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It’s amazing what people will do for attention, fame and getting someone to take notice. In the case of some girls in North Babylon, New York, in order to get some attention three girls (14, 14, 13) took to beating a third (13) so that they could post the incident online.
You can thank our culture for this event.
First, we have a “Fear Factor” culture– anything for money. You can be certain that there was some kind of reward for this video on the two sites that displayed it. It was either money or the second part of our current culture– webcam attention– that was the reason for this crime.
We all need to understand just how strong the pull of acceptance can be on these teens and what lengths they will go to in order to be noticed, to be well known, or liked. What the Internet has done is that it has taken the peers that a child would normally have (those found in school, church, and the playground) and multiplied the number several orders of magnitude.
Now their lives are not judged (by themselves) simply by who they are in contact personally, but their friend they Instant Message (IM) from Singapore, the grown man pretending to be a teen, and their in-person friends. They also have web pages where they are judged by how many people have added them as a friend, what the comments people leave about them, and whether they will go further than the person the “next website over.”
There’s pressure there that we never had to deal with. Now, a person should only be concerned about what God thinks of them– since that is the only appropriate standard– but since many have not yet accepted Christ, and even then teens are usually struggling through gaining their own identity anyway, it is our job as parents and loved ones to help reaffirm who they are in Christ, and to expose this folly for what it is.
We should not care about what those around us will say, but God will say about us. This is a hard lesson, but one that needs to be learned early if we are to have a joyful life.
Clearly not the brightest girls around either to post evidence of their own criminal activity for everyone to see. Are bullies usually stupid people?
This is one of the reasons why my husband and I started to originally consider homeschooling. We looked at how we were pressured to be a certain way, or ridiculed for who were were- and we wanted better for our daughter. Of course, we can’t protect her from everything, but it sure sounds nice to buy her some time to develop who she is, and an understanding of how God views her, before she has to deal with ’round the clock peer pressure.
I don’t know. *sigh* When I was in school, there were scuffles. Still, girls didn’t gang up on one girl and beat her like that. I understand that there is peer pressure, but where are the parents? Something is really wrong if some girls can so viciously attack another girl, and then take pride in it. I can’t just blame it on peer pressure, because there are plenty of people who show themselves to be above such influences. I think it has more to do with what kind of person that teenager is being raised up to be, and a parent should be the main influence in a young person’s life- not their friends. It just strikes me that this is a little deeper than “my friends made me do it”. 🙂
Buffy, I think that the whole intention was to gain attention– so the fact that they were actually in the video was secondary to what they thought they were going to get.
It goes back to the whole culture of people doing dumb stunts for attention.
Jenna, good points. Peer pressure is everywhere– the question is who do we want for our kids peers? We have to be careful in who we encourage our children to hang around with.
I think this also has a lot to do with how involved the parents are and whether the kids are “latch-key kids.”