Teenagers get into vicious schoolyard brawls these days, and oftentimes someone videotapes the incident on a smartphone and posts it to social media, starting off a new round of viral fight videos that are now a mainstay of You Tube.
Family therapist Veronica Sites faults, in part, video games for inciting the heightened vulgarity of the melees. “They don’t categorize and associate that these things are really impacting what their brains start to capture as normal, reasonable behavior and it’s something that they don’t have the skills to manage emotionally,” she tells NewsRadio 740 KTRH.
And it’s not just boys.
“The catfights with girls that used to be hair-pulling is now as knock-down and drag-out just as violent as the boys that are fighting on video,” says Sites. “Young women and girls want to do everything that boys do, good bad and ugly.”
At Madison High School in northeast Houston Monday afternoon students got into a brawl, resulting in arrests, including a female teenager who had been misidentified as having been involved in the fight. According to HISD, it was a video of the altercation that prompted HPD to notify the DA’s office of her innocence, prompting her release from jail.