Did you hear about the Central Florida high school cheerleaders who invited a fellow cheerleader over, then held her against her will, and proceeded to beat her up while recording it to post on the Internet? I’m not making this up. According to the NBC Today Show report:
For 30 minutes, six girls ganged up on a classmate, slamming her head into a wall and taking turns pummeling her and videotaping it all to post on the Internet. And when they were arrested and were being booked into juvenile detention, they joked about not being able to go to the beach, a Florida sheriff said Tuesday on TODAY.
The vicious attack in Lakeland, Fla., was supposedly in response to slurs and insults the victim had posted about them on MySpace. But the alleged online comments are no justification for the attack, Polk County, Fla., Sheriff Grady Judd told co-host Meredith Vieira.
“I don’t have the specifics of those comments, but there is nothing our victim could have said on the Internet that would have caused that kind of beating,” Judd said.
“Cyber-bullies” are becoming a major problem on the Internet. This is the extreme form. The video (which I have chosen not to post) clip shown on television isn’t even the first beating according to the rest of the story:
“Officials released three minutes of the 30-minute video that show two of the girls taking turns screaming obscenities at the victim between attacks with their fists, while the others watched and taped the attack. They also challenge the victim to fight back, which she does not do on the video.
“The beating you’re seeing is the second beating,” he said. “She was knocked unconscious prior to this video clip.”
The 16-year-old victim suffered a concussion, and has hearing loss in her left ear and some loss of vision in her left eye, Judd said. Her face is obscured in the video and her name is being withheld.”
The Sheriff is recommending that all of them be tried as adults. Now there’s the first sane thing I’ve heard in all of this. If there was ever a case for signs of an emerging generation out of control with no boundaries, responsibilities, accountability and no moral compass this is it.
Too many parents are in the dark on their kids’ Internet behavior. This isn’t one, or two isolated students that fell through the cracks. This is a premeditated and organized beating by a group of students with one goal in mind, to inflict physical harm and inject emotional/character injury by posting it on the Internet. Put aside the fact that what they did is a felony for a moment. The complete lack of judgment and arrogance it took to plan, follow through and plan on posting something like this and thinking you wouldn’t be caught is mind-numbing. It shows we are producing some really ignorant youth in America. Very few thugs and criminals have ever been accused of being smart and this crowd is no exception.
Mom’s and Dad’s get active. If you allow your children to have My Space, Face Book, or similar accounts make a point to know what’s out there. For help on Internet safety go to http://www.isafe.org/. And by all means applaud, encourage and support the overwhelming number of students in America who aren't doing drugs, beating people up or living without values. There are some great kids out there, unfortunately we don't get to hear about many of them because of stuff like this.
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