Cellphone school fights not so innocent

The phenomenon of cellphone fighting has come to town, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

If you happened to see the YouTube video earlier this week of the so-called “bitch fight” between South Kamloops secondary kids, you would have noticed the mass of phones being pointed at the dueling students.

Such fights seem to be a growing thing, staged for the video app. Some are between consenting teens; others involve real victims.

Smartphones are recording such fights all over the world. In Australia, a 13-year-old girl was thrown to the floor in a school washroom and punched in the head at least seven times as the victim begged, “please don’t hurt me any more.”

And, guess what? There was a cheering crowd to witness the assault, to record it on their phones, and to send out the images.

In the southern U.S., a TV station reported that fights at a high school were becoming a regular occurence, and that cellphone recordings of them were being viewed thousands of times on YouTube.

Some of the fights were planned days in advance.

“It’s funny. I ain’t a fight-starter, but if I see one, I just pull my phone out and record it and put it on YouTube,” one student said in an interview with the station.

Closer to home, a 14-year-old boy was charged with aggravated assault in Toronto this year after beating up another kid so bad he was hospitalized with serious head injuries. The fight was, of course, posted on YouTube.

Nanaimo school authorities found a YouTube video of a fight between two teenaged girls. Calgary school officials asked YouTube to remove a video of students fighting at a junior high school. In Ottawa, a fight video was watched 1,000 times before it was pulled.

YouTube’s policy is that “real violence” is not allowed. “If a video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, it will be removed.”

The Kamloops video was pulled under that policy. Yet dozens, maybe even hundreds, of videos of school kids fighting can be found on YouTube. Other websites specialize in it, some clearly marketing fights between girls as erotica, promoting them with lines like, “Really hot high school girls fight,” and “A chick gets absolutely pummeled by another chick.”

School authorities are becoming increasingly concerned but don’t know what to do about it. In some places, attempts have been made to ban cellphones in schools, and to punish anyone who even watches a school fight.

Some psychologists fear young people can become habituated to violence by watching the fights or by constantly being exposed to the videos.

I found one disturbing reference to something called “happy slapping,” which started in the U.K. This involves a youth slapping or hitting a stranger while another youth records it on a cellphone and then sends it out over the Internet.

“Happy slapping” has spread all over Europe. Some incidents have gotten out of hand and progressed into full-fledged assaults. People have died.

In France, a gang rape was shot on cellphones and distributed. Of course, we don’t have to go that far afield to find an example of that — the 16-year-old Pitt Meadows girl whose gang rape was posted on Facebook last fall is a case in point.

Those who brush off school fights as nothing to worry about might want to think about the real consequences of accepting violence among our kids, and the part modern technology plays in it.