Web is becoming window for teens to stage violence
Posting of fight videos multiplies on Internet
The grainy, 91-second amateur video begins with a graphic naming the two fighters, both North Tonawanda Middle School students.
It ends with one boy raising his arms triumphantly and the other coping with a broken nose he suffered as a note on the screen taunts the loser.
A fight between two students is not surprising. The surprise here is that someone recorded the fight, edited the video and then posted it on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site.
The posting of schoolyard fight videos appears to be a growing trend across the country, with scores of cases covered in recent months.
“I find that what is happening here locally is mirroring what is happening nationally,” said Patti McLain, community educator with the Buffalo office of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “While I find it disturbing and disheartening, it’s not surprising.”
Some fights have grabbed a lot of attention, including a few notably vicious assaults that police say were staged for the express purpose of recording the attack.
So, why are they doing it?
For the attention, according to police, experts and teens, and possibly for recognition from their peers and the wider world.
They also might be copying what they’ve seen in other fight videos. Or they may be trying to humiliate the victim of the attack. Or they may just think the videos are funny.
“I think that especially kids in this day and age, to some extent, [the publicity] influences them or motivates them to do it,” said Kevin Moore, a recent City Honors High School graduate. “All sorts of people are gaining fame from YouTube.”
North Tonawanda police are investigating the most recent case, which came to light two weeks ago, though they have not filed any charges.
YouTube site administrators took down the video after they were alerted to it, but thousands of fight videos remain and critics say YouTube should do more to police itself.
“What they have to do is hire staff to approve videos before they’re posted,” said Jayne Hitchcock, president of Wo rking to Halt Online Abuse — Kids-Teen Division, a volunteer group.
Kids have always fought. What’s new today is the technology that gives just about anyone with a cell phone or digital camera the ability to record and share anything they see.
Young people in particular frequently shoot photos and videos and pass along those images through YouTube, the photo- sharing site Flickr and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
“I think it’s cool, if you’re doing something that isn’t destructive to someone else,” said Kyle Friedman, 18, who just graduated from Buffalo Seminary.
Fights that were recorded are now preserved for posterity
and available for anyone with an Internet connection to view.
“We have a generation of digital natives who think nothing of doing this and know how to do this,” said Joe Marren, a Buffalo State College assistant professor of communication.
Searching for “school fight” on YouTube brings up about 40,000 videos, such as “Middle School Fight Caught on Camera” and “School Kids Fight After Chess Game.”
Some of the fight videos appear to be staged for the camera, but many are brutally real and a number of these cases have generated intense publicity.
In perhaps the most notorious incident, eight teens in Lakeland, Fla., were arrested on charges of battery and false imprisonment after savagely beating an acquaintance in an attack recorded on video.
“I was absolutely horrified,” said Victoria Lester, 14, who will attend Buffalo Seminary this fall. “I personally thought it was really mean and disgusting.”
Some experts believe the people behind the fight videos are seeking attention, or the chance to become mildly famous.
“This is the bite of reality TV coming back at us,” said Alex Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University who once taught at the University at Buffalo. “There is something about the culture of instant celebrity that seems to encourage this.”
It’s not surprising children and teens are doing this now because they’re exposed to so much violence in the media, including coverage of other fight videos, said Kenneth N. Condrell, a Williamsville child psychologist.
There’s a lowering of the bar for what’s considered appropriate behavior, he said.
“I think we have an increase in cruelty among peers over the last 20 years,” Condrell said.
Some of the videos, such as one posted in May 2007 by a student at the Middle Early College High School in Buffalo, don’t show serious fights and are meant to be humorous.
A number of the video posters may have darker motives, however, and putting a violent fight video online could be a form of bullying or an attempt to humiliate the victim, said McLain, the local official with the center for exploited children.
“Technology has made bullying so much easier, in a sense,” she said. “It revictimizes somebody when the whole world gets to see their humiliation.”
Many of the kids behind the videos probably just think it’s funny to do it, teens say, and they don’t think about the consequences of preserving and publicizing these often-disturbing images.
A few critics say YouTube should be doing more to keep these fight videos off its site.
The company, now owned by Google, will take down a video when it receives a complaint from a user or someone else that the video is inappropriate.
But the company said hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to the site by users each day, too many to review before they are posted and made available for viewing.
Still, Hitchcock said You- Tube should spend the money to hire enough employees to view each video before it’s allowed on the site.
And parents must play a bigger role, experts say, making an effort to be more aware of how their children use the Web and what they are posting online.
In the case of the North Tonawanda fight, no charges have been filed, though the case remains under investigation.
The eight spectators, however, did have to attend two sessions last week with a North Tonawanda police officer and a social worker, forums that were intended to reinforce acceptable behavior, said North Tonawanda Superintendent Vincent
J. Vecchiarella.
And the mother of the 14-
year-old boy whose nose was broken in the fight said she’s hoping to transfer him out of the district when he starts high school this fall.
She said she’s frustrated that there don’t appear to be laws against posting the violent videos online.
“What are we going to do, wait until something really bad happens?” she asked.
Nancy A. Fischer of the News Niagara Bureau contributed to this report. swatson@buffnews.com
