Date: Thursday, August 2, 2007

Violent child fight videos posted online

The huge amount of online videos showing children engaging in shocking activities has raised calls demanding better policing of video content on the web.

 In the latest spate of shocking online content, mass amounts of videos showing young children engaging in violent and appalling fights with other children, have been found to appear regularly on video-sharing websites. The issue was given prominence on a recent BBC Panorama special in which children as young as eleven and twelve were found to frequently participate in these fights and then post them online. Calls from the general public and police chiefs have asked for video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Liveleak to better monitor the content of their posts. However YouTube has responded to this saying that this sort of policing goes against their values as a private company which does not engage in censorship. It has said that it does remove offensive videos but only if they are flagged up by users. Liveleak on the other hand has said that whilst it does check every video before posting it online, it does not remove these violent posts as it believes that if these things are going on in real life they have a right to show them. Police chiefs do not agree, and the Association of Chief Police Officers has called for these websites to do more to remove this offensive material. They say that as private companies they have better resources to monitor their online content than the police do, and that they have the responsibility to do so and then report their findings to the police. Other views from users of these sites have said that they do not believe it is up to the websites to monitor their content, but the users themselves.

What most do not argue with is that these offensive videos should not be appearing online, and that images such as youngsters hitting each other and kicking people in the head are not forms of entertainment. Some of these fights have resulted in horrific injuries, such as the girl who ended up with a detached retina, and nearly all viewers believe that the calls for an end to the broadcasting of these videos must be heeded.

Source: BBC News