By Calvin Palmer

One of five Florida teenage girls accused of beating a cheerleader classmate was today put on probation for a year.

Brittany Mayes, 18, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in January.

As part of her probation, Mayes was ordered not to contact the victim’s family, not to have an account on social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, and not to talk to the media for profit.

She was also ordered to pay the victim’s family $1,752 in restitution.

Mayes was one of five teenage girls from Mulberry High School, in Polk County, facing charges in the March 30, 2008 beating of Victoria Lindsay, then 16, and threatening to post videos of it on the Internet. Lindsay was a cheerleader at the high school and sustained concussion and bruising in the attack.

All five have accepted plea deals, thus avoiding any trial in the case.

Lindsay’s father claimed the teens were motivated by plans to produce a video that would become popular on a video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one the attackers said the victim provoked the other teens by insulting them on a social networking site.

[Based on reports by The Ledger and Associated Press.]

By Calvin Palmer

One of five Florida teenage girls facing charges in the beating of a cheerleader, which they planned to broadcast on the Internet, today pleaded guilty at a court in Bartow.

Mercades Nichols, 18, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery under a plea bargain that saw prosecutors agree to drop felony kidnapping and witness tampering charges.  Last month, Brittany Mayes entered a similar plea.

Under the deal, Nichols will face up to three years probation.

Nichols was among a group of teens, four other girls and two boys, arrested in 2008 and accused of attacking a 16-year-old classmate and cheerleader Victoria Lindsay.

The attack was recorded on video and Polk County Sheriff’s detectives say the teenagers were going to post the video on YouTube and MySpace in retaliation for online smack-talking between the girls.

Charges against the boys, who were accused of acting as lookouts, were dropped.

Nichols also agreed to plead guilty to charges of assault and violation of an injunction in an unrelated case, in which she was accused of stalking a former boyfriend.

As part of the plea deal, Nichols must also write a letter of apology to Lindsay, perform 100 community service hours, is forbidden from contacting the media to profit from the case and agreed not to contact the victim.

Judge Keith Spoto made it clear that he would revoke the plea agreement if Nichols failed to comply with the terms.

Nichols is due to be sentenced on March 5.

[Based on reports by The Tampa Tribune and Associated Press.]

Facebook has 120 million users; Twitter has over 3 million users.  There are countless blogs floating around the Internet, and numerous photo sharing sites.  Our private lives are suddenly becoming more and more public thanks to social media.  But are we becoming too comfortable?

 I’m going to take what I consider to be the most appalling example of this and start from there.  Facebook has a group called 30 Reasons A Girl Should Call It A Night.  It’s full of girls in various stages of undress, making out with friends (and perhaps strangers?), heaving into toilets…many, many things that I wouldn’t want the world to know I was doing. 

I feel old as I write this post, having only graduated from college a little over 2 years ago and already finding this group more troubling rather than entertaining.  I had my fair share of crazy nights, filled with too much alcohol and lots of cameras.  There were pictures taken of me that I found funny at the time, but most are now untagged (if they were taken by friends) or completely taken down (if added by me).  I know what these pictures symbolize—a great memory between friends, a hysterical story to be shared over and over again; it’s a form of cataloguing memories from the college years, which some say are the best years of your life (I could beg to differ on that too, but that’s an entirely different post in and of itself).  BUT, with more and more people and businesses becoming involved with Facebook, posting drunken pictures is becoming a more dangerous practice.  Employers are checking out potential hires’ pages and pictures; parents are seeing a side to their kids that they’d probably rather forget; and those people in the pictures are having to do a lot of explaining. 

Let’s move on to the issue of blogging about our personal lives.  Emily Gould is probably the best example of this, having been burned by the blogging site that employed her.  Many other people have blogs on which they unload personal messages.

 The question remains—are we becoming too comfortable pouring our personal lives into an arena to be viewed and critiqued by others?  A few unfortunate souls have seen the ramifications of social media overload:

Teachers in trouble over Facebook profiles

Joshua Lipton

Victoria Lindsay

Megan Meier’s suicide and the subsequent trial

There are so many more that it would take me forever to list.  People are arrested, stalked, bullied and passed over for jobs based on what they put on their social profiles. 

