Posted on 05/26/2015 5:08:07 PM PDT by ExSoldier
The student sitting at the front of the class doesn’t know she’s about to be attacked. But others in the room apparently do.
As another teenager approaches her from behind, several students in the class whip out their cellphones. They have no intention of dialing for help, however. Their aim is to record the encounter between the two teenage girls so that they can upload it to Instagram, YouTube and other sites.
In the recordings, shot from multiple angles, the girls exchange words and, before long, a punch is thrown. A scuffle breaks out, with squeals and laughter from classmates in the background. When a teacher tries to intervene, his glasses are knocked off and he’s pushed aside.
This battle took place two months ago at Lovejoy High School in Hampton, Ga., but there are similar recordings from all over the country. Educators and parents worry that the recordings are not only encouraging fights, but are also sometimes making them more brutal as students attempt to gain notoriety on social media. In some areas of the country, preplanned, off-campus fights are even drawing a large number of spectators, with nonstudents sometimes taking part.
One Instagram page devoted to Clayton County student brawls — clayco.fights — has nearly 400 fight videos and more than 30,000 followers. A Henry County page, which sprung up shortly after a similar page was deleted, has more than 3,000 followers. Last year, a distraught Cobb County parent alerted police and school officials to a site called Cobb Hook Session, which featured brawls between young people.
The fight pages are so troubling that some school districts are taking steps to address the problem by monitoring the Internet. If students are caught on tape on school grounds, they could be suspended. If administrators become aware of fights off campus, they try to intervene with the help of teachers, parents, school administrators and counselors.The scuffles occur in classrooms, hallways, bathrooms and schoolyards. Some are staged. Many are violent free-for-alls. And, while the popularity of the recordings is on the rise, it’s not a new problem.
Fayette police encountered similar online fights eight years ago on My Space. It was a Blood-on-Crip fight — a gang recruitment video — involving nine Fayette County High School students, said Scott Israel, a juvenile detective with the Fayette County Police Department.
Social sites have been pretty good about removing fights when notified, said Israel. But not always. “We sent off a subpoena in December 2007 to MySpace and are still waiting on the return,” he said.
Many parents are clueless about the online sites that show middle school and high school students brawling.
“It feels like the whole underground world of cockfighting or dogfighting,” said Jennifer Falk, who works with students in alternative schools and psychoeducational centers. She’s also the parent of two children who graduated from Duluth schools.
Even if a recording is staged, said Riverdale parent Tisheka Hubbard, “The play fights are very, very dangerous. Somebody could get hurt or killed.”
Students must figure out a way to resolve conflict, other than fighting, Hubbard said.
The recordings seem to be encouraging fighting. Clayton County schools superintendent Luvenia Jackson became aware of the problem about a year ago as more fights began “seeping into the school district.” In response, the district purchased monitoring technology.
“It’s not something peculiar to Clayton,” Jackson said. She said she has heard other superintendents talking about the problem at educational conferences.
“Most of those (fights) begin in the community and the school is where they end up coming together. Our administrators are becoming more aware of it and try to put preventive measures in place. We’re making sure there’s supervision and contacting parents to let them know what’s going on with their children.”
But, even when school districts are successful in getting the pages removed, new ones pop up, said Cox, Clayton’s school security chief. “I call it chasing the rabbit,” Cox said. “You get an idea of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, and once they’ve figured out you’re on to them, they move on.”
Steve Teske, the chief judge of Clayton’s Juvenile Court, said he is disheartened but not surprised by the trend of what he calls online “fight clubs” — similar to the amateur fighting featured in the 1999 movie “Fight Club.”
“The concept of fight clubs is not new. The only thing new is the form in which fight clubs are being published. Kids just enjoy all that (social) media,” Teske said.
Monitoring the online activities of a generation of schoolchildren weaned on technology is becoming increasingly difficult. “In addition to fighting, we have seen a trend where students post inappropriate videos and other sexual content online,” said Sloan Roach, a spokesperson for Gwinnett County schools, Georgia’s largest school system.
Cobb County Police Sgt. Dana Pierce said many kids who feel disconnected from their parents see these sites as “their moment of fame and glory.”
