8 teens charged in videotaped attack

I watched enough of the footage to know that the victim didn't want to fight back. That must've been one damned hard decision to make under the circumstances.
It looked like they were trying to manipulate something for, "Maury", "Violent Teens! Caught On Video!". Sadistic and cruel behavior, worthy of jailtime.

They beat her up for writing something on her Myspace... How rediculous could this be. They tormented this girl that did not want to fight back and wouldnt let her leave. I say try them as adults and give them serious jail time. That's the only way they'll learn.

This is horrifying. It is sad to see that kids are no longer acting out to seek attention from their parents or other authority figures, but are using technology to gain a quick 15 seconds of fame or a 5 star rating on You Tube. This is not to say that this sort of "pack mentality beat down" hasn't occurred in previous generations, but it is sad how it has become glorified on social networking sites. I can only wonder in the world of MySpace and YouTube how much further people are willing to go just to get a few more page views.

8 kids = 16 (roughly) parents
where are they?

if these were minors, i'd like to see the parents locked up too.

quoth 96 "their parents also need to be prosecuted on related charges of child abandonment, child neglect, and child endangerment"

Wow, this is pretty bad. Just two days ago a girl in my neighborhood was called outside of her house were a mob of about 20 girls and one man proceeded to beat her. They too decided to film the incident and post it up on the girls myspace. Six girls were eventually arrested along with the man. The girl has yet to return to school due to the injuries she received.

Karma's a bitch.

You know, most of the kids these days needs a good-old butt whippin'. "A hard head makes a soft behind."

The problem lies with the parents. If the kids are not raised in a caring environment they are more likely to do things such as this incident... I have to say that I disagree with you Tomcatt, "good-old butt whippin[s]" will never work in the long run.

Sure, the parents can be blamed to an extent, but the youngest of the girls was 14 - that's plenty old enough to know what you're doing, and it's plenty old enough to get jail time.
Perhaps, after they've suffered a beatdown of their own, they'll realize they were acting like vicious pack monkeys.
Such stupid reasoning...

With so many folks wanting to see girls hitting girls, I'm launching a new dvd series, "Girls Gone Deadly!". No nudity or sex. Just endless reels of violence. I'll be rich, I tells ya! RICH!

I don't think MySpace is to blame, really. It's just replaced gossip for these people. Where it used to be "I heard what you said to Tine about me behind my back," it's now, "How dare you post that picture on the Tila Tequila page!"

Sad thing is, decades ago, the parents would have got involved too.

I don't know. I hate this kind of story, because there's so many ways of looking at what led up to it. The internet can and does affect people's social skills, but so can a lot of things. Their parents probably do need to look at themselves too.

I don't know why people are so surprised that this happened. People have been doing this kind of stuff for years, it's just now happening to younger kids.

MSNBC is going nuts showing the actual video. Who didn't see that one coming?

..."But the mother of one of the girls said that Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on MySpace, a social networking Web site....
....She did not deserve what she got, but I don't know how she's that messed up and able to get on the computer and talk about that."

It's like saying, she didn't deserve it, but she had it coming. Show me a malicious child with evil intentions and you'll realize the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Nina maybe you should read up on Karma and as far as you tube not at fault at all, its not entertainment . It should have been pulled, and thank you again 96 for being dead on , bullseye and thread the needle right. Your a poet ! Ever think of being drafted into public service?

wow...this is really scary. What is going on in schools and at home? ..they wanted to produce a video for youtube..this won't make you famous...this type of act will get you nowhere. I am shocked. Should we fear the kids of America? This is insane behavior i can't even process it. I am disgusted

this isn't necessarily teens these day .. this is a barbaric display of idiocy and groupthink gone horribly wrong, then mince that with the proverbial 15 minutes of fame syndrome, instant viral fame and our american culture and we are watching the mirror expand and contract .. an isolated incident that blankets our entire society in another sensless act of stupidity that will again sidestep real issues that should be covered ..

i can not believe this, and to happen in our kids. It fears me to think that one day my kids might face this, is just sad. I really hope that they try these teenagers as adults. They should not get away with this!

