On April 18 I posted a video on YouTube of two teenagers harassing a third teenager (you can view the video here). They called him gay, tried engaging other bus patrons to ‘date’ him and were merciless in their attack. This was just two months before the infamous video shot of bus monitor Karen Klein that was viciously harassed by middle school students. That incident has been analyzed a lot. A lot of people want to focus on the aftermath, when people of conscious have donated to a fund for the woman. The last time I checked the amount of money in the fund was well over $600,000.

Like many people I was disturbed but not too surprised by the incident. Like I said, I had my own video up of a similar incident months before, but I’m sure a few people might look at the video I shot and think ‘well, those kids are attacking a friend, so it isn’t the same as what the kids did to Karen Klein.’ In a couple of interviews, when the reporter decides to probe past the incident itself, the bus monitor says something that we all should be concerned about. When asked why she didn’t initially report the incident, the monitor says she didn’t because it was near the end of the school year, and from past incidents a report about the students action wouldn’t result in anything happening.

Take that statement into serious council when you think about what those kids did. I’m not sure how many people have bothered to watch the whole incident. When I first learned about it from someone else, and they played it for me, I only saw about four minutes of what went on, not realizing the verbal assault went on for ten minutes at least. Who knows what happened when the video wasn’t recording. The vicious verbal assault wasn’t that of unknowing junior high kids. You had the kids taunting about cutting her open and letting the fat pour out. You had them saying they hoped her family died. Tears from her eyes made the attack more pronounced. This wasn’t ‘you’re ugly and your mama dresses you funny’ hijinks.

Here’s the biggest takeaway I took from the incident. The reason millions of people have seen the video, the reason why people have given money to this woman, the reason why most of us know about the incident is because of the kids themselves. The video wasn’t shot from a surveillance camera. The footage wasn’t taken by a concerned student. The reason why all of us are aware of this incident, if we are to believe the video shooter, is that one of the harassers told the kid to videotape the incident on his cell phone and then was told to post it. Really think about this in context of what I said earlier about the bus monitor saying she didn’t tell anyone initially because she felt nothing would be done. These kids were so brazen in their actions they didn’t feel at all ashamed about having someone else videotape the incident, then posted it on YouTube. You would think that if someone had done something so cruel they wouldn’t want it to be recorded, and surely they wouldn’t want it to be posted on YouTube for all the world to see. Make no mistake, if it was posted on YouTube, these boys, these harassers, were so confident that they wouldn’t get in trouble that they wanted the world to know what they did.

When you think about it, the kids were right in their thinking, up to a point. This story could have easily died, even with the posting. My video was up for two months and barely got 100 hits. The story about the bus monitor has been out less than two weeks and the hits on my video are a little over 300. I’m sure the jump in views is because of the Karen Klein story and people either are mistakenly coming across my video or people are looking for other harassment incidents, but I’ve yet to receive any comments from the video. I have to assume of the over 300 people who have seen the video, none of them have thought to find those students in my video, nor has anyone set up a fund for the harassed boy in my video. So it was quite possible for those guys in the Karen Kelin video to think they could post the incident and nothing would happen to them.

Let’s think past the video posting. The boys supposedly peer pressured another student to video the incident. No other students around them said anything to the boys. No one told them to stop. I know, they were just kids on the bus, we can’t expect them to do anything. Well, I was on a bus with adults. The three teenagers were the only young people on the bus. They were loud enough for people to notice. Even though I only shot two minutes of footage, they went on their little rant for about ten minutes. In my case, the kids even interacted with other passengers. None of us did nothing. Yes, I’m counting myself in this because I could have said something, but all I did was to pull out the camera and videotape them.

To me, the fact that the boys in the bus monitor incident felt so embolden that they had someone videotape them and posted it on YouTube is a shame. The fact that no one said nothing to them illustrates a bigger problem. People, especially young people, will not stop this behavior. Don’t get comfortable thinking this will be the end of this type of harassment. As long as people do nothing, as long as victims have the attitude that nothing will happen if it reported, then people are going to believe they can get away with harassment.