Jennifer Osborne Photography

JONATHAN

"My parent's split up in January, and it all got started by facebook. You would see facebook 'minimize' when we came home in through the door. My brother didn't believe it. Now a days, internet causes a lot of conflict with people's relationship. It does good and bad things."

AMY

"It would be nice to live in California. I'd like to be doing celebrity nails, gettin' all the gossip from them. Probably never gonna happen...."

RASILA

"The rednecks at out school thought it was cool to bully colored kids. I got bullied up until grade 10, and finally I just beat the sh*t out of one kid that had been bullying me since grade 7 and the bullying stopped. These are the types of kids that show up at parties just to fight, all high on coke."

KATIE

"I don't really have any problems. People who have lots of problems just need to relax. Most problems aren't as bad as people think. As long as you're alive you've got no problems."

JARED

"I'm in foster care. I'm a ward of the ministry. My mom is my biggest problem in my life. She is a drug addict. She uses crack and cocaine. She was shocked and happy when I told her I was going to have a child. She had a kid when she was 17 too."

ETHAN

"I was heavily medicated for the gamut of ADHD, Tourettes, OCD when I was quite young. Tourettes with puberty started to go away, the ticks and everything. I always hated these meds. The doctor I had, he was a pill pusher. I think it's demeaning to humans to make them feel they can't solve there own problems."

KATELYN

"My idol is Jesus. He's perfect."

WILLIAM

"I've dated a lot of older women. When I was 18 I was hanging out with a 36 year old women. I like mature women. I like the mentality, I like the way they act."

MORGAN

"Most of them said they weren't surprised. 'Of course you would have a baby right now'.

Its a bit more normal to have children at a young age in the valley. Someone at our work [zellers] had her 7th baby when she was 44 yrs old."

RYAN

"I don't cry really, but the last time was 11 months ago when my dad passed away."

Jay Phillips was beaten by 3 white supremacist teenage rednecks on July 9th, 2009, in small town Courtenay.

Words like: "we're gonna lynch you, we're gonna kill you, get out of our F*ck*ng town" were thrown amongst punches. When three white-ass white-supremist KIDS yell something like "this is a white town and you and your whole race aren't welcome here", I wonder who and what encourages these beliefs.

This series examines the physical change happening between the ages 12 and 19. Something harder to articulate is emotional maturity. Are we to be held responsible for our actions if we are never given the opportunity to learn?