two 11-year-old girls left their after-school club around 5pm to walk ten minutes and meet an older brother who was escorting them home. It was dark but the streets were well lit and it was a quiet residential area.
As they waited they noticed a small group of older youngsters who attended their school walking towards them. As the group passed, one boy turned and hit the girls hard on the head. They reeled in shock and became aware of the rest of the group laughing and jeering as one filmed the attack on his mobile phone. Both girls were hit several times before their attacker yelled to his friends, 'Did you get it?' and ran off.
The distressed girls decided to run back to the club where their leaders were horrified when they recognised this latest 'happy slapping' incident.
WHAT IS HAPPY SLAPPING?
If ever there was a misnomer it is the phrase 'happy slapping'. It conjures a picture of innocent fun, perhaps even of a congratulatory and friendly nature. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Happy slapping is a craze gathering pace in this country. A group of youngsters gang up on a victim, who may be an innocent bystander or passer-by, and assault them with sudden slaps around the head while other members of the group use their mobile phones to video the attack. Videos of the 'slaps' are then exchanged around mobile phones and, in some cases, even posted on the internet.
Police and anti-bullying organisations have reported that the teenage fad, which began in south London in late 2004, has now become a nationwide phenomena. Although club-aged children are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of 'happy slapping,' club workers are right to be concerned the craze could quickly seep from the playground to club. They are all too aware of how ordinary bullying by a group can escalate into something more sinister.
It is important that we try to understand what a youngster feels they are gaining by taking part in 'happy slapping' as well as thinking about how to help the victim.
SEEKING CELEBRITY STATUS
In May 2005 Dr Graham Barnfield, head of media at the University of East London, said in a television interview with Trevor McDonald that he felt the craze was rooted in TV shows such as Jackass and Dirty Sanchez which show youngsters 'attacking' passers-by while recording the incident on their mobile phones; the difference being that in the TV shows the 'victims' have volunteered to be 'surprised' on television.
He explained, 'I think happy slapping has become a short cut in the eyes of the slappers to fame and notoriety among the people who see the images circulated on the web or sent to them via their mobile phones.'
In the same programme, a 16-year-old slapper described how, '... you see someone just sitting there, they look like they're dumb, you just run up to them and slap them, and run off. It's funny.'
But it is not only on television that children observe sadistic, spiteful behaviour. Many children will have seen their parents goading or tormenting each other. They are likely to have been teased or bullied by their siblings. Children try to make sense of puzzling behaviour by re-enacting or playing it out. Perhaps at a very deep level, 'happy slappers' are trying to show us something about family life. We could argue they are trying to tell adults that there is something wrong in our society and no one seems able, or willing, to do anything to remedy it. And they are right.
We see people shaming and humiliating others as part of our everyday life, be it troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners or journalists searching for murky details on the private lives of almost anyone in the public eye. Children themselves are taking up the fashion. ''Fess up and take the shame,' they say to each other. 'Take the shame' has a very different ring to an encouragement to own up and take responsibility for one's actions.
We seem to almost have a sense of glee in seeing someone shamed; how else can we explain the extraordinary viewing figures for Big Brother, a programme which sets out to humiliate and shame its participants? So we can wonder what the purpose of shame is in our society today.
THE POWER OF THE GROUP
Sometimes happy slapping attacks will be planned events in schools or the playground and on such occasions a huge crowd of children are likely to emerge from nowhere to watch the happy slapping. The majority of observers will be, on the whole, responsible youngsters - so what happens to them in these group events to make them behave in a totally uncharacteristic way? The two girls at the beginning of this article knew their assailants.
Indeed, the boy videoing the 'happy slapping' was a friend of the brother the girls were on their way to meet and had always been warm and friendly when visiting the family home.
We are all capable of being violent towards others. Most of the time we control our aggression, consciously or unconsciously, because we have been taught not to harm other people because we want to think of ourselves as 'good people'.
However, it is relatively easy to feel anonymous or innocent in a group. We can claim either that we weren't actually 'doing it,' we were only observing other people, or we were made to do it by the group!
In groups, people give themselves permission or provide themselves with an opportunity to abandon control and inhibitions and to behave in a way that is normally so repressed we may not even be aware we were capable of behaving in such a way. For children, entering a group can feel rather like entering a world without adults. Unconsciously, they feel they can experiment with behaving in a way that would normally be forbidden by the presence of adults. And sadly, as we know from world history and the novel Lord of the Flies, when human beings feel free from constraints, they become sadistic to each other. Once cruelty begins in a group, it takes enormous courage and strength of character for any one person to protest against it.
PASSING ON THE PAIN
Happy slapping is not funny, it is bullying. It is traumatic for its victims both physically and emotionally. Bullying has many faces but always involves the strong picking on the weak. Few childhood behaviours make adults as angry or indeed as punitive as bullying and yet many adults bully all the time.
We seem ambivalent about bullying. We pass laws to prevent bullying in the workplace and yet people are often congratulated for bullying at work - for example, 'I slapped her into place.' And bullying goes on in families, between siblings, and under the guise of parental discipline. The heart of bullying lies in a power/domination relationship.
At the deepest level, a bully dreads feeling afraid, alone or isolated.
Bullying can be a way of passing on our pain to someone else in an attempt to feel strong and powerful rather than vulnerable. So we can think of the boy who happy slapped the two 11-year-olds as temporarily feeling strong and powerful, jeered on and admired by his mates. He needed this experience as a solution to feeling isolated and afraid most of the time because of his own experiences with a violent father. Like all human beings, he had the capacity to be violent and when he suffered violence he needed to get rid of his feelings of pain and shame. The current social milieu of happy slapping provided him with the opportunity to act out his aggression.
Thumping and slapping each other is common behaviour among the 12-plus age range. They use it as a way of expressing both affection for and anxieties about each other. It is especially common between boys and girls, almost a way of making contact without allowing closeness.
As professionals, we need to be able to see the signs when this normal behaviour has become bullying or happy slapping, and to create an environment in which youngsters feel able to tell us what is happening.
Andrea Clifford-Poston is an educational therapist and author of Tweens - What to Expect From, and How to Survive, Your Child's Pre-Teenage Years (Oneworld, 8.99)
More information
* Winnicott, D W (1984) Deprivation and Delinquency, Tavistock/Routledge, 17.99
* Wiseman, R (2003) Queen Bees and Wannabees, Piatkus, 7.99
* Clifford-Poston, A (2005) Tweens - What to Expect From, and How to Survive, Your Child's Pre-Teenage Years, OneWorld, 8.99
* Clifford-Poston, A (2001) The Secrets of Successful Parenting(Ch.4 - on bullying) How-To Books, 9.99
