A group of eight teenagers, six of them girls, were arrested for beating up another girl, 16-year old Victoria Lindsay, purely for the sake of filming the attack and uploading the video to YouTube.
One of the girls struck the 16-year-old victim on the head several times and then slammed her head into a wall, knocking her unconscious, according to an arrest report.
The police described the attack as “animalistic”:
“It’s absolutely an animalistic attack,” Sheriff Grady Judd said Tuesday on NBC television’s Today show. “They lured her into the home for express purpose of filming the attack and posting it on the Internet.”
The victim was treated for concussion, bruises, and damage to the left eye and ear. What interests me about this is this: at what point did these teens think: “Hey! Let’s beat up so poor schmuck and upload the video to YouTube! That certainly is a SMART idea!” and feel that they were going to get away with it? One of the teens involved in the attack handed the clip over to the police, so I guess the guilt must have been eating her. Still., it’s one atrociously horrific attack.
The insanity of it all is that these people thought that beating up someone for entertainment was fun. I can’t get my head around it: why do people think that willfully harming another person is entertainment?
And how far a step is it from there to snuff clips?
Question: what steps do you think might have to be taken to reduce the acceptedness of gratuitous violence for the sake of entertainment?
This desire to be famous or do something worthy of being noticed is crazy.
[...] By developers, for developers – Builder AU wrote an interesting post today on Today’s insanity: girls beat up and kidnap another girl for YouTube…Here’s a quick excerpt…for beating up another girl, 16-year old Victoria Lindsay, purely for the sake of filming the attack and uploading the video to YouTube. [...]
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I just think that willingness to go to ANY lengths to be noticed or be noted is crazy. Small distinction, I know, but I feel it’s an important one.
I wonder to what extent the level of violence in entertainment—movies etc—has to do with this. Violence is depicted as a normal part of life.
joeseeker: Probably quite a bit, I’d imagine. Violence is glorified, and it’s perceived as the acceptable norm, even if the reality is something else completely. It’s the reason that a ratings system exists, even if it isn’t reliably or fully enforced. The alternative, of course, is an outright banination on all forms of violent media, but that way lies madness and a revokation of the right to free speech.
This is absolutely n-sane I am in an outrage that one mother to another mother would make such a comment. I have a daughter and girls will talk about each other BUT I have taught my children “Sticks an Stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me!” These girls say they were arguing on my space….In my opinion none of these girls should of had a my space.. TOO YOUNG. Where was the one girls mom while they are at her house beating this girl? Do they think they are cool because it took 6 “GIRLS” to beat up 1 “GIRL”. How would that other mother feel or any of those moms feel if it happened to their daughter? Those 6 Girls parents should be sued for damages that their children put upon that girl and her family. All over a few negative words….So that gave them the right to gang up on 1 “GIRL”? Absolutely NOT. Its a sham.
How mad… and sad
I don’t think this has as much to do with violence on TV or in films as it has to do with a bullying mentality and a mob mentality. I was watching a (really pointless) program about bullying and hazing in the States. (I say pointless because it was one of those “Worst hazing incidents” programs which didn’t really delve into causes etc.) But basically, I would say that it’s not so much a violent movie – for example, where a mobster type beats the crap out of an innocent dude who didn’t want to pay hush money or people with guns shoot the crap out of aliens – that encourages this type of behavior but the mentality where one group of people thinks they’re better than another and feel that this gives them the right to phsyically assault the other group. And we can see this in school bullying, in hazing in sports teams and the military, and even in incidents such as those at Abu Ghraib etc.
As said in a previous post on video games – it’s EASY to lay the blame at the feet of movies and video games, but I believe the real culprit is more likely this passive acceptance of certain horrible aspects of our society. Many people will tell you hazing is a useful strategy for building team feeling or military brotherhood etc.
You’re right, of course. It IS easy to blame the media. Take a look at the My Lai massacre. The soldiers there didn’t even see the people they killed as human–possibly a feeling of moral or human superiority.
MUSIC VIDEO- VICTORIA LINDSAY’S GANGSTA PARADISE-
http://podblanc.com/?q=node/16687
Is it can be spam?
Allah confound you Akhsimet! (I think he is Egyptian.)
Hmmm…interesting video, at the very least. Trashy at the worst. Probably not very accurate, though. As has been pointed out earlier on, it seems doubtless that the kids are parroting what they’ve seen in the media, and were pretty much just doing so because, hey, “I am right and they are wrong”. Watching the fight itself is disturbing, and the video is probably unnecessary sensationalist crap, but as I said…interesting at the very least.
Here’s a more thorough news clip on the incident.