But Rosa Barbee, founder and president of community watchdog group Georgia Active Support and mother of an 11-year-old son, said parents must assume responsibility for their children.
“They’re wrestling just to get attention,” said Barbee. “Again, it’s parents’ responsibility to monitor their kids. Who pays for the cellphone?”
Paris Hudnall, a Riverdale mother, recently learned about the online fights from her two daughters. “Parents are the last to know because a lot of us don’t follow our kids on social media,” she said. “Monitoring your kids should be another part of parenting.”
While some adults are just now becoming aware of the fight sites, students are all too familiar.
Keyana Brown, 15, has viewed some of the online fights. She thinks today’s students, like students of the past, get a charge out of anything that breaks the routine. “What they get from it is the excitement of, like, seeing a fight, you know what I mean? School on a typical day is pretty boring.”
Combating online fights is a “slippery slope,” Cox said. “There’s not a whole lot we can do with existing laws, unless we can show bullying or distribution of pornography,” Cox said. “But there’s hardly ever any threats.”
Teske say online student fight sites aren’t protected by free speech. There are laws against fighting — even when both people consent to fight.
“If it’s illegal, it’s not protected speech,” he said. “You can’t go into a theater and shout ‘fire’ and you can’t go into a crowd and say things to incite a riot.”
Charleia Price is familiar with the repercussions of school fights. Her son had to learn to walk and talk again after sustaining a concussion when he was jumped by students in a bathroom at Riverdale Middle School two years ago. The family moved away, but returned this year. Price’s son attends another school in the district. But recently Price learned that a fight between her son and another student had been posted online. Both were suspended.
The teenager said he agreed to the “play fight” to gain acceptance. He said he didn’t know it would end up online. “I thought if I did that everybody would stop messing with me,” he said. “They think it’s funny and entertaining. It’s not really funny. It’s stupid. I didn’t need to do that.”
See, homeschooling is bad because homeschooled kids miss out out on this kind of socialization ...
I was a student who didn’t hit puberty until age seventeen. I weighed 56lbs when I started high school. You think that there is an increase in bullying today because you personally lived in a bubble and you refused to believe things that you did not want to believe.
Welcome to reality, ExSoldier. It is the same as it ever was.
The difference now is exactly the same as the difference between police corruption today and police corruption in the past.
Ubiquitous cameras crush the deeply desired illusions that people lived in by choice.
People who cherish the illusions they held and don’t have the fortitude to deal with reality that they ignored or enabled the problem in the past. So they throw out the pathetic assertion that the problem long talked about by others and long denied by themselves has just now appeared.
But it didn’t just appear.
Cell phone cameras is what just appeared.
Who pays for the cell phone?
I thought Obama provided them for free.
Is there any hope for this subculture? Are they just doomed?
I want to wave a magic wand and stop the vicious cycle but it just gets worse every subsequent generation. How do we fix this without taking all the fatherless babies away from their mothers and raising them in Catholic convents or some such thing.
This problem seems doomed to go on forever worsening.
Hmm, looks like an extra mag is in my future. Two is not enough ...
This woman is clueless: THERE IS NO CONFLICT other than a fabricated one as an excuse to attack. This is a sport, or a hobby.
It’s not clear to me how they managed it, but Victorian England had a large population of uneducated, ruthless gutter rats in every big city. I’m thinking mid to late 1800s when Capitalism was taking off and their society hadn’t figured out how to deal with “the dregs”.
Somehow they turned it around. While they never eliminated poverty, and they did eventually slide deeply into socialism and decline, there was a period (1900 to 1940 perhaps) where England seemed to build a stronger social fabric and have somewhat fewer people living life at the bottom.
Whatever they did is probably what we need to do.
Put them in cages. In the Pacific Ocean.
Stay in one piece down there.
We are witnessing the fall of Rome and the beginning of the next dark ages, rejoice in seeing history unfold before our very eyes.
When i was in grade school there was a special, admin-approved area for fighting and wrestling. It was good fun. In highschool there were fights every Friday night down by the Piggly Wiggly.
That was.... A very long time ago.
A while back I ran into a guy who once cold-cocked me at a party in highschool. He apologized. I had forgotten about it. No one told me I was supposed to be “psychologicaly traumatized.”
