By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
“I THINK it’s time that someone heard a teenager’s thoughts on violence.”
This plea was written in a letter by 13-year-old Kelsey Ryan and sent to the News last week.
Disturbed by a TV news broadcast in which an elderly man was brutally beaten and robbed, the Narre Warren teenager was spurred to pen a letter to the newspaper denouncing the violence she kept seeing flashed across her television screen.
With the letter received in the wake of White Ribbon month, the News spoke to Kelsey about what inspired her to write the piece and what she hopes it can achieve.
In her letter Kelsey, from Fountain Gate Secondary College, shares how the broadcast made her escape to her room where she “could not stop crying”.
“How could these people stoop so low?” she wrote.
“Leave a poor, innocent man brutally beaten on the ground, what has gone into these people’s minds so that they think it’s okay to not have respect for the elderly?
“This man has grandchildren; I could not imagine how frightened he would be to even go outside his house again.”
Kelsey, who lives with her grandparents Barbara and Paul, told the News she hadn’t known whether she had the “guts” to write something like that.
But she soon felt compelled.
“I thought about my grandparents – what if that happened to them?
“If that happened to them, how would I feel?” she said.
Later in her letter Kelsey puts forward her suggestions on how to curb the community violence, including extra police patrols, more CCTV cameras in all areas and more school assemblies involving victims of violence and police officers.
“I know that many will say ‘you’re only a teenager, so what would you know?’ but we kids listen and wonder about these things more than you think,” Kelsey wrote.
“It’s tearing us apart seeing that men and women can’t even respect the elderly now, imagine what this world will be like in 10 years?”
Grandmother Barbara sent the letter to the newspaper after reading how well it was written.
“I thought she was doing her homework but she was writing that letter and she printed it off,” Barbara said.
“She writes very nice things. She quite often writes stories, or she’ll write me a letter.
“I thought it was really good that she’s taken an interest in what’s going on around her because teenagers sometimes are in their own little world. I thought it was quite a good letter.
“She’s just happy that someone’s taken notice apart from her family.”
