Fight videos. They are all over the internet, from news outlets to blogs to Instagram. Sites like World Star Hip Hop were built on them. But, while we’re all watching someone be pulverized, has anyone ever stopped to ask why the person who recorded the video chose to record it?

I was listening to the radio this morning and the DJ was talking about an incident in Clayton County, Georgia where a girl was jumped by another girl and several students stood around the fight and recorded it. They then posted their recordings online. Despite the girl who was jumped sustaining injuries, the girl who started the fight was only suspended for a few days and the students who recorded the video went on about their lives. Now, the parents of the girl who was jumped are calling for the school and law enforcement to punish the students who recorded the fight just as, and potentially more harshly, than the girl who started the fight.

I have always wondered, what if the people recording the incident for a few hundred more followers on social media, instead decided to help the person being beaten? I have never been the type of person who could stand idly by and watch another person be jumped, slapped, humiliated, and beaten up. I find it hard to watch boxing because of the sound of the impact of the boxing glove hitting flesh (I literally wince).  Why did these students stand and watch instead of alerting a teacher, school resource officer, or administrator? What is the appeal of seeing someone else’s blood shed? And how do you face that person in the lunchroom or restroom the next day?

This “better him/her than me” mentality that I see among tweens and teens today is so disturbing, and it really comes down to humanistic value. My mother and father would have beat my ass when I was 13 if I recorded another girl being beaten in the hallway at school, because being a heartless bitch was not allowed in their home. << And that’s the key– my mother and father would not have allowed it, because they taught me humanistic value. It was never okay for me to take pleasure in someone else’s pain and it sickens me that we have just become so okay with this voyeuristic violence. What do you think? Is this battery via bystanding?