All the trigger warnings on this one. This was difficult to watch, to say the least. “It’s just a prank, bro!” If you’d prefer to read about these parents and their lucrative youtube channel, head over to The Guardian. The first 9 minutes or so of the video deal with the DaddyOFive situation.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
As a parent, their ‘pranks’ make me shudder. Those aren’t pranks, that’s cruelty, and treating your kids not like human beings but like objects for your own entertainment. They’re not puppets; they have all the feelings.
I mean, when the person who has been granted emergency custody has to say
… something just isn’t right,
I agree. I know abuse when I see it, and that’s abuse. It’s also obvious that one of the kids is the most singled out target. That poor kid looks like he’s the whipping boy for all the others.
For people in the UK:
If you are a child in need of help, contact Childline on 0800 1111
If you want to report suspected child abuse, contact the NSPCC. And please, don’t talk yourself out of acting by persuading yourself that “it’s probably nothing.” Let people decide who very probably have much more experience than you do in making such decisions.
Maybe others could share help-line info for their own countries? I’d particularly like to see bloggers making a habit of attaching the appropriate help info to blogs posts where abuse is discussed. It’s not the only way to help, of course, but it’s one easy and effective method.
My feelings on the video are inexpressible.
Where to Get Help for Child Abuse.
Echoing Daz, reporting needs courage, but don’t be afraid to help. As someone who was abused as a child, you could make all the difference in a child’s life, or keep that child alive.
Daz: Thanks for that; I’ve snapshotted your comment to my laptop in case I ever need it or know someone who does.
Every time there’s a big abuse case, someone says “if only someone had said something!!” Well, yeah.
In this case, people did say something -- a lot of people viewing the videos on youtube. According to one of the commenters on the Guardian article, someone like this can pull down around 10K a month with this sort of shit.
I was only able to make to the 1:29 mark. I hope these people lose their kids and go to jail. I was that kid. I know the terror he feels. Fuck those assholes. Anyone who thinks this is funny should just curl up in a ball and die. If you know of this sort of thing happening and you don’t do anything to stop it, you are just as guilty as these people are of torturing those kids. Fuck.
Fuck I’m almost crying.*
I just want to grab that kid, take him into my arms and promise him that he is safe and nobody will ever treat him like this again. I hope his mum can do that for him and his sister. I’m sorry for the other three.
No shit, Sherlock, the kids say in a video filmed by their parents that everything is alright.
1. Yes, abused kids will say lots of things. Abused kids often don’t even realise that this is abuse because we don’t have a fucking frame of reference. I was almost 30 before I realised.
2. Even when we don’t know it’s abuse, we still know exactly what will get us into trouble. We might still believe that this is all our fault and we just need to behave right, but we usually know what not to do or say.
3. It’s a video filmed and uploaded by the dude who pushed a kid into a shelf. Any bets what would happen if a kid actually said “I don’t want this, please stop!”? Yeah…
I hope Codey sues for every cent of it.
*At least my mother didn’t push me into a shelf and put on youtube, right?
Marcus & Caine.
You’re welcome.
StonedRanger:
Yeah, me too. It’s like some arsehole took most of the years of my childhood plus the many nightmares since, and loaded ’em onto youtube for lulz. Don’t get me wrong; my main anger is on behalf of that poor kid, but there’s plenty left over for the more personal side.
“You aren’t traumatized, right?” Cody: “I don’t even know what that word means, but I’m not.”
Abused kids will say anything to fit in, to appease, to one day find the magic that makes their abusive parent[s] consider them part of the pack, rather than the convenient thing to beat up on.
I just watched the video, and I think the acting is terrible -- to the point where I am skeptical that it’s not just acted. That’s still a problem, of course. And maybe it’s my reflex not to believe it’s real, because I don’t want to get the slightest frisson of amusement from that shit. Even if the kids are just rotten actors, they’re still putting this shitshow together to help their parents make coin on youtube. There are consent issues to that -- at best this is child labor and at worst it’s abuse.
