Teen Girls Beat The Hell Out Of Disabled Woman, Flaunt Footage On Facebook

pennsylvania attackDon’t let those newsfeeds full of questionable baby names and cat photos fool you. Facebook can be a scary place. Especially if you’re one of the first few who stumbles upon something you really didn’t want to see — such as your own child’s death. But in an online encounter perhaps equally abrasive, some parent out there loaded up their feed to a video of six teenage girls walloping on a 48-year-old disabled woman. And instead of just randomly clicking to the next engagement photo or birth announcement, she or he rightfully contacted police.

Msnbc reports that the teen attackers videotaped themselves attacking the woman in Delaware County, Pennsylvania and then shared the clip with all their Facebook friends. The kids, all 16 or 17 years of age, begin by punching her with their fists and then hitting her with chairs before continuing the attack in her home. The victim did not get medical help for the bruises and cuts to her face. No grave injuries were reported. But this random beating wasn’t even her first, as her neighbor told one newspaper that she endured a similar attack two weeks ago in which someone struck her over the head with a gun.

After a “local parent” saw the clip and contacted police, four of the teens were arrested. But what’s even more concerning is that the girls don’t seem to express any remorse for their violence:

“The parents are upset…The girls are defiant. It’s like they didn’t do anything wrong.”

In her new book, The End Of Men, Hanna Rosin goes into great detail on the uptick in violence among young girls in precisely this age bracket. She notes in her findings that many of her subjects, girls in correctional facilities, express exactly zero regrets for their attacks and seem to flaunt their assaults as a matter of pride. Yet, posting footage on the grand public forum that is Facebook for all to not only see, but comment, “like,” and of course share, constitutes more than just high-fiving from friends — even though a Facebook is clearly the equivalent.

It’s true that we, and many of our children, don’t identify much of distinction between our online selves and our offline selves. Living, for many of us, including kids, seems to happen as seamlessly in real time as it does in our Facebook updates. (In a modern take on “if a tree falls in the woods,” I’d even go as far as to put forth if an event takes place and it doesn’t make it to social media, did it really happen? For a younger sect, the answer is not so obvious.) Bragging in person might as well be bragging on Facebook. It all seems pretty interchangeable at this point.

But in this case, the absence of any sort of apparent pause to boast such exploits and therefore further victimize the victim with online gawking, speaks to a problem just as great as random violence.

[b5poll id=”b0b1b7133dc94d02e9ca59110a2af156″]

(photo: 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com)

Similar Posts