 Don’t get me wrong.  I use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and I’m obviously extremely involved with social media, given my marketing job and my blogging hobby.  I do think, however, that there are some basic rules to follow regarding what you show to the rest of the world.  No direct addresses, full names, and other personal information should be shared.  Photos should be approved by a discriminating eye.  Would you want your parents to see that?  No?  Then don’t tag it.  Would that piece of information hurt you personally or professionally?  Yes?  Then don’t share it except with friends (real friends, not virtual ones). 

The Axiom Of Responsibility

Individuals Demonstrate Valid Behavior

By Taking Responsibility

For Themselves And Their Children

Reviewing recent headlines, we are left feeling as though our society is pretty far gone. We will be able to recover?

Parents are encouraging their toddlers to beat one another up and then posting the fights on YouTube. Don’t believe it? See it: “Terrible Toddler Fight On YouTube.” According to ABC News, there are numbers of videos posted on the Internet of toddlers hitting each other while parents or other adults stand by and watch, at times even “egging [the fight] on.” In the videos, the toddlers are screaming, crying, and occasionally bleeding. Some of the fights are clearly planned, as the toddlers’ parents have them in boxing gloves.

In Polk County, Florida, six cheerleaders “ambushed” one of their cheerleader “friends,” “viciously” beating her for “more than 30 minutes,” and then posted their attack on YouTube. (“Exclusive: Beaten Florida Cheerleader Speaks Out“) “17-year-old Victoria Lindsay told Good Morning America she thought she was ‘going to die’ on the night of the horrifying attack” at the home of one of her friends. The video is beyond disturbing, “show[ing] Lindsay literally backed into a corner and attempting to cover her head while the alternate pummeling her and yelling at her.” Tragically, Lindsay was “unable to avoid the blows and suffered a concussion and injuries to her left eye and left ear. One girl reportedly slammed her head into a wall until she lost consciousness.”

An eight-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona murdered his father and his father’s friend. (“Prosecutors Say 8-Year-Old Boy Methodically Shot Father, Friend“) Allegedly, the boy “methodically reloaded a .22-caliber rifle as he committed the crime, pumping at least four rounds of bullets into each victim.” There is still no clear motive: “Police Chief Roy Melnick of St. Johns, Ariz., originally suspected the boy had been abused, but he told the New York Times he found no evidence supporting that theory. The child had no disciplinary problems at school and showed no signs of being troubled.” Nevertheless, a judge didn’t think the boy should have to miss Thanksgiving with his mother and is allowing him to leave juvenile detention “from noon on Nov. 26 to noon on Nov. 28.” (“8-Year-Old: ‘I Shot My Dad’“)

A 14-year-old boy in Montrose, Colorado slit the throat of a 17-year-old girl as she was standing in a hallway at her school. (“14-Year-Old Boy Slashes Girl’s Throat At Montrose High“) “Police said [the] suspect was arrested moments later after running from the scene.” The boy, “who has a troubled past [ . . . ] was not a student at the high school.” “Investigators are still trying to determine a motive.”

Apparently, numbers of children today don’t have a clue as to what is right and what is wrong, in addition to being completely void of empathy and lacking an emotional connection to the consequences of their actions. Our nation’s youth are our future, and clearly, many parents are failing them. In the case of the toddlers, parents are instilling violence and brutality in their children. As to the others, children whose parents have raised them properly rarely commit such atrocities.

Pursuing Magna Sententia requires parents to do their utmost to raise children with character. While no one would say this is easy, as parents, it is our job.

If America’s parents continue to fail, America will fail.

Anna and Ellie Sherise
Creators of Magna Sententia
Authors of Magna Sententia: The Logical Cure for Our Society

Hey Guys!

Few days ago I had an idea to make Celebrity SEX weblog on wordpress because everyone was asking me and now this is finished!

You have to see it!!! I have found Lindsay Lohan Sex Video in the Internet!

If this video not a Fake then I think it will be a real scandal!!

Audrina Patridge is the most beautiful girl on this planet and this video is a proof of that!

Audrina Patridge Nude Video below!

Attention! Adult content! only 18+!!!

“Further investigation has shown that there is insufficient evidence to proceed with charges against the defendant.”

