GET YOUR OPINION http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/26/us/florida-teens-charges-drowning
ID: 372096 • Letter: G
Question
GET YOUR OPINION
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/26/us/florida-teens-charges-drowning-man/index.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. The article above covers an incident that happened in July of 2017. Fair warning, it is hard to watch, however the particular article I chose cuts some of the video and leaves all of the commentary. It shows a video of 5 teens who are video taping and mocking a man who is drowning. While the teens clearly know the man is distressed, they purposefully chose not only to not help, but to stand by laugh the man while video taping his unsuccessful struggle to stay alive. The tricky part about this scenario is that it is technically not a crime to not report about a person in distress, thus they technically did nothing wrong. The article reports that they were pushing for use of the medical examiner's statute in this case to try to charge the teens in not reporting the death of the man. It is unclear if that law applies to this particular situation and whether or not anything resulted from these potential charges. As terrible as this situation is, I can't help but to think of torts in this scenario. How did the teenagers behavior not reflect intentional tort? While they were not technically causing the emotional distress of this man, as he was drowning, they taunted him from the shore line and laughed at him. While it may be because they were simply bystanders, I believe more punishment should be enacted for not even reporting the drowning, as the family got answers after three days when they filed a missing persons report, only to have local officials find his body another two days later, on July 14th. Perhaps this is where the case takes a turn to ask if this was a case of negligence? I believe these teenagers, even if they want to blame it on ignorant youth, were old enough to know enough about how a reasonable careful person would behave in that situation. All five teens were between the ages of 14 and 16. According to the article, "At least one of the teens had "expressed no remorse while being interviewed by detectives," Martinez told CNN last week. She said the teenagers' parents were "very disturbed" and some of the teens did show remorse" (M. Park & N. Valencia, http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/26/us/florida-teens-charges-drowning-man/index.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., July 27,2017). Clearly these kids, after the fact, knew that their behavior was unacceptable in our society's standards, and one failed to have any kind of remorse. Whether you want to blame this on poor upbringing, or just plain disrespect and rebellion, an man lost his life and those who sat by and watched it happen get to walk away, punishment free.
Explanation / Answer
The case mentioned has a lot of commonality these days primarily after the advent of social media and smart phones. The family values have reduced and internal communications broken. The teens or even adults can be found to use their smart phones to quickly capture pictures or videos of accidents or incidents and are eager to be the first to post on social media sites. They feel this accomplishment as far more satisfying and a proud moment rather than actually helping the accident victims or injured people. So many incidents have come to light from around the world of people merrily and busy taking videos of accident victims or people being bashed around.
This behavior has a lot to speak about the society we live in today. People have become so self centric that their is no concern or any care about those we do not know. It is indeed a failure of the society and to a large extent the advancement of technology, primarily communication that has ensure isolation is no longer a dreaded state.
The laws also need to keep up with the modern trends and a crime is considered crime even if committed by an under age person. The rationale that a 14 or 15 year old boy is not mature enough to understand the severity of situation and action is no longer valid when the same boys mock and take videos and post on social media sites. When they publicize their "achievement" it itself shows that the boys clearly understand it was an important and serious incident.
It is the society and the parental care of their upbringing is more important to change behaviors and priorities rather than only change of law and criminal liabilities.
Related Questions
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.