Young people (and by young I mean under 25) often do stupid things. I know because I did stupid things when I was that young, casually taking risks that could have resulted in injury or even death that I would not dream of doing now. I am amazed when I recall my younger self that I could have been so foolish and am thankful that I have survived.

Research supports my thesis that young people are prone to stupid behavior since they find that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, the part that is responsible for reasoning, planning, and making judgments, does not become fully developed until around the age of 25, which is a good reason for raising the age for granting driving licenses, since driving safely in one act that requires particularly good judgment. As a result of both the research and my own experiences, I tend to be very forgiving of young people’s indiscretions, believing that almost all of them, however irresponsible they seem when they are young, will grow up to be sensible adults.

But while poor judgment can be blamed for things like driving while drunk, performing foolish acts of bravado merely to impress the people around you, walking around in shorts in deep winter, and so on, there are some things that young people do that point to deeper problems than simply poor judgment. I am thinking at this point of the two Rutgers University students (Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both age 18) who allegedly set up a webcam to record Ravi’s roommate Tyler Clementi (also 18) having sex, and streamed the video live on the internet and tweeted their followers to watch. This ended in tragedy when Clementi was so mortified that he committed suicide.

My reaction to this story was sadness at the death and horror at what those two students had done. What were they thinking? How could they not know that what they were doing was deeply wrong? How could they not have a basic moral compass that would tell them that they had completely lost their bearings? After all, this was not even a grey area where reasonable people could disagree about whether the act was appropriate.

The blatantly wrong nature of what was done suggests that it was not merely an act of poor judgment by Ravi and Wei but points to deeper problems, both personal and societal. The personal one is the homophobia involved. Clementi was gay. If he had been having sex with a woman, I think his roommate would not have streamed the video. It is because homosexuality is still viewed as something outside the norm, a cause for teasing, taunting, and tormenting, that the perpetrators felt that what they did was ‘funny’ and that they would not face any repercussions.

The societal problem is that we now live in an age where the boundary between the private and the public has become blurred almost to the point of non-existence. Some people think nothing of freely revealing the most intimate details of their lives to the public on venues such as Facebook and YouTube. Such people are still few but the existence of reality TV has amplified their impact and made it appear as if fame, however fleeting, is sufficient incentive for people to reveal everything about their lives to a voyeuristic audience.

The government is not helping here. It claims that it has the right to snoop into our lives in order to ‘protect us from terrorists’. Businesses also think nothing of harvesting our personal information for commercial use. All these have added to the pervasive sense that people do not have the right to privacy or the expectation that it will be protected.

TV programs in the old Candid Camera mold or people like Sacha Baron Cohen (in his persona as Ali G or Borat or Bruno) have made it seem acceptable to put unsuspecting people in situations in which they say or do embarrassing things and then broadcast the result to the world. And now the internet has made it possible for reality TV or Candid Camera or Cohen wannabees to try their hand at this, not realizing that this is not a harmless prank, that violating people’s privacy is wrong, that there is deep cruelty inherent in their actions, and that the danger is high of things turning out badly. I suspect that this is what lies at the heart of what motivated Ravi and Wei to do what they did.

The harassment that young LGBT people face at the hands of their peers is appalling. And because their knowledge and experience and worldview is so limited, they may think that their entire life is going to be a continuation of their horrible adolescence. It should not be surprising that so many of them commit suicide or are harmed psychologically, with some of them even growing up to be the kinds of hateful closeted anti-gay bigots that keep getting exposed.

Dan Savage has started a great program called It Gets Better aimed at giving hope to young LGBT people that things will improve, to make them aware that if they can weather the tough early years, then as adults life will be much more tolerable. Adults have much more control over their environments, such as where they work and live and whom they interact with, and thus you can avoid the homophobes more easily. I hope Savage’s program takes off and also that we become a society that can deal with sexuality in all its diversity in a mature way.