Videos spark warning to parents from high school
Principal asks parents to help ‘nip this in the bud’
An Ottawa high school is asking parents to have some “dinner table conversations” with their kids after a rash of scheduled off-campus fights were recorded and posted on social media. It’s a troubling trend, says an expert on cyber-bullying, who on Friday called for “zero tolerance” in dealing with such videos. In a letter this week, South Carleton High School principal Bill Arden asked parents to help educators “nip this in the bud and proactively save children from injury or worse.” One video, posted Thursday and tagged as happening at the school, showed a pair of teen boys squaring off amid a circle of onlookers, who were filming with their phones and screaming profanities. One boy takes a hit to the face and lands in the mud against the backdrop of a residential neighbourhood. The video had nearly 2,000 views by late Friday morning on an Instagram feed that appeared to be used by teens at schools across the city. Tracy Vaillancourt is the Canada Research Chair in Mental Health at the University of Ottawa. She called the type of violent fights uploaded on an Instagram channel called 613 Live “disgusting.” “I’m generally against zero-tolerance policies because they’ve been shown to be harmful to kids, but we need to be swift and harsh with how we deal with this,” Vailancourt said. The Instagram feed appears to have started in August and also contains videos of other fights that appear to have been shot at schools, parks and strip-mall parking lots. It has nearly 1,800 followers. “Just like suicide can become contagious, this is going to become contagious,” Vaillancourt said. “They’re using aggression with impunity.” Young people, particularly boys, have always fought, but uploading videos is a phenomenon of the internet age. The Instagram videos are cyber bullying, which is even more harmful than to its victims, Vaillancourt said. “It used to be that maybe a few hundred kids would see it. There’d be no documentation of it. It wouldn’t exist in perpetuity, so the person who was being harassed wasn’t constantly revictimized on the internet.” The Richmond school — which is not the only one with fight videos on the feed — is working with technology services at the Ottawa Carleton District School Board to tackle the social media element, a board spokeswoman said. Arden, the principal, acknowledged in a letter to parents this week that the fights are “troubling ” news, but stressed that a “very small group of students” that are involved in the one-on-one fights over lunchtime this week and last at various off-campus locations. School officials have “interrupted” some fights, but the trend has them concerned. “It appears students other than the combatants are urging this on, and even helping organize and communicate it,” Arden wrote. “Sadly, we have heard that it becomes difficult to back out of as the result of mounting peer pressure.” No one can legally agree to be hurt, so charges are possible and city police are involved in the investigation through their school resource officer, he wrote. A city police spokesman said there’s a “fine line” because while there’s no law against consensual fights, no one consents to injury, which could lead to a charge of assault causing bodily harm. “The videos we have managed to see show a large number of audience members circling the events and filming,” Arden told parents. “This is a very sad statement about adolescent society and is not isolated to South Carleton.” Last week, an assault outside an Orléans Catholic high school that sent the victim to the hospital was captured on video that was circulated on Snapchat. Police say charges are pending. Instagram’s community guidelines ban hate speech, nudity and sexuality and say “serious threats to harm to personal or public safety are not allowed.” On Friday evening, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We don’t tolerate bullying or harassment on Instagram. We have removed the account for violating our bullying policies.” The danger of street fights was targeted in a 2015 Australian ad campaign, One Punch Can Kill. The graphic ads played before fight videos on YouTube and were targeted at teens ages 14 to 18. Videos of violence encourage teens’ to play to the audience, Vaillancourt said. “Teens are quite attuned to other people paying attention to them. They think people are more interested in them than they really are. This just feeds into that.”