RI's youth suffer from crisis of values

JAKARTA (JP): Researchers say young Indonesians today suffer from anomie. They do not know right from wrong.

Rusydi Syahra, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Sciences, told a seminar on youth here yesterday that many young people committed socially unacceptable acts -- such as vandalism or becoming involved in brawls -- because they lacked a sense of values.

Antara reported that the institute's recent study on high school students in Bandung, Ujungpandang and Medan, found that more than half of the respondents admitted to having difficulty in defining whether their own acts were right or wrong.

"A great number of students also said they were often depressed without understanding why they felt that way," Rusydi said.

Young people who dropped out of school and had no orderly daily activities experienced greater confusion. He compared this particular group with high school students who had relatively better social and economic lives, and found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the latter group experienced anomie.

"The percentage of urban youth, such as those in Jakarta, who experience anomie is even higher (than those who live outside of cities) because of the various urban conditions which lead to problems," he said.

Anomie in societies or individuals is a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.

The term was introduced by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his study of suicide. He believed that one type of suicide resulted from the breakdown of social standards that people need to regulate their behavior.

When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, while new values and meanings have not been developed.

Such a society produces, in many of its members, a sense of futility, a lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving for certain goals is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.

Rusydi pointed out how Indonesian youths are exposed to a clash of values, leading to confusion as to which set of values to adhere to.

When a family, school or peer environment failed to instill strong values in a child, while the mass media exposed him or her to foreign "unacceptable" values, the child would certainly become confused, he pointed out.

"They become people who do not have a clear purpose in life," Rusydi said. (swe)