Online child fight club videos shock viewers

Graphic videos of children engaging in street fights have been appearing on sites such as YouTube to the outrage of millions. Following a BBC Panorama special mass calls for an end to the broadcasting of these images have been heard.

An investigation by the BBC news programme Panorama has reported that children as young as eleven and twelve regularly post and share videos on websites of them engaging in shockingly violent behaviour. Videos showed children kicking and punching others in the head, using handguns to smash police car windscreens, and one fight resulting in a girl having to go to hospital with a detached retina. The brutality of these fights, especially in ones so young, has created cries of indignation from society as a whole, and calls from the Association of Chief Police Officers that video sharing websites should monitor their content more efficiently. However these websites, such as YouTube have hit back saying that pre-screening is a form of censorship which was not in line with their role as a private company, and that they would only remove posts if they were flagged up by users and found to be in breach of the website’s rules. However another site Liveleak said that although it does check all videos before posting them online, it does include those which show gratuitous violence, as they took the view that if this is happening in real life they were going to show it.

The police are not inclined to agree with the views of those showing these videos on their websites, and say that as these people are making their money off showing these videos they have a moral obligation to police their content, and report anyone breaking their rules to the higher authorities. The police also said that these websites have much larger financial resources which enable them to better monitor the content of their sites than the police, and therefore it is their responsibility to do so and report their findings to the police. Users of the websites though have argued that it is not the websites’ responsibility to monitor content but the users themselves who should alert them to offensive material on their site. What most are agreed upon though is that these videos must be removed one way or another.

Source:

BBC news