A Boiling Pot of Water in the Face and Teen Suicide: Are Teen Kids Going Crazy For Facebook?
Written by Craig Rogers, Posted on , in Section Embracing Our Uniqueness
After holding his female classmate and her mother hostage, a teen boy throws boiling water on her for un-friending him on facebook. The boy had allegedly come to the girl’s house, looking for his lost ID card in Muzaffarpur, India. This didn’t seem suspicious because the girl’s father, a local teacher, had been tutoring the boy at their home.
"I accepted his (Facebook) friend request a year ago because I found him decent then," she said in her statement. "But of late he had become abusive and so I 'unfriended' him last week." As reported by Neetzan Zimmerman at gawker.com.
As he entered the home of the victim, he locked her and her mother in a room and then continued to boil a pot of water in the kitchen. He then re-entered the room and poured the boiling water on the girl's face causing severe burns to her right cheek and neck.
The suspect, identified as Yudishsthir Yadav, fled the scene and has yet to be found by authorities.
The Role of Social Media For Teens in India -- Is It Possible That This Fanatic Behavior Could Strike Closer To Home?
In India, Facebook is quickly becoming the only means of communication among teens, and as a result more and more tragic news stories are involving young Indian Facebook users.
October last year the Indo-Asian News Service reported a story that a 17-year-old female from Parbhani commited suicide after her parents banned her from the social network.
People are becoming more and more reliant on social media as a means to socialize between friends. It might be difficult to understand why this keeps happening and we may tend to want to blame Facebook, Google+ or other social media as the cause.
But being unfriended could be seen the same as a friend or acquaintance refusing to notice your existence. Losing a friend or not being able to talk to your friends can be very hard emotionally and even more so for young people. This can influence them to harm themselves or others as a way of acting out emotionally.
As social media use is on the rise, especially among our youth, we can only expect to see more cases of this kind of horrific event happening. In order to stem acts of what can only be characterized as absurd and tragic, we have to make strides toward establishing positive values in teens. Empathy and understanding along with recognizing that what happens on social media is often not worth carrying over into the real world could have helped prevent this tragedy.
