Virus of our modern age is in humiliation videos
Brett Corbett is a sweet teenage boy with forgiveness in his heart.
If only such kindness had been shown to him when classmates goaded the 14-year-old — he has cerebral palsy — into turning himself into a human bridge, lying face down in a shallow, muddy Nova Scotia creek while students stepped on his back, like a springboard, to jump across the water.
Nobody cried, “Stop.” Nobody said, “This is cruel.” No bystander intervened.
“He said to me after, ‘What if I would have died?’ ” Brett’s mom, Terri McEachern, told the Star. “‘Would anybody have even picked me up?’
“All he wanted was to be accepted.” Her words choke on a sob. Instead, the tormentors shot video on their phones and uploaded it to social media platforms, for thousands upon thousands to watch Brett’s humiliation.
Where was the single individual with a conscience, a trace of humanity, when a student at St. Michael’s College — a highly regarded all-boys private school in Toronto — was allegedly sexually assaulted with a broom handle in a locker room by a group of boys? Just like in a scene from the second season of popular Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which triggered tremendous backlash from viewers.
In a separate incident at St. Mike’s, a different teenage boy, in his underwear, sits in a sink as water is run over him and several student slap his bare skin.
Both assaults were captured on video and circulated. Toron- to police have warned that the first video constitutes child pornography, should be immediately deleted and anyone found in possession could be charged criminally.
These are not rarities, neither the crimes nor the exhibitionism/voyeurism that seems even more crucial for the purpose of demeaning and degrading. The spectacle thrills.
Who are these kids, stoked by such wickedness, such sadism?
They live their lives online while others share their brutishness vicariously. They scorn, they shame, they bully. They have no pity. It’s the pathology of a modern age where nothing is considered too profane, too malicious, too invasive.
“This is the next generation of doctors and nurses and educators,” McEachern says. “And they just get a slap on the hand.”
McEachern will not allow her son to return to Glace Bay High School until she’s convinced the administration is taking the incident seriously, police are investigating it as a crime and Brett will be safe. “I’m not sending my boy to an unsafe environment. I don’t want him in that school. They treated him like an animal.’’
As of Thursday, one student — the boy who concocted the “dare” — had been suspended for two days, several others suspended for just one day, those who were among the dozen who participated, laughed and jeered, demanded that he get back in the water after he stood up. “Do it, you f----- b-----!” one classmate shrieks, and Brett did.
All McEachern has heard from school administrators is when they came to her home last week, after the video had gone viral. “They didn’t even apologize. They were more concerned about the school’s appreciation and didn’t like that I had gone to the media.”
“The schools, their first concern is protecting their reputation,” says McEachern, who had just learned about the alleged events at St. Mike’s. “They thought they could hush me.”
On Thursday, police said a threat had been made to the school and they had responded by increasing the uniformed police presence there. One officer, CP24 reported, removed a long gun from the trunk of his cruiser before entering the premises.
There are two components to such odious misbehaviour: the doing of it and the documenting of it. The latter is a perverse communal phenomenon, a kind of ultra-gang involvement whereby young people not only watch, but become, subliminally, accessories to the crime.
They’re drawn in, nefariously, to a horror that no longer feels horrific because they’re numbed to the abominable and the aberrant. That flateffect strain of nihilism has consumed social media and the broader culture.
The ubiquity of tacit involvement — knowledge of a crime — was at the core of a murder trial in Toronto where literally thousands of text messages were submitted as evidence to show how the killing of 14-yearold Stefanie Rengel, stabbed outside her home on New Year’s Day 2008, had been plotted.
Melissa Todorovic, 15, had persuaded her 17-year-old boyfriend to murder Rengel, wielding the threat of sex withheld if he didn’t do her bidding. Todorovic didn’t even know Stefanie but detested her, perceived the teen as a rival because of her friendship with the boyfriend.
The plot was hardly a secret and that was maybe the most stunning aspect of the murder — how many adolescents within the couple’s social rat pack were privy, contaminated by the malignancy, and said nothing.
Todorovic was tried as an adult in 2009, convicted of first-degree murder for masterminding the killing and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for seven years — the maximum adult sentence for someone her age. Last year, she was granted unescorted passes from prison. She will seek full parole at a hearing scheduled for later this month.
In an earlier case, teenage sisters from Mississauga, the infamous “Bathtub Girls,” were convicted of first-degree murder for drowning their alcoholic mother in a tub. The sisters were 16 and 15 at the time, the death originally ruled an accident. And the sisters would have gotten away with it, had they not bragged endlessly about the crime and the insurance money they were expecting to enjoy. Again, a large number of friends were aware of the murder, by word of mouth, in those days before cellphone videos. One finally told the cops and the case was reopened. Both killers are now free. Their names cannot be published.
It’s a wide spectrum of reprehensible conduct — from the plaguing of a disabled boy to sexual assault to murder — all of it amplified now as direct-tovideo viewing, with wrenching online exposure that has driven teenage victims to suicide. Amanda Todd, 15, who hanged herself in Port Coquitlam, B.C., after posting flash cards telling of her experience of being blackmailed over exposing her breasts via webcam. Rehtaeh Parsons, from Cole Harbour, N.S., who killed herself after allegedly being raped by four boys at a party, photographs of the assault circulated at her school.
Somehow, somewhere, they learn to prey, on the weaker or the vulnerable or the outcast. And the miscreants — both males and females, A-students, F-students, from “good” families, from violent families — turn the video chronicles into mass entertainment.
In that sense, the power to torment and the eagerness to witness, they are not a tiny minority of malefactors. They are the vox populi, they are a dominant subculture.
Who are they? They’re your kids. And you don’t have a clue what they’re up to.
Says Brett’s mother: “The parents should be ashamed of themselves.”