Facebook Message May Have Prompted Middle School Attack

LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) – A 12 year old boy in the L.A. suburb of Calabasas was beaten and kicked by up to 14 fellow students because he had red hair. November 20 had been declared “Kick a Ginger Day” in a Facebook message the students received. Ginger is a nickname for redheads more common in the U.K. and Canada, but made famous by a 2005 “South Park” episode which focused on redhead prejudice.

Social Media Message Leads To Violence?

According to law enforcement investigating the incident, a “South Park” Facebook group was presumed to be the source of the message. A.E Wright Middle School, where the incident took place, is in an affluent suburb a short drive to Malibu beach. It’s a high academic-achieving campus with a good teacher to student ratio, rarely if ever in the news.

School authorities responded by addressing the issue of prejudice in a school announcement and class discussions. November 20, 2008 saw a similar middle school attack in a Catholic school in Canada. The originator of the Facebook group was a 14 year old boy who explained he “meant [it] as a joke.” Canadian Mounties at the time considered prosecuting it as a hate crime. The mother of the Canadian girl who was attacked at the time stated, “It’s assault – it’s racist, too.”

The “South Park” episode described redheads as “evil” and “soulless”.

Laura spent years as a Hollywood story analyst, did a big 180, and is now an entrepreneur focused on web marketing and analytics. She's also a mom of one.

Laura Glendinning article archive.

Post Published: 23 November 2009
Found in section: Politics

matt
This kid must have been a Daywalker.
LOL
LOL nice one!!!!
Kris
Regardless of what you believe that South park is not responsible is false, kids are always going to take things out of content and being cruel is fun, rebelous and they do it with out thinking. South Park started that game and there are now many reports in multiple countries. This will only get more popular as more kids here about it and will come up with more cleaver ways to do it and not get caught.
Please tell me what you kids hair color is so we can offset the beatings, We then can have South Park make up a new clever name and feed stupid ideas in my kid head to beat your kid.
Use your head and understand that South Park has a snowball effect of starting small and growing huge
Look how racists teaching in a cartoon have become cool and provide the exact opposite of claimed teaching.

Brock
Kris, simply put: you're an idiot.
Offset the beatings? There you go, way to have an intelligent solution. Do the world a favor, and never think for yourself again, because the world is a worse place by you doing so.
South Park is TV-MA for a reason. Kids shouldn't be watching it, and the parents are responsible for letting 12 year olds watch something designated for 17+. Do parents let their children get pornographic materials or smoke cigarettes when they're 12? No. Then why do they let them watch adult material, yet complain when they see the detrimental effects it has on them?
To blame South Park is unfair – it's a satire. "Kids are always going to take things out of context" – why were the parents not preventing this? Every cable company enables passcodes to block mature content (which South park is…). Blame the idiot parents before you blame South Park, then blame the idiot kids for not being able to interpret satire. I read Gulliver's Travels (unabridged, mind you) when I was 11 years old (Granted I am in the top 99th percentile and an active member of Mensa, and in all probablities, incomprehensibly much smarter than you) — yet I didn't go and start a war with my classmates because how they liked their eggs; so why is South Park to blame because some ignoramus children misinterpreted a story? People love to blame the material rather than the perpetrator, which you are doing in your response.
The idiot kids take the most responsibility. Then come the parents for letting them watch it, or making sure they don't watch it.
The only thing South Park is responsible for, is making a funny show that millions of people watch. And about 99.999998% of those millions don't go out and kick people because of what they see. These kids did, and now they have to take the heat.

Rooibos
As a point of historical accuracy, this "ginger persecution" began happening LONG BEFORE the South Park cartoon aired an episode about the behaviour…LONG before that. The persecution of red-haired people has been around for a few hundred years in the British Isles, possibly longer.
While all of you are debating the relative merits of a time-wasting TV show, none of your bothered to do a little research and check out human history.
And then anyone wonders why humans are doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over and over….
–Ginger-haired Woman
Woodrow
Kids misunderstanding something isn't really an indicator of good or evil in the something.
Gabby
This is rediculous. It wasn't as bad as the people say. I know all the kids that supposivley got "arrested" and they didn't even touch the kid let alone get arrested. The most they got was a suspention. These websites that say this are PATHETIC!! I still go there today and no one even cares anymore. Kids are still getting called "Ginger" and they don't even care.

Facebook Message May Have Prompted Middle School Attack

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