For the past couple of days I’ve been avoiding the almost viral video of a father beating his daughters after he found out that they had recorded themselves twerking and then uploaded the video onto YouTube. If you haven’t seen the video, I’m embedding it below; but beware, it’s graphic and a bit hard to stomach.
http://www.youtube.com/v/zebURzsvUN4?hl=en_US&version=3
Does this remind anyone else of slavery? It’s akin to something we saw in Django Unchained. It’s brutal. The only difference is that this man is related to the girls he’s beating. It’s honestly disgraceful.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t get spankings when I was a child. I’m not anti corporeal punishment. But there is such thing as taking said punishment too far. The girls were screaming and apologizing, pleading for their father to stop as he whipped them, angry overseer style. It’s too much. When I was growing up, my mother was the one who spanked my sister and I. It wasn’t until I got older that they did this because my parents didn’t want to send mixed messages. We tell girls and eventually women that you shouldn’t stay with a man who beats you; but if that man is your father, it’s okay. It’s counter intuitive. Furthermore, if you’ve really done your job as a parent, you shouldn’t still need to beat your children as preteens. There are more effective punishments. Something like your child posting their twerking videos should require a conversation about respectability and standards not a beating. Because when these girls and eventually women are out of your care, what is to keep them from wyling out when you’re not physically there to beat them? (How many girls raised in overly strict homes only to get to college and completely lost their minds?)
And not only was the force of the beating too much, the most disgusting thing about all of this is that it was uploaded on YouTube for the world to see. This father sounds like a hypocrite to me. You punish your children from trying to get a little shine on YouTube and then turn around and upload a video of your own. For what? To embarrass them? To highlight yourself as a concerned father who goes to great lengths for his children? I don’t get it. The advent of social media has shown us that everyone doesn’t know what to do with internet access. Your daughters are still being highlighted in a way that is much more embarrassing than a twerk video would have been. Maybe that was the goal. And if that was the plan, it just might backfire. I’m sure this type of beating violates some type of Child Protective Services law. If his daughters or someone who knows the family decides to report this, this father could be taken away from the daughters for whom he was so “concerned.”
What do you think about this video? Did the father take it too far? Should he have uploaded the video?
