point, repeat the question, respectfully and patiently: “Am I free to go, officer, or am I being detained?”
I wrote this book for my three sons—two of them teenagers—so they can better understand what is expected of them as they transition from our home to the outside world. For them, and everyone coming of age today, there are new risks, expectations, and laws that didn’t exist for previous generations.
Let’s face it—going through adolescence has never been easy. But it can be more challenging today if you don’t completely understand the ways a damaged digital footprint can alter your life; the statements or actions that amount to sexual harassment; the potentially severe consequences of underage sexting; the point a sexual interaction “goes too far”; the safest way to pull over when stopped by the police; and so much more.
While the subject matter in this book is serious and at times unsettling, my objective is not to scare you. To the contrary, I hope that understanding the fact-based information herein will bring you a sense of calm knowing that you’re better prepared to handle the unexpected.
