Girls, Lies, and Videotape

Written by Selwyn Duke

Thursday, 24 April 2008 09:54

On the heels of the well-publicized attack on a 16-year-old girl by 6 other girls in Lakeland, Fla., comes another girls-on-girl attack. This time a group of Clarksville, Indiana, middle-school students videotaped themselves beating a 12-year-old schoolmate and then posted the footage on the Internet.

Are such incidents driven simply by a desire for YouTube stardom, or is there something more to it?

We’ve heard the stories about girls viciously beating rivals, and recently nine third graders hatched a plot to kill their teacher. Childhood misbehavior, once typified by Dennis the Menace or Leave it to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell, is now often more sinister in nature.

This trend reflects our overall moral breakdown, and while it’s difficult to do this issue justice in one article, there are factors that bear mention. One is moral relativism, the characteristic spiritual disease of our time. It tells us there really is no such thing as right and wrong and infects each succeeding generation more thoroughly. Thus, many today embrace the message of an old cartoon I remember; it depicted the Devil addressing a group of people in Hell and went like this (I’m paraphrasing), "There’s no right or wrong down here. It’s whatever works for you." Undoubtedly, if you can’t use morality (the Truth) as a yardstick for making decisions because "it doesn’t really exist," what is left to use?

Feelings — if it feels good, do it.

Now we have to ask how those feelings are being directed. Today’s popular culture encourages not virtue, but vice. It stokes the fires of children’s darkest passions with animalistic portrayals of sexuality and, more to the point here, gratuitous, mindless violence. Then there is the message behind the violence. It’s one thing if violence is perpetrated by a thoroughly unappealing villain and serves to demonize him or by a truly noble hero for the purposes of vanquishing evil or defending the innocent. After all, a child would only become more virtuous with the Lone Ranger as a role model.

Today, however, moral relativism is suffused throughout our movies and television shows. The "good guys" often aren’t truly good, and the bad guys sometimes aren’t much worse; the message is often that the only difference between them is that they occupy opposite sides of the law. Not only that, but while neither the shades-of-gray hero nor the gray villain possesses the attractiveness lent by virtue, the latter may at least be larger-than-life (contrast the new Cape Fear with the old). He may have one redeeming quality: "coolness." So whom do you think youth will be more likely to emulate?

As for the violence, it’s often in the service of sadistic impulses. Instead of measured violent action motivated by an obvious moral imperative, it’s sometimes wanton violence visited on another merely for fun. Yes, if it feels good, do it.
We then have to add to this dangerous mixture another element: the lack of accountability bred by our permissive culture. People may wonder how youths reach a point at which they assault an age-mate so viciously for so little reason or, worse still, how third-graders could contemplate such a serious attack on an adult authority figure. It shouldn’t be surprising as it’s a matter of moral conditioning.

When I worked with children years ago, I quickly learned that while behavior boundaries will sometimes be crossed regardless, the key is to draw them very tightly. If you don’t allow minor transgressions, egregious ones won’t even be contemplated. Sure, those transgressions a step up from minor may enter the consciousness, but they will seldom be acted upon, and great misdeeds will be out of sight, out of mind.

In other words, we didn’t transition from chewing gum in the hallways — just about the biggest problem in schools in the 1950s — to beating up teachers (not uncommon today) and knocking out classmates with metal chairs (happened recently); it was a devolutionary process. Society started tolerating more and more and punishing less and less; first one step toward the moral nadir was taken and went unanswered, and then, once enough people had so descended, it didn’t seem as intolerable anymore. Then another step was taken, and another, and the process continued until we had fifth-graders having orgies in classrooms and third-graders plotting to knock off teachers. It’s what some have called "the defining of deviancy downward."

Just as the groupings of individuals called societies can follow this path, so can individuals themselves. So many children today are held accountable for very little; we mustn’t hurt their self-esteem, you see, let alone their posteriors with a good switch. They get away with small things when small, bigger things when bigger, and then, soon, the horrible seems excusable. And, when there are consequences, they’re usually so mild as to be completely ineffective (a "time out" isn’t a punishment; it’s an element of a sporting event).

This last factor explains something some have wondered about: how could the brawling girls disseminate their crime on the Internet and not expect to get caught? Are they stupid? While I don’t expect there are any future Nobel laureates among them, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd sheds more light on the issue with a report on the behavior of the Lakeland Six. WLTX.com quotes him and writes:

"When they were in a holding cell, they were all laughing," Judd says. "One of the teens arrested, who is a cheerleader, asked, 'Does this mean I'm going to miss cheerleading practice tomorrow?' The others were cutting up and said, 'It looks like we won't be going to the beach this weekend.'"

It’s obvious to me that, like so many today, these girls are so used to acting with impunity that they neither expect consequences nor fear them. Thus, one of the lessons here is that a little fear can be a good thing. After all, when potential victimizers aren’t controlled with fear, you have more victimizers. You also have more victims.

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