'Essendon Station Bitch Fight'

I admired Terri Irwin for watching and then destroying the footage of her husband Steve being attacked by the stingray that killed him. I felt glad for her that she didn’t sell her husband’s death to the highest bidder, but I was also disappointed - I felt jibbed of the spectacle.

I don’t usually seek out violent or vicious films, but when I read that a video clip of two schoolgirls fighting had been removed from YouTube, I was again disappointed that I hadn’t had a chance to see that clip. I am a YouTube member with nearly 60 videos posted on my profile page, and have an avid interest in the random homemade videos I come across on the site and, in this case, the clip that had been removed from it.

Having watched a number of disturbing clips I was intrigued as to what had caused YouTube to remove this one. I wondered about the process that took place from the clip’s posting to its deletion. I thought about making and uploading an offensive clip of my own, to find out about the removal process from a user’s perspective; but I feared having my account suspended, or my films removed.

The content of my YouTube films includes: family members blowing out birthday candles and cutting cakes, my boyfriend’s son standing up on his skateboard for the first time, and one of my chooks venturing into my home. They are a photo album, a video diary of small life moments, but ultimately meaningless to somebody else.

I managed to track down the film of the two schoolgirls fighting. Compared with the choreographed violence we see depicted in movies, this real life clash was more of a scuffle than a fight. The girls punch, grab, and kick each other clumsily. Both the action and sound lack the theatrical overstatedness of a professionally produced film; nothing is slowed down for the camera or exaggerated for the benefit of the viewer.

When I typed the words “bitch fight” into YouTube, nearly 17,000 search results are returned. Some of the clips are of girls slapping each other, while others are of full-blown fights that are just as violent, or even more violent, than the one that was removed.

Clearly, watching something in real life differs from watching it on a screen or from when you are filming it - not only because you experience the action via the view finder or screen, but because you have already left that moment, and are conscious of constructing it and how it will be re-lived.

I wonder how the 13-year-old eyewitness who filmed the removed video, experienced the fight. Did she know the girls involved? Were they friends? Was her filming them an act of malicious intent? She captured the footage of the girls brawling outside the Essendon railway station, in Melbourne, using her mobile phone, then she uploaded the footage to YouTube with the title, Essendon Station Bitch Fight. It took two weeks for the video to be flagged, reviewed, and then removed, because, according to the message YouTube posted on their site, it violated their Terms of Use. In the meantime 5,000 people had viewed the clip.

“You may not like everything you see,” it says in the YouTube guidelines. “Some of the content here may offend you - if you find that it violates our Terms of Use, then click “Flag as Inappropriate” under the video you’re watching to submit it for review by YouTube staff. If it doesn’t, then consider just clicking on something else - why waste time watching videos you don't like?”

Good question. What I think is an equally good question is: what would compel someone to video people fighting then post the footage to the public sphere of the web? To safeguard evidence? For proof of the event? For the thrill of the spectacle? The Romans built immense arenas to view gladiators do battle, which evolved into modern day sporting stadiums. Today though, the violence of sport has been sanitised by its commercialisation in a way that the arena of YouTube has not. At the heart of my inquiry is my inability to understand that someone’s first reaction to witnessing a fight is to take out his or her phone and film it. Even though I too am a recorder of the ephemeral, I struggle to understand this motive.

I live in a small rural town where I limit my exposure to the things I abhor: overt consumerism, advertising, traffic congestion, fast food, chain stores and violent acts. Perhaps if violence were a part of my everyday life it would seem normal to want to film it and share it with the world as I do the incidentals of my life. And, perhaps if I subscribed to the violence Hollywood promotes, I might welcome a fight taking place in the mundanity of my every day, to bond me to the glamour of the big screen stars. Though maybe the motive is innate, and harks back to ingrained memories of fighting for survival, food or a desirable mate.

During the 16 years since I left school, I may have forgotten the intensity of the need to fit in. The economy of insecurity relies on the social currency of one-upmanship to prosper. Filming two rivaling schoolgirls equates to such capital because it is this kind of insider information that influences social positioning.

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.