The “World Star Effect”, why teens video fights
A Delaware teen died during a fight at her high school Thursday and according to many on Twitter, this all happened as her friends were recording the incident on their phones. According to police though, this trend of videotaping fights isn’t anything new.
Capt. Rich Kaiser of the Salisbury Police Department tells 47 ABC that over the recent years, more and more of these videos have begun popping up on the internet.
“There’s a huge trend of these recordings being out there,” Kaiser said. “There’s a lot of crimes that go unreported for weeks and then the videos pop up, whether on YouTube or any other kind of social network, and that’s when the police learn about it.”
Over the recent years, website www.worldstarhiphop.com has become an outlet for many of these videos. All one needs to do is search “fight” on the website, and thousands of home recorded fights will pop up.
Police speculate many of these home videos are shot by millennials.
The downside of this, some believe that some teens are now more apt to film a fight, than to save their own friends.
Local psychologist Dr. Kathy Seifert believes the reason why this demographic is so apt to film these fights, instead of calling for help or stepping in, is because they are impressionable and adults haven’t told them what to do in those situations.
“If we don’t teach them as the adults they will look to their peers and their peers will say ‘no man take a picture, put it on Facebook, put it on whatever’ and thousands of people will look at it,” Seifert siad.
She adds that because so many kids are now caught up in this trend, the idea of pulling your phone to get help could gain kids a bad reputation
“If you get out your cellphone and dial 911, what’s going to be the outcome, are the other kids going to look down on you,” Seifert said.
Kaiser though, recommends kids do just that, call police for help when you witness a fight. Although he adds videoing after you call for help can actually help if the content is given to police.
“We can identify exactly what happened, corroborate witness statements, or even victim statements and then possibly locate additional witnesses, you know, as the investigation goes on it helps us solve those crimes quicker,” Kaiser said.
Seifert said this a trend she doesn’t see ending anytime soon. She believes as long as people still have an infatuation with social media and as long as teens still seek that instant gratification, that this phenomenon will stick around.