They should be locked up for a long time, they could have killed the girl.

wow. talk about mob mentality. some of the things that stood out for me were the desire to protect the shelving while beating on the victim, and the urgency to "make it good" when the tape/battery was running out.

"this isn't necessarily teens these day .. this is a barbaric display of idiocy and groupthink gone horribly wrong, then mince that with the proverbial 15 minutes of fame syndrome, instant viral fame and our american culture and we are watching the mirror expand and contract .. an isolated incident that blankets our entire society in another senseless act of stupidity that will again sidestep real issues that should be covered .."

I [think I] agree.

The act itself has been going on since we were hunting on the African plains. Beating the shit out of somebody is just as human as adopting an emaciated puppy and nursing it back to health. The act is all most people are concentrating on, since it's placed directly in your face.

Watching the bits of mainstream news coverage, I can see they are sticking to the kiddie pool, and keeping their legions of viewers in the same ankle-deep water - after all, who likes thinking about social ramifications after a day at work? They give us so little credit.

Of course, as any halfway-informed person knows, this is all old news...it's not as much about finding a real solution, so much as pouncing on what they think will be the most popular and easily understood scapegoat.

Myspace? Pfft - the changing world in general.
And it's not "to blame" - it's merely the cause. It's a new variety of the same old human behavior, not a new crusade that needs to be taken up.

Reporting like that is so simple-minded; they should be kicked in the nuts for infecting the American public with that thought pattern again and again.

Whoa! This isn't normal behavior and for the small snippets of the video that I saw on MSN it looked like it was just one girl doing the hitting.

There might be something else going on with that girl that makes her so violent. I wouldn't be surprised if Child Protective Services invetigated and possibly found some kind of abuse that had happened to her. It didn't seem like she was just pissed in the moment -- she did have to wait for the unconscious girl to wake back up to hit her again. Seemed kind of like an oddly hyper-violent plan.

Teenagers are given too much slack.

Look at teenage bullying in schools. There are countless reports in schools all across America of kids getting beaten up and harrassed right in school -- and what happens? Nothing. You can be 16 years old and beat a kid with a baseball bat right in the halls of a high school and the worst that will happen is some faculty member will timidly poke their heads out and mutter, "You, uh, might want to, uh, possibly stop it. Maybe. I dunno. Just a thought."

We need crackdowns at school, first off. If you hit someone it's instant Juvenile detention for 3 months followed by random home visits by Social Services. If you just threaten someone verbally you should be instantly seperated from the herd and placed in a special classroom where you will recieve instruction. You won't leave the classroom or have any interaction with other students for 3 months. Gotta get the insitgators away from the herd. 10 percent of troubled students cause 90 percent of the problems.

And truancy! Kids shouldn't be allowed to just drop out of school if their under18. Right now the most violent kids just drop out, hang out all day and then wait outside school to sell drugs or beat people up. We should increase truancy enforcement so if you don't show up for class for a week -- you're arrested and sent to juvenile detention.

As a flaming liberal I hate to sound so militant -- but its pretty clear the inmates are running the asylum.

We need to vastly expand the powers of public schools and teachers to deal with students -- and hold them criminally negligent if they don't.

It just seems like there is a link between what some kids are being allowed to get away with in school is spilling over and influencing events outside of school.

I can't imagine the violent girl in the video is a straight A student that has never said a harsh word to anyone while at school. I'm confident there must have been incidents or problems that occurred in school that went unaddressed and that behaviour, left unchecked, just got progressively worse.

sad

Well, I refuse to even watch the video, but I've read your responses and agree with some of them. I personally think that, althought the parents have some responsibility in the bringing up of their kids and as someone stated the youngest was 14, the perps are ultimately responsible and should have the highest possible charges brought against them and at the least some kind of psychiatric evaluation before they are unleashed against the public.

I also wanted to mention that this is an excellent example of a hate crime and should be treated as one. The first thing that came to my mind was, "Oh my god, Here there are, a group of girls who clearly have the advantage and there is no other motive than to beat this girl up, punish her, and make her suffer." It is cowardly,
the basist of instincts, and as someone pointed out that remorse was not even slightly shown--sociopathic. Although I am not a lawyer and have not read or even ever argued about the hate crime issue, I am a minority and see why it could be useful in this case especially because it involves straight white females.