With that phrase charges were dropped against 3 of the teens involved in the case of the beating of former Mulberry High cheerleader Victoria Lindsay. Freed from further prosecution were: Cara Murphy, 16, Stephen Schumaker, 18, and Zachary Ashley, 17. They had all been charged with kidnapping and battery. There is some speculation that the 3 may become witnesses. However, Chip Thullbery, a spokesman for the State Attorney’s Office said any such speculation was premature: “At this point, it’s premature to determine who will be witnesses in the case,” Thullbery said.

Cara Murphy’s attorney, Melodie Lopez, said her client had nothing to do with the incident. Her client was at the scene of the incident, but that was all that happened.

Stephen Schumaker’s father, Bob Schumaker, blamed Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, saying he had arrested the young men too hastily.

“They had nothing on the boys from the very start,” Bob Schumaker said. “That’s why we were so upset. Because they weren’t even there.”

Zachary Ashley’s mother, Heidi Dease, agreed:

“It’s been a long road,” Dease said. “But we’re very excited today.”

Five girls still remain charged in the beating of Victoria Lindsay: Mercades Nichols, 17; April Cooper, 15; Brittini Hardcastle, 17; Kayla Hassall, 15; and Brittany Mayes, 17, all of whom are charged with battery and kidnapping. In addition, Mercades, Brittini and Brittany also are charged with tampering with a witness. See the video here.

For the full story on the entire incident see this posting and this update.

It only took me about 10 minutes of watching today’s Meet the Press to realize that this edition sucked.  Maybe it’s too soon, maybe not soon enough.  It just ain’t the same without the big guy asking the questions.

Spent most of those 10 minutes thinking about Luke Russert on this Father’s Day.  What a friggen day it must have been for that guy.

Also thought about Victoria Lindsay today.  Not intentionally, but was checking out comments left by folks when I realized someone added a comment about that beating dished out to the cheerleader down in whatever state that was.  Reading the comment made me a bit ticked.  It was, afterall, a fairly good Father’s Day for me.  Probably not so much for Lindsay’s father as the comment left claims that the charges against the two boys accused of being lookouts and against one of the girls, Cara Murphy, were dropped.  Not that I could find anything with a quick web search.

But I will be looking at that story in the morning to see if what the commenter claims happened is true.  I sure hope not.  I know what I saw on that video and it sure did not look to me like the cheerleader was a willing participant in a brutal beating that occurred in the house of Mercades Nichols’ grandmother.

  Zachary Ashley               Cara Murphy             Stephen Schumaker
 

Charges Dropped Against Three in Teen Beating
Charges Dropped Against 3 Teens In Videotaped Beating
Charges Dropped Against 3 Teens In Cheerleader Beating
Teen Accused In Taped Beating Asks Judge To Let Her Tell Story
Teen Beating Suspect Can Get Job, But Can’t Talk (has several links to other stories as well)

The internet may be desensitizing kids to violence, but didn’t that whole trend start a long time ago with television?  It’s just that now with the internet kids have their own network to broadcast violence from as opposed to just watching at home and then silently taking it out on a peer sans film crew.  YouTube is filled with videos that contain fights or other violent acts, they have policies set up that remove videos if they’re deemed violent or contain nudity.   But the task of filtering through the thousands of videos that are uploaded daily is a daunting one and it does take the site a bit of time before they can remove a video that’s been flagged.  The most recent and publicized violent video on YouTube is of 16 year-old Victoria Lindsay being attacked by six of her female classmates while two boys were posted as lookouts.  Lindsay had been lured into the home where she was attacked and then beaten unconscious, placed on the couch till she awoke and then backed into a corner and beaten some more.  All of this while one of the girls was filming the atrocious acts so that it could be posted on YouTube as some sort of ill planned revenge for Lindsay’s supposed comments about her attackers on her Myspace page.  Since police released the video of Linsdays attack to the press there has been a media circus surrounding the whole event.  It’s been an utter melee of networks fighting for coverage of the girls first court appearances and parents being interviewed and of course running the video of the beating will probably never get old.    As if the story wasn’t strange enough, Dr. Phil McGraw, of the Dr. Phil show, had some of his staffers bail out one of the attackers, Mercades Nichols from jail.  The teens all had their bail set between $30,000 and $37,000.  The Dr. Phil show later decided that they would not go through with the show that Nichols was supposed to be a guest on due to the shows guidelines being compromised.

