Everyone knows what bullying is, for example; the taunts kids yelled at school, extortion, fights, spreading rumours; an extremely horrifying and sad problem that many students face in high school. Now with the use of technology as well as physical violence, bullying has escalated to an even more dangerous and threatening level. Some may have heard recently of another case of internet bullying that has occured in the United States, Lakeland, Florida;
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=42578&cat=14
Victoria Lindsay was unknowingly trapped in a classmate's house (where she had run away from home to) and under went severe beatings, threats, name-calling and humiliation by 6 of her classmates and 2 older teenage boys; all of this was being taped by one of the perpetrators, a 16 year old fellow cheerleader from her high school, their intention? To humiliate Victoria by posting this video on the net for public viewing; Why did they decide to commit such a horrifying act? For alleged 'trash talking' Victoria had done about these girls over the internet; in particular the popular site Myspace.com.
Here there are so many aspects to question; the by-stander effect, the 2 older boys present had no problems with Victoria, but chose to stand by idley and allow this battery to happen to a young girl while they had the power to intervene and stop this assault before it got even worse. Are people become more and more malicious today and formulating new ways of torture, both mental and physical at such a young age? Is myspace to blame as it was an outlet for this 'trash talking' to happen? If this behaviour had occured in school itself, would the situation have been dealt with the same way?
I feel that if Victoria had indeed spread rumours and talked about her friends behind their back at school, a confrontation in school or some where out of school would have occured except on a less malicious level; there would have been no abduction, no filming, no plans for humiliation. The bullies found this evidence of 'trash talking' on the internet, which added more fuel to the fire each time they viewed Victoria's page and kept it in thus they slowly planned what to do, getting angrier and angrier as the 'trash talking' carried on, making their final decision to address this issue so malicious and so violent that they lost sight of how trivial the whole situation actually was. Vengeance and bullying has risen to an all new level, with popular sites like Myspace not having censorship and screening for such videos (myspace only censors gore, nudity, anti-religion propaganda etc) before they are posted, this case of internet bullying and having the victims humiliated with videos online is not the first time. Even Youtube, where any video can be posted regardless of it's content, where even the more graphic videos can be viewed with merely making an over-18 account. Have our youth become so tainted and affected by what goes on on the internet rather than in real life? Globalisation may just have caused people to create the idea to humiliate globally.
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3 comments:
Yeah Hannah this is so true! its crazy how everyone's business becomes so public today, while doing research for psychopathology essay, i found out that youtube even has videos of people jumping in front of the MRT to commit suicide. In Vctoria's case, the fact that she made it so public made them feel even more angrier because EVERYONE has access to that. and nobody wants their name to be tarnished right? Some time ago when I was part of this forum, there was a group of ppl who trash talked about me and my online friends and when my group of online friends found out, we all got into the mentality to "take them down" (obviously, no real harm done, just some online fighting and stuff) but these problems could have escalated into something serious if we had physical contact, so im glad the only contact we had with them was online. Its scary how somethng small escalates into something so major, but we have to live with it though :/ unless myspace and youtube come up with SOME way to filter out much of the crap they talk about.
It's so sad knowing that internet have been abused for that kind of thing. I also remembered about my sister and her classmates. The whole batch do not like my sister's classmate (which is a girl). And one guy decide to make friendster account in purpose to scold this girl. So all his friends who also dislike this girl also make bad comments about her. The worst things are, they still around 12 years old and the teacher found out about this. I can't understand why such a young student can do such thing. I just hope that fiendster, myspace, and youtube, can filter not only "bad pictures" but also the "bad words" and the content of the conversation :)
This is so sad and really makes you take a step back and think what went wrong that our world came to such extreme levels of bullying. I really hope those teens were punished.
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