A Kick in the Head

It is only Wednesday of this week and already I have see too many videos of children having fights.  I say "fights" but that would indicate that there was a degree of fairness amongst those who are seen in the videos as "fighting".  Usually it's one person being physically assaulted by one or more other individual.  That person, twice this week, has been female.  One lone female being battered silly while others look on and watch and film.

Sadder than that is that in one of those videos this week it is understood that the female being beaten up was actually a child who was eight-years-old and, if the information with the video is correct, the girls giving the beaten was older, in high school at least.  What sort of beef does an eleven-year-old girl have with an eight-year-old girl?

Thankfully, in the that video, there was someone, a young lad, trying to step in.  The video is not long and the child is okay physically but extremely shaken up as you can imagine.  

The one who beat her up has been identified (she made no attempt at hiding her face and the person filming it had a very clear view) but what is to happen to this person? If she is no more than eleven? She won't go to youth detention, she'll probably just have to apologise sincerely and told not to go near the child again.  

What concerns me about that video and several others I have seen is this action of kicking someone in the head.  When the person is being beaten up and appears to be on their own they tend to be in a foetal position with hands covering head.  The person doing the beating then starts to throw kicks at the head area.  Sometimes there is a lack of conviction in these kicks and other times they think they are taking penalty kicks. (Either way, they shouldn't be happening at all).

All sorts of things can happen when the head is traumatised.  People can lose vision, hearing and suffer brain damage. All of these things are life changing.  Most of the damage done to the brain cannot be reversed.  

While some people think it's just kids fighting it 'toughens' character and all that let me tell you about something that happened thirty years ago.

The mid-1990's.  I was in my mid-teens and had been out clubbing with a large group of friends.  At throwing out time we all go ready to go and outside we were heading in different directions to said our goodbyes and about half a dozen of use crossed the road to find a couple of taxis.  All of a sudden a fracas broke out and within seconds we all turned around to see a guy about our age sparked out on the ground then his assailant did something which I still see in my mind to this day - he started jumping on his head, first a couple of stamps with one foot and then two full two-footed jumps.  It was awful.

Everyone rushed to the victims attention - he was out cold.  The police who were effective in those days, were actually just seconds up the road, they arrived and got a quick idea of what was going on, where the assailant was headed and what he was wearing, radioed this out to a wide network on the radio and, thankfully, that guy was caught getting into a taxi where the driver was already on the look out.  We were told that same evening that the driver just locked his doors and took him to the police station which was two minutes away.

While that was happening an ambulance had arrived and the victim was being attended to.  The police took statements from dozens of people, by the time we were able to leave they were still working on the victim on the road.

A year later the court case was due and the assailant was pleading not guilty.  This in itself was nuts because there were literally dozens of witness, not just clubbers but bouncers from the club we had been in and from the others, people just walking home, drivers who had stopped when they saw what was happening.  There was also CCTV.

Someone came to the house to go over my statement and this happened with everyone I knew who had witnessed it.  I was not looking forward to going to court at all.  The assailant was being charged with attempted murder.

Thankfully, for the witnesses and the court anyway, the assailant pleaded guilty the day before the trial.  I think his lawyer probably pointed out the amount of evidence there was.  I don't know what the sentence was but I suspect that is one convicted criminal who has long served it and has been walking the streets for a number of years now.

The victim.  He suffered life-changing injuries that night.  In the space of the few moments of the attack he essentially had his life taken away from him.  He didn't die but he didn't recover.  He couldn't walk, talk, move any limbs, he had to be fed through a tube, he had a catheter.  He couldn't communicate with anyone.  He never saw his home again.  He never did anything again essentially.  He lay in a bed in hospital with tubes sticking out of him until he deteriorated and passed a few years later.

Watching children/young adults kicking other children/young adults in the head and filming it for a few likes on social media is beyond reprehensible and people need to check their children's phones to see what kind of content is on there.  

While the scenario I witnessed was extreme it's really important to note that one kick is literally all it takes.  What if that girl in the video I watched had landed a hard kick in the wrong place on the eight-year-old's head? What if that eight-year-old had never stood up again?