Back in our day, if someone in the media cried "Fight Club," then you'd get a Rikers Island Fight Club or a Fourth Grade Fight Club (ugh). But nowadays, people yell "Fight Club" and all you get is a Facebook page where high schoolers upload random fight videos. That's basically what's happened at Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey, as school officials have been investigating "an apparent fight club" which, it turns out, isn't actually a fight club. "At this time, it appears random fights between students with no association to each other are being filmed and placed on this site," said Bridgewater Township Police Chief Richard Borden. "This does not appear to be an organized group of individuals that go to a predetermined location and fight."
The Facebook page, called BRHS Fights, was started March 14, and invited users to submit fight videos—at one point, they collected five videos of fights inside and outside the school building. Headlines on the videos included, “after 4th period cat fight in HD thanks to anonymous provider,” “period 5th lunch fight,” “after school fight,” and “don’t steal shoes.” The videos have since been removed.
"Since March 1, the high school has had 7 fights, an unusual number in such a short time span," Michael Schilder, superintendent of the Bridgewater-Raritan Regional School District, said in a letter sent to NJ.com. "Prior to March 1, there were 5 fights since September. The average number of fights in any given school year is between 20 and 25."
So this past week, school officials and local police have been "investigating" the Facebook page to determine how it was related to this outburst of fighting—only to conclude that it is just a reaction to the fighting, and not the cause of the upswing. Nevertheless, Bridgewater Police released a statement this afternoon that said the department "does not want students being encouraged to fight just for the sole purpose of having the encounter posted on Facebook. As with any fight or assault in a school setting that warrants a police investigation a determination is made if there was a clear-cut aggressor and if so legal ramifications will be explored against the individual(s)."
Students are debating whether the videos constitute bullying or not both on the page and in the media: “I can see it as a bullying page, because I can see the next day someone walking into school saying, ‘I saw you on Facebook. I saw you got beat up on Facebook. You suck at fighting,’ and if that happened to me I would get hurt,” said Bridgewater-Raritan sophomore Kayla Brothers told CBS. “I would feel you could never show your face again at school.”
"Just read the CBS article and I couldn't disagree more," Tim Zelinski wrote on the Facebook page. "This page gives people a reason to laugh at those who get into these lame-ass fights, which should show them that getting into fights is pretty stupid. If we can deride fights to being "over the pants hand jobs", I think we've done a good deed.
David Gershaw added:
I like how Fox news and other news outlets are making this out to be a bad thing, yet they publicize it. As for whether its newsworthy or appalling, we had the same fight issues my school back in the day. The only difference is that these fortunate youngsters have camera phones, facebook, and youtube to publish their craft. It builds character. Let them be. For those who can't handle the heat, stay away from the crowd and get to class.
As for the person who started the page, they wrote in a post today: "I would rather stay anonymous then be known as the idiot who got caught."