Boys are no different now than they were 1,000 years ago.
The real problem is the absurd number of teacher’s raping children.
Have school security open fire on them. This’ll stop.
ROFLMAO! Whatever gave you that silly idea? Read my FR Home page. I've taught in some of the toughest inner city high schools in Miami, FL. I have lost dozens of students to gang violence and had a colleague of mine, get jumped after school, because he had the AUDACITY to confiscate an iPod from a female. When he confiscated it, she slapped him on the spot. He sent her to the office expecting an arrest as is county policy.
But the poor thing was simply misunderstood and TPTB sent her home on an outdoor suspension (speaking of which in 2005 that school had the highest number of suspensions for violence in the nation: seven THOUSAND--7000 -- in one school year on a population of just 1800!). She returned that afternoon with her crackhead mother, her golden gloves boxer brother and another guy. They jumped the teacher after he'd just finished tutoring some kids for their FCAT exams and they broke his jaw in three places. My class is just across the hall from his. I was out sick that day. Next day, my kids come to class and AXE me if I'm now 'Fraid to come to work? to which I responded thusly: "Look son, I'm too young to die and too old to take a A$$ whuppin' so, I'm just gonna KILL YA."
Their eyes got wide and they said: "Yeah we figured you'd say that." That was because at the other inner city high school from where this one had recruited me to teach a psychology and sociology class, I'd had a little incident where I'd had to put a kid on the ground, screaming. But that was just a small thing, there. It impressed the kids though.
My other buddy at that school (retired Airborne Ranger 1st Sergeant from the 1st Ranger Battalion) had taken out nearly a half dozen kids on his own amidst a sudden gang fight in his class. That was quite interesting. When I say taken out I mean out cold as in unconscious, but not dead. Can't remember if he broke bones.
Code Red shooting incidents were common. One time I was home sick again (it was a "sick" building and I was always having headaches and breathing issues) and a buddy called me on my cell asking if I could "see it." I asked see what? and he replied the dead body riddled with bullets in the street beneath my class room that year. I missed all the cool stuff that year.
Finally I got sick of having the "state" all up in my face (everybody was harassed) -- they kicked 35 teachers out the door to other schools. I survived the cut because we were a triple "F" school and I had very good stats. But I got burned out and requested a transfer.
When I went into my middle school where I am now, I asked: Okay, how many knifings here? They were aghast. It's really quite a nice school, but I need to be teaching the high school kids so I'm trying to transfer to a nice suburban high school next year. I'll probably retire in four or five years.
My point flew entirely over your head.
Things were as bad as you describe at some schools back in the sixties.
That's an interesting question. It depends. For example in the 17 years I taught at those two inner city high schools, I never experienced the first incident of racism from any student. Even those I'd had suspended or expelled. But the teachers and administrators that were "of color?" The hatred rolled off of them in waves. I had a principal for a few years that refused to look any white person in the eye when greeted with a "Good Morning!" he might respond but he wouldn't even glance your way.
95% of my students, when they were finished with my assignment in class, they'd take out a Holy Bible and read or have a quiet "study" among themselves, to which I was delighted. Some of the LIBTARDS in that school, among the faculty would suppress that activity, but not me.
OTOH, about 5% of those I taught were totally welfare state minded and of them maybe 2% would be ripe for radicalization to Islam and recruitment. That happened to me in 2001 right after 911, but that's a long story for another time. The small percentages were shunned by the "good kids" and they would come to me and apologize profusely when one of them (entitlement children) would act stupid in class.
And you entirely missed my point, MrEdd. The point is that it's no longer just the violence which has always been there. But now it's an organized spectator sport and large crowds may show up in the terms of a "flash mob." Now, suppose the kid (victim) is walking home with friends and the mob shows up, the violence can easily spread to them. Probably will. At the very least they will be forced to watch the victimization of their friend and have to see it over and over on the various media frequented by that age group. I don't have an instagram account. Most of my family does, but I don't because I don't want to be followed by my students. It's the numbers and instant global sharing that is new here. The ability to organize. Not the act itself. Goes far beyond cell phone cameras as you asserted.
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