I think that, historically, human societies grant parents way too much authority over their kids. For example, in the US you can raise your kid an ignorant creationist with no career path other than public office or some other life of crime or working retail. I hope that someday there will be minimal standards for child-raising and you won’t be able to have a child if you can’t commit to giving it a decent opportunity without wracking its brain or propagandizing it. I don’t know how that’s gonna work out. I know someone who was raised on a diet of Kardashians and FOX news and she’s got toxic self-images out the wazoo and some really screwy belief systems. How can parents be allowed to do that? Argh.
I just really want to believe that’s all bad acting.
Yeah, I learned pretty well that “it’s just a joke” is your cue to shut up or else.
The kid shows some of the same behavioral twitches as Marjoe Gortner. There’s a lot of body language there. Ugh. Levels of mental torture. Marjoe described his mom as expert at punishing him without leaving visible marks. Gah. What’s the “grew up in it” version of “stockholm syndrome”?
Giliell@#13:
Yeah, I learned pretty well that “it’s just a joke” is your cue to shut up or else.
It’s almost like the ‘but’ rule -- you can ignore everything up to the ‘but’ in a sentence. When someone says “it’s just a joke” it means exactly the opposite. Because if it was a joke, nobody would have to explain that it’s a joke -- everyone would be laughing.
No, sorry Marcus, no kid is that good an actor.
Besides, when actual movie/TV productions shoot such scenes, they usually don’t shoot them with kids reacting directly and that’s for good reasons. Your parents yelling aggressively at you is terrifying.
Giliell@#16:
OK, I’m convinced.
I was thinking about dogs I’ve know that were raised with horrible psychologically abusive caretakers, and they get the same kind of twitchies -- they’ll do anything for some positive feedback, or just obey to be ignored. It makes me want to kill.
I don’t suppose youtube would ban them?
aahahaaaaa I crack myself up. I wonder how the advertisers would feel if they knew what their products were being flogged with? aahaaahahaaaa they don’t care either. What a swamp.
Trying to imagine being abused and then told that the abuse is “just a joke.” Frankly, I think I would have found that even more horrible. I realised early on that I was my father’s cat in the game of kick-the-cat. Kickin’ me round the room acted as a safety valve. And after all these years, I still can’t decide how much it was intentional versus him being lost in a blind rage; but the added layer of intentionality involved in coolly and calmly planning it as a “joke”? I dunno, but to me that adds an extra helping of belittling to an already demeaning situation.
My parents played a joke on me, once. Mom made pancakes with flannel in ’em. There was a brief moment when we tried to cut them and our brains went “skkkkrkrkrkrkrkrwwwwWHAT?!” When we figured it out, everyone had a big laugh and mom made more pancakes without the flannel and we all laughed.
It’s not a joke unless everyone laughs.
Marcus:
It isn’t. It’s quite easy to see genuine terror on a child’s face, and in their body language. You have a thread full of adults who were abused as children who went into immediate recognition. The kid is not that level of an actor. If he were, his parents would be busy milking him for cash in a different way.
Daz:
It does. And stepmom gets to play evil stepmom and pass it off as a joke. I was also very disturbed by the oldest son, “it’s a prank, brah!”. Look what they are teaching him -- everything is great if you have someone despised and smaller to kick around. He’s already the same level of asshole as his parents.
Caine #21:
Also, his terror visibly escalates as he realises that “I didn’t do that” isn’t being accepted. Even most adults don’t get details like that right when acting terrorised.
I think there’s a similarity to this “cultural” habit in the USA to calmly beat your children. Being genuinely angry is one thing. It’s not an excuse for parents losing control, but I think it’s much easier to forgive. Somebody calmly deciding to inflict pain on their children, that adds an extra level of cruelty.
Caine@#21:
The kid is not that level of an actor. If he were, his parents would be busy milking him for cash in a different way.
Yeah, that’s true.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #24:
I dunno about “forgive” (I maybe forgave my dad a bit when I found out many years later what his dad had been like), but yeah, that’s basically what I meant.
Damn, I could only watch until the screaming started, then had to turn it off. That is documented child abuse.