A trendy new game: ‘bum fighting’

08/09/2009 / UNITED STATES

A trendy new game: ‘bum fighting’

Some young Americans have launched an utterly sinister trend: organising fights between homeless people ("bum fights"), then posting the video of the clash on YouTube.

It all began with a "bum fighting" DVD, which came out in 2001 and sold 6.8 million copies. The producers of this DVD were sentenced, in 2003, to community service and their site was closed, but the trend had begun. According to a report published by the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), there are more and more videos on the internet of "bum fighting" or which show homeless people being made to do dangerous activities (go down a staircase in a trolley or on a skateboard for example), in exchange for a pack of beers or a few dollars. The NGO found almost 86,000 videos on YouTube containing "bum" (a highly pejorative term for homeless people) in their title, adding that almost 15,000 of them were posted last year. Most of these videos to which the NGO refers do not show pictures of the fighting, as these are deleted by YouTube, but pictures of "bum fighting" are easily accessible on specialised sites.

According to the NCH, 106 homeless people in the US were beaten up for no reason in 2008, of which 27 were beaten to death. In most cases, the homeless people are attacked by groups of young people, who then circulate the videos on the Web.

Washington, D.C. has already extended its law on hate crimes to include attacks on homeless people, and the US Congress is currently studying a federal law on the subject.

Contributors

Michael Stoops

"Homeless people have become a minority that it is okay to hate"

Michael Stoops runs the NCH, an NGO in aid of homeless people based in Washington, D.C.

Job insecurity and misery affect 42% of the US population, but homeless people are a fully-fledged community. And like for blacks or gays in the past, a certain number of stereotypes persist. Homeless people have become a minority that it is tolerated to hate. Because if that happened to another minority, there would be an organised movement of protest.

In most cases, we’re talking about gratuitous and unpremeditated attacks. They are often carried out by groups of white adolescents, of all social backgrounds, and who are generally under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Homeless people represent an easy target since they cannot defend themselves, especially against a group of young people. And the attackers say to themselves that they don’t risk anything, that a homeless person will never file a complaint with the police. They are the ideal victim because they are not visible to society.

The real danger today is the escalation provoked by putting these “bum fight” videos on YouTube. When you type “bum” into a search engine, you get more results than for “fag” or “nigger”. That is perfectly significant of the extent of the phenomenon.

Some states (Maryland, Washington, D.C., Maine, California, and Florida) have decided to integrate these attacks into their laws against racist or discriminatory crimes. But [when] you see the outcry over the health reform championed by President Obama [which calls for better medical cover for the poorest - editor’s note], you say to yourself that the fate of homeless people in the US is far from being resolved."

Michael Stoops