With the disturbing beating of a 13 year old Long Island girl caught on tape and uploaded to YouTube causing a stir, amNew York looks at the trend towards cyber-bullying. A spokesman for the teachers' union says there is concern that being able to upload videos to sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Photobucket will "give kids an incentive to engage in this kind of bullying." Oh, you think? The Department of Education is working on "intervention training for cyber-bullying," you know, so teachers can add that to teaching students.
amNY references one of the more infamous videos is "Mamood Had a Bad Day," shown above, which the NY Post also mentioned in a November article about cyber-bashing. The video has the hallmarks of easy-to-use editing software: Titles, a soundtrack, and lost innocence. Which the kids love. One 16 year old student said, "It's fun to see other people get smacked around. It's not like kids are shooting each other. I especially like when they had music to make the videos more exciting." Sigh.
And there are differences of opinion about the Long Island fight: The victim's mother says her daughter met the three girls who attacked her while the lawyer for one of the attackers says it was all staged.
