Not Wanting Your Kid To Join A Gang Is Great, But Beating Them And Putting The Video On Facebook Isn’t

A video was uploaded to Facebook showing a mother and grandmother brutally beating an 11-year-old Flint, Michigan child with a belt as punishment for the boy’s Facebook postings and as a warning that he should not be involved with bad kids in the neighborhood. Both the mother and grandmother, Demitria Latrion Powell, 28, the boy’s mother and Uteas Michelle Taylor, 42, were charged with third degree child abuse. The person filming the abuse, Stefon Tirrell Felton, 39, was also charged. The six-minute video, which also shows the boy getting hit in the face by his mother, was shared more than 1,000 times before it was removed from Facebook. According to Minbcnews.com, an infant was also in the room at the time of the beating. Now both the child and the baby are in protective custody.

Flint, Michigan is not an easy place to raise children. It has been named The Most Dangerous City in America numerous times. Flint’s unemployment rate is 16 percent. There is widespread drug use and gang activity. I think a lot of parents with young kids worry about them getting involved in gangs, and want to scare them into staying away from them. But this is so not the way to do it, and this makes me think we have a lot of parents out there now who think using their “tough love” disciplinary methods and posting the videos online will get them their own sort of fame and notoriety. Did these people just not realize what they were doing was grotesquely wrong and also a crime? It scares me to think of how they were treating this child when they weren’t filming him.

The sad irony of this case is that April is Child Abuse Prevention month. I guess the mother and grandmother in this case didn’t get that memo.

(Image: MINBCnews video)