There is a general sense of outrage directed towards the attackers online and in the media.  But some are blaming the Internet for all of this violence because it was manufactured online (Myspace comments) and intended for online use (the YouTube video).  One former bully, Rob Havilland, 32 stated that, “yeah, if we could have showed our beat-downs online then I’m sure that there’d be a lot more of em’ and I’d probably be in jail still.”

So what can parents to do ensure that their kids aren’t the victims of bullies or that they aren’t the ones doing the bullying?  According to the director of Safe and Drug Free Schools for the Cadillac, Michigan Area Public School District, Danette Crozier MSW, “the only way that parents can be sure is to snoop.  I had one mom come in who has an older student and she told me that she goes through his Myspace and AIM accounts at least once a week.  Privacy is earned.”  Crozier runs a program called Second Step, it’s an anti-bullying program that has had a great deal of success in her school district and she’s hoping that other schools will implement the same style programs to make sure that violence and harassment aren’t a normal part of any childs school day.

The videotaped beating of Victoria Lindsay, the 16-year-old from Lakeland, Florida, who was assaulted on March 30 by six girls she knew at Mulberry High School, seemed to many people to come out of nowhere. When did girls become so violent, so cruel and so savvy about using images as a means of humiliation? Isn’t all this the province of their maladjusted male peers?

I’m as baffled as the next person by the incident, and I’m still grasping for answers to those and plenty of other questions. But the scenario wasn’t shocking to me. In fact, it immediately reminded me of a similar incident I followed closely a few years ago.

On Sunday, May 4, 2003, a group of girls gathered at a forest preserve in Northbrook, Illinois, to play a game of football. It sounds innocent enough, but the beer-soaked “Powder Puff” game quickly devolved into a ritualized initiation ceremony in which the team of juniors submitted to a torrent of verbal and physical abuse from the seniors. It was tradition, they were told. These were the rules of the game. When the last of the punches, kicks, and swings of the bat were doled out–and after the buckets of paint, feces and pig intestines had been dumped–five girls were sent to the hospital, one with a broken ankle and another with a head wound. The entire episode was caught on tape by the boys on the sidelines, who promptly sold the footage to the local news. Fifteen of the students involved (twelve girls, three boys) were called to Cook County Circuit Court on misdemeanor battery charges–all of them were found guilty. Parents Christine Neal and Marcy Spiwak were also found guilty for providing the teens with two kegs of beer and a place to drink in the hours before the game.

The story probably wouldn’t have made the headlines if it didn’t feature a group of girls acting so viciously at such a young age, and it certainly wouldn’t have circled the globe if the boys hadn’t participated as cameramen. Once the tapes were released, though, the audience pounced on the chance to respond. Here, in one neat package, were entry points into broad discussions about the voyeurism and schadenfreude of reality TV; moral passivity and the obligation to intervene; suburban teen violence in the post-Columbine era; male fears of female empowerment; the simultaneous glorification and stigmatization of youth; and on and on. Reactions varied wildly from curiosity to revulsion, bafflement to condemnation, casual dismissal of a nonevent to bold pleas for drastic punitive measures. It was like a cultural Rorschach test: we projected our anxieties onto the Powder Puff girls, and they reflected them back to us.

I was fascinated by the story and its reception, in large part because I grew up in Northbrook but also because I was intrigued by the connections between adolescent girls and hazing, an activity I had associated with older males (fraternities, the military). After the story receded from the national headlines I stuck with it; I wanted to probe deeper into the gender angle, which struck me as particularly significant and puzzling. The attack on Victoria Lindsay has prompted me to revisit the material I compiled a few years ago when the Powder Puff story broke. I’m presenting some of it here because I think it’s relevant and may be useful to others trying to understand the broader issues at play.

One of the hazing experts I spoke with in 2003 was Elizabeth Allan, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Maine. “I’ve seen this pattern emerging in sororities and girls’ athletic teams for a number of years,” she told me. “For me, it’s about the power of masculinity. We live in a culture where aggressive masculinity is taken as normal, and it’s accorded status in politics, economics, the workplace. Girls want to feel powerful, and it makes sense that they would take on masculine behaviors in order to achieve. The ways in which girls are taught to behave, to sit quietly in class and fit into particular expectations of femininity, definitely shaped the way these girls acted out and the ways in which the rest of us understood what happened.”