Also, I do see a parallel with the movie that recently came out about the the horrific website where the more people viewed the atrocities the quicker the demise of the victim. Sadly and pessimistically, I do believe, no, know that there are a lot of people who are attracted to this kind of thing. All you have to do is watch the Spike channel for the brutal weekly fights on I think it is called the ucw.

I may be wrong about there motives. I forgot they were recording this for youtube. So my argument may be flawed. Oh well, FWIW. Still I don't know if I should vote for this or not. Perhaps I'll take the dog for a walk and get off here.

This is really disturbing. Girls these days are more dangerous than some adults... Where is all this anger coming from really? I know i personally wouldn't want to be left in the room with these kids. eek.

I've been rethinking my original idea about putting them in jail and while I think that might help some of the offenders -- maybe being sentenced to the Peace Corp would be a better idea?

Some of these poor girls engaging in violent behavior might be suffering from "over-priviledge." It's a horrible affliction that seems to attack bored, affluent suburban teenagers with a lot fo time on their hands and little parental supervision.

It is curable.

Breif stints in the Peace Corp building water sanitation systems in Bolivia while living with a dirt poor Bolivian host family with no TV, radio or indoor plumbing for 15 months usually has a 100 percent cure rate.

Or perhaps doing work in a AIDS hospice in Africa?

I can't help but believe that if we took the violent girl in the video -- shipped her off to Africa and made her work helping people much less fortunate than herself for 15 months, yeah, I really think she'd come back a totally changed person.

Suddenly she wouldn't think her life in the suburbs was so "unbearable" that she has to beat someone.

oh the wonders of modern suburban living!

these kids are so dumb they actually wanted to post evidence of a crime on the internet...yet another great moment in human devolution!

I really hope these girls get what they deserve, but i have a bad feeling they wont. That poor girl i cant imagine the physical and emotional pain she is going through. Things like this truely make me scared of what our world is turning into. I would like to see each girl get beat up by a group of UFC fighters but i am not sure if that sends the right message. Is there anything good left in the world?

seriously.....this is one of the reasons why i dont want to have kids...they get easily exposed to crap on the internet

yeah i can't decide whether to vote or not either - voting yes means that more people end up seeing the story and the video, which is what these kids wanted, but voting no means that the story might not get seen, and it is probably something worthwhile to think about because it's sad that people would want to do this to someone for such meaningless "fame"...

these kinds of videos are like face of death and that stuff, and i definitely have to er on the side of the sleater-kinney song "was it a lie?" which talks about how messed up it is to watch someone's suffering for enjoyment, which even though we may not be enjoying it we still desire to see it because it's so talked about

Only in America, seriously, kids here have way too much freedom, not in the laws, but in parenting. Nowadays parents let their kids drink, smoke, take drugs, and they don't care. Eventually kids become hardened to the point to where they don't care about their punishment. Kids here are so spoiled now to the point to where they are not sorry for their actions, and just imagine, this is future America, I am seriously disappointed and I think that these 16-year-olds should be tried as adults.

This is really nothing new at all. But now more people know about it due to sites like Myspace.

My niece's elementary school treats bullying seriously and hopefully if more schools do this, things will improve.
It would be nice if parents would be parents instead of trying to be 'cool buddies' to their kids.

its ridiculus to think that people want attention so bad, that they would do something like this to get their 30 seconds of fame. Whats even more depressing is the fact that they acheived it! Sure they will be living it up in a prision some where, or atleast with a hefty fine, but they got what they wanted. Now I'm not saying an injustice like this shouldnt be reported on, but it annoys the hell out of me!

Great story to share... it's not an uncommon story, I bet. I thought the "anti-christ" comment by Judd was thoughtless. I've noticed that they never mentioned why the teens actually beat her... Relationship issues possibly? Hmmmm.... Anyone know?

This story made the local news here in Nebraska. One station felt inclined to scour youtube for other "teen fighting videos" and air them. WTF.