'Essendon Station Bitch Fight'

The position Niddrie Secondary College took on its student who filmed the fight was to suspend her - the same punishment received by the two fighting girls. Though several schools have sought to tackle such videos by banning videophones or all mobiles from their premises, how can these schools ensure videoing doesn’t happen when the fighting takes place outside school hours and school grounds - as was the case in this instance.

Schools have teachers to enforce regulations and discipline, whereas YouTube has no staff to actively trawl the site for violent or offensive videos. “The community polices the website,” says Rachel Whetstone from Google, the parent company of YouTube.

To me the self-determining, video-flagging system of YouTube is a good one. But, can self-governance really work when it comes to violence? Self-governing communities replace hierarchical authority with relationships based on responsibility, accountability for one’s own actions, full access to information, and freedom of choice. Does that sound like a societal model in which you would like to live? The French government doesn’t think so. Last year it passed legislation that outlawed the filming of violent acts by any citizen who is not a professional journalist. Bloggers, amateur documentary filmmakers, or those filming to collect evidence of a crime, are not exempt. The law is intended to target those involved in what has been called “Happy Slapping”, the act of attacking someone and filming it for entertainment. Anyone caught filming and then publishing violent images faces up to five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros (about AU$130,000), which is potentially heavier than the sentence for committing a violent act itself.

Last September a 15-year-old British girl used a mobile phone to film a man being beaten by two friends of hers. The man died three days later from a ruptured spleen. The two young men who bashed the man were sentenced to six and seven year's detention. The girl pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting manslaughter. In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the UK, the girl was sentenced to two year’s incarceration for manslaughter. No longer is watching a passive activity. No longer is filming an event the act of a surveying bystander.

However, teaching young people a lesson in this way is not always possible or, necessarily, effective. At Temple University in Philadelphia, psychologist Laurence Steinberg has been studying risk behaviour in teenagers. In an experiment using a driving-simulation game, he studied teens and adults as they decide whether to run an orange light. Both sets of subjects, he found, made safe choices when playing alone. But, in group play teenagers took more risks in the company of their friends, while those over the age of 20 didn’t show much change in their behaviour. “With this manipulation,” says Steinberg, “we’ve shown that age differences in decision making and judgment may appear under conditions that are emotionally arousing or have high social impact.”

“Most teen crimes,” he says, “are committed by kids in packs”.

Such risk-taking behaviour most likely evolved to compel teenagers to leave their parents’ nests, explore the wider world and find their own paths and mates. But in today’s world where cars, alcohol, drugs, peer pressure and, it seems, technology, beckon, the teenager is being made out to be a liability.

And a scapegoat. To suspend the fighting girls and the girl who filmed them is, of course, to punish them, but it is also to blame them for society’s infatuation with violence as entertainment. Just as with the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, the perpetrators of the torture received the punishment even though their superiors knew exactly what was going on.

In 1996 the American computer scientist B.J. Fogg coined the term Captology (an acronym from the words Computers As Persuasive Technologies) to describe the area of inquiry that explores the effects of interactive technology on people’s attitudes or behaviors. At Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, that Fogg founded, the researchers predict that: “In 10-15 years mobile phones will be the primary platform for changing people’s attitudes and behaviours, surpassing the persuasive power of TV, radio, and the web - combined.” The researchers agree that the mobile phone platform has unprecedented potential for persuading people. So maybe it is the video and camera phones and their accessibility that are responsible for the violence.

Or could part of the problem be the small mobile phone screens and the small YouTube interface windows: the seriousness of the action seen within is diminished by the size.

Nobody can deny that violence has become a staple of popular culture. “Does this town need a hug? What happened?” host Jon Stewart asked the audience at the 2008 Academy Awards in relation to the violent nature of so many of the nominated films. Why is it that we don’t find these big budget movies as disturbing as we do the homespun ones?

It’s not startling news any more when psychologists come forward with more research findings that children exposed to violent TV, movies and video games may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, and may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways. Fed on these staples it’s no wonder young people mimic them and imagine themselves as the heroes of their own movies, without thought or question locating their action. But, it is startling that we blame the kids for being kids; for learning through watching and imitating others. Are these kids promoting and encouraging violence by posting these Happy Slapping clips online? Are they not merely gobbling up the violence we have fed them and spitting it back out in their own image?

Our fascination with violence and blood and guts was around way before 2005 when YouTube entered our online consciousness. Last year, the BBC commissioned a documentary on the trend of recording and posting violent attack videos online. YouTube YouTube and LiveLeak were singled out as being two of the main User Generated Content sites involved. But are these sites responsible for censoring and morally auditing their contents? Maybe a part of what we dislike about the violent homemade clips is that they show us a part of our collective selves that we don’t like and don’t want to look at.

Banning videophones may be the only power schools have in preventing Happy Slapping, but the real issue is the compulsion to do it in the first place. It’s true that kids should know right from wrong by the time they are teenagers, but their behaviour is merely emblematic of what they perceive as entertainment. We haven’t become desensitised viewers of the media, but desensitised viewers of real life. This is not an indictment of the sick teenage mind, but of a broader social enthusiasm for capturing humiliation and pain on film, manifest by our appetite for watching people hurt one another, or a fatal attack by a stingray..

It is far easier to ban videophones and suspend kids from school, than to point the finger where it belongs - at an increasingly voyeuristic media culture. It seems simplistic to hand down harsh sentences to young people and expect them to learn. The responsibility may be theirs, but the problem is wider.