If you know, you are responsible

In addition to being a chronic news watcher/reader/monitor, I am a hopeless Buzzfeed addict. Whether its an "LOL," "Win," "Cute," "Trashy," "OMG," "WTF," or "Fail" story I am pretty much 9 of 10 times going to click on it. This past week I came across an story titled, "Alleged Sexual Assault That Happened On A Sidewalk DUring Ohio University;s Homecoming Was Live-Tweeted." So, of course, I clicked on it. I am not exactly sure what I expected to come across, but let me just say this, the content reported in the article catalogs about some of the most despicable and heinous acts by human beings that I have come across in a very, very long time. Just take a look for yourself...  Pure Disgust 

Ohio University Police Chief Andrew Powers made a statement to The Post, Ohio University's student paper, conveying his own personal concerns, and I could not agree more. “What is more disturbing are the social implications of what it means for someone to have been standing there watching this thing happen, videotaping it with their phone instead of getting involved and trying to help the victim."My problem with our society today is that everything is seen as an opportunity for personal exposure and/or gain, and is very rarely ever seen simply as an opportunity to help. The thing is, no one knew whether this was, in fact, an assault or rather just two people getting a little freaky. The people who stood just feet away and held up their phones had absolutely no clue as to if it was consensual or not, yet they still chose to record the moment and circulate it via mass media for pure entertainment and "props" before, if even at all, reporting it to the authorities. Our society has normalized this behavior. I guarantee that the followers of the tweeters of the video and pictures retweeted, responded, and/or shared the documentation of the public act. The responders should be held just as accountable as the original distributors and circulators. If no one retweeted, talked about (as entertainment), or spread the pictures around, then the next time the monsters responsible for the original delivery of this now viral event came across a similarly erratic event, maybe they would think twice about turning it into personal amusement and entertainment.