Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Children as CopyCats

There it is, children are most certainly copy cats. They see something, they feel compelled to copy for whatever reason. It's not what they hear, necessarily, but what they watch unfolding before their eyes that appears to grip their imagination. And isn't it increasingly so that children are able to see with their very eyes,more than ever before?

Where once it was scraps of hushed conversation beween parents or other adults that intrigued children, now it is the glimpses they catch on television, on the Internet and other like sources that bring them to the kind of interaction and subterfuge and secretive longings and imagined heroism that responds to their growing sense of the world around them.

Since the grisly images of Saddam Hussein meeting his ignominious end children have attempted to emulate what they've seen on that little screen. Either groups of children play-acting together to copy what they've seen with no intent of causing disaster, or children who have been led to believe that such a final act is somehow ennobling of character.

While most in the West considered Saddam Hussein to be a mass murderer, a bloody dictator, there are countless others around the world, in the Middle East and South-East Asia, for whom he represents a figure of great respect, a cult figure, a hero. For children from these cultural backgrounds viewing the clip on the media has influenced them to emulate the event so they too can become martyrs for Islam.
  • A 12-year-old hanged himself on the front door of his home in Saudi Arabia. Standing on a chair he wrapped wire around his neck, attached it to the top of the door frame and ended his life.
  • A 15-year-old girl from east India hanged herself from a ceiling fan after repeatedly watching the execution on television. Her father said she told him she wanted to feel the pain Saddam experienced during the execution.
  • A 13-year-old boy wrapped a cord around his neck and hanged himself from a tree in the capital of Yemen.
  • Another 13-year-old boy in Yemen, playing with his friends in their village had a rope from a tree placed around his neck, then was unable to free himself.
  • A 9-year-old boy in Pakistan hanged himself from a ceiling fan while re-enacting Saddam's execution, with the help of his older sister.
  • A 10-year-old in the United States accidentally killed himself after imitating a video report on Saddam's death that he had seen on television.
  • In Algeria a group of schoolchildren hanged a 12-year-old classmate in a "game" imitating the execution two days after it took place.
Pity the children: at an age when they begin to try to understand the world in which they live, and somehow interpret the events they witness in their own inimitable, and sad way.

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posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, January 09, 2007

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