Fight video incites cellphone ban debate;
High school brawl posted online
North Bay Nugget
Maria Calabrese
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Local News - It took only 26 seconds to blemish a North Bay high school's
reputation, and educators are debating how to keep it from happening again.
Scraps between students are no longer the private domain of schoolyards and
hallways, with pocket-sized technology able to record and post disturbing images
online for anyone to see.
That happened Saturday when a brazen fight between two teenage girls in the
hallways at Chippewa Secondary School joined the rapidly expanding ranks of
similar video clips on the Internet - a phenomenon experts say amplifies both the
humiliation of the victims and the power of the bully.
The clip, which appears to have been recorded on a cellphone camera, shows
one girl with a blond ponytail and dressed in a pink top walk up to a schoolmate
and deliver several blows to her head.
The victim tries to block the punches and get away, but her attacker gives chase,
landing about 40 vicious blows to the head over the course of the 26-second clip.
The fight happens inside the school's main entrance in front of a crowd of
students who do nothing to intervene. Some encouraged the violence.
The clip was posted Saturday on youtube.com - a popular video-sharing website
- and had been viewed almost 1,100 times by late Tuesday night. It has since
been removed.
"It is ugly," said Patrick Bocking, superintendent of programs and schools for the
Near North District School Board.
"It's a scary thing to see."
It's a new problem for school administrators, Bocking said, acknowledging they
sometimes have to deal with fights. But it's frustrating that a code of conduct fell
into place to break up the Chippewa brawl and deal with the students, he said,
only to have the worst of it publicized.
North Bay Police Service confirmed they're investigating after receiving
information about the video. No charges had been laid as of Tuesday.
To protect the identities of the students, the school board would not divulge if
they were suspended or expelled, and Bocking said he didn't know if there were
any injuries.
Comments can be posted to the video-sharing website, with one response asking
if the girls are "hot" and another praising the video.
But one comment spotlights the downside: "as a chippewa grad, i'm
embarrassed that the school has turned to dirt, i hope this girl is proud of
herself..this video should be taken down its actually stupid that this girl is being
praised for what she did," the viewer writes.
"That's something that really bothered me about a fantastic school like
Chippewa, that this is what people see," Bocking said of the comment, adding it
downplays the positive accomplishments in the 800-student school.
The province and educators alike are trying to keep pace with new technology to
keep schools safe, Bocking said of the growing debate whether to ban
cellphones.
A trustee with the Toronto District School Board has called for a cellphone ban in
its schools, while the province is so far leaving it up to individual boards and
teachers to deal with the problem.
The Near North board has applied to the Ministry of Education to receive funding
to launch a cyber bullying program.
Such a program would promote positive student behaviour in schools.
There are similar videos from schools across North America posted on the video-
sharing website, and a search for school fights turned up more than 7,000 clips.
And more than a dozen other such fights have been posted since the Chippewa
high school clip came to light Saturday.
They're the same sort of schoolyard fights that have been taking place for as long
as there have been schoolyards.
What's changed is the technology, experts say.
"If you want to humiliate someone, beating them up and filming it then posting it
for a worldwide audience - that's a pretty effective way of humiliating them," said
Jordan Peterson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto.
The audience is a large part of the appeal for the perpetrators of these videos,
said Raymond Corrado, a criminology professor who studies youth violence at
Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.
"Within their peer group it's a record of violence, it's a record of intimidation and
in their mind the bullies see that as another way of enhancing their reputation,"
Corrado said. "That's enormously enticing for these kids to think that they have a
national reputation . . . as being tough."
The fact that it has been posted on the Internet also speaks to youth's sense of
invincibility, he added.
Comments praise the Chippewa video as a "dope" video and ask if the two girls
are "hot."
"There's a sexual undertone to that . . . the boys love it," said Sybille Artz, the
director of the University of Victoria's School of Child and Youth Care.