Richard Martini, an adolescent psychiatrist at the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, interpreted the eruption of violence among the Northbrook girls in a similar manner. “I think it has to do with the changing expectations of women,” he said. “More doors are open, and with that, the boundaries of what is appropriate get stretched.” In his practice, Martini had noted a recent spike in aggression among teenage girls, and he pointed to Northbrook as evidence corroborating his claim that more girls are getting involved in physical misconduct than ever before–“more fights, more overt violent behavior that has previously been associated with boys.”

In 2000, a team of researchers at New York’s Alfred University conducted a survey that focused on initiation rites in American high schools. According to the report, almost half of high schoolers claimed that they had been subjected to hazing, and the majority of those hazed said that they suffered negative consequences as a result. Predictably, the greatest number of incidents involved athletic teams, though almost every type of extracurricular group was cited. Boys were found to be more susceptible to hazing than girls, but girls were consistently involved in hazing at all three demarcated levels: 39 percent of the girls reported participation in “humiliating” hazing (compared to 48% of boys); 18 percent acknowledged substance abuse (24 percent); and 17 percent were involved in “dangerous” hazing (27 percent).

“I think hazing is pretty common among adolescents,” Martini suggested. “One of the problems, though, is that the desire to belong to a group is so strong at that age that they don’t acknowledge it as dangerous.” Allan suspected not only that rates are increasing but also that the intensity of the behavior has escalated.

“I don’t know is if there is an upsurge or if the code of silence is finally being broken, but I suspect the latter,” said Jeffrey Gershel, a professor of clinical pediatrics at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. Gershel published his own study, “Hazing of Suburban Middle School and High School Athletes,” in the May 2003 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. He found a lower number of incidents than the team at Alfred University–17.4 percent of those surveyed reported participation, compared to nearly half–and discovered that rates were practically equal for boys and girls at all grade levels (his report, which investigated student athletes in grades six through twelve, was the first to consider pre-teens in this context). “Cheerleaders had the highest rates,” Gershel said. “Girls were more likely to be asked to do something, like dress up in a stupid outfit, and the boys were more likely to have something done to them.”

Lindsay was a cheerleader, true, but her story is certainly not about hazing. She did not willingly submit to her abuse, as the Northbrook girls did. She was ambushed and cornered and assaulted by erstwhile friends. This crucial difference perhaps explains the difference in the severity of the punishments: whereas the Powder Puff girls got off with misdemeanor battery charges, the girls in Florida are being charged as adults with felony battery and could face life in prison. (This also says something about the juvenile justice system in Florida compared with that in Illinois.) The parallels between these two cases aren’t perfect, of course. But the stories, I think, do overlap. Certainly they raise related questions. It’ll only be a matter of time, I’m afraid, before another case poses these questions anew. All the more reason to keep searching for answers.

8 Teenagers have been arrested and charged as adults in the brutal, animalistic beating of Victoria “Tori” Lindsay. See some of the court proceedings here. They have now all been released on bail ranging between $30,000 and $37,000 and placed under house arrest.

The parents of Victoria Lindsay, Talisa and Patrick Lindsay, speak out about the beating of their daughter:

One of the girls, Mercades Nichols, who is accused of being the ringleader of the group assault was bailed out of jail by people associated with Dr. Phil.

This was obviously an attempt by the show to have exclusive rights to the Mercades Nichols’ story and have her on the show as a guest. After receiving a lot of negative feedback they decided to cancel those plans. In an attempt at damage control Dr. Phil issued the following statement:

“We have helped guests and potential guests in the past when they need financial assistance to come on the show – assisting with clothing allowance, lost wages, accommodations, travel and necessities. In this case, certain staff members went beyond our guidelines (re: the bail being paid). These staff members have been spoken to and our policies reiterated. In addition, we have decided not to go forward with the story as our guidelines have been compromised.”

A Polk County judge, J. Michael McCarthy, issued a gag order in the case after parents of some of the teens and Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd appeared on national TV shows discussing the case this week.

In the meantime Victoria Lindsay is recovering slowly from the injuries she sustained in the vicious beating at her friend’s house. She suffered a concussion and, even though more than a week has passed since the attack, has not fully regained her hearing and vision on her left side. However, as the swelling subsides, doctors hope those will return. According to her parents, Victoria will not return to Mulberry High school.