MAY 31 — “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

Some 13-year-old girls did something horrible recently.

They choked a classmate with their school ties, hit her repeatedly, laughed at her, called her names, and, for a grand finale, cut off her hair with scissors.

They also videotaped the entire episode, blogged about it, and posted the video on YouTube. They even bothered to put in background music and ask the viewer at the end if they liked the video.

The online community went berserk. Within hours, the video had gone viral. People found the culprits’ Facebook accounts, blogs, names, and the school where the incident had taken place. While all that was going on, frightened and heartsick at what had occurred and with nowhere else to go, the victim’s parents lodged a police report.

The bullies were then caught, suspended from school for two weeks and asked to apologise to the victim.

If the online community had been berserk before, it was nothing compared to the subsequent uproar when the plan of action was revealed. Many called for the expulsion of the bullies. Others were shocked that no rehabilitation or counselling was necessary for these girls who had clearly overstepped many boundaries.

Shock was the general underlying theme of the entire incident, many calling the suspension a “holiday” and questioning the efficacy of the chosen punishment. The recurring question was “How could this happen?”

How indeed?

Literati amongst the public would probably recognise the quote at the beginning of this article to have come from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”. The book’s basic premise surrounds a group of English schoolboys who are marooned on an island whilst being evacuated to safety during a war.

The boys try to establish order amongst themselves and survive until help arrives, with disastrous results. The quote is by the “beast” that the boys believe has been roaming the island tells one of the boys, explaining that hunting and killing it would not stop the madness that the beast’s presence has caused, and that the true enemy lies within the boys themselves.

And it is true that younger children are less inhibited by the norms and rules that have held together modern society as we know it — perhaps due to the genetic remnants of our ancient predatory lifestyle that codes for impulsive acts of self preservation against any perceived threat; or because they simply don’t know any better.

I suppose you could say that one of the major themes of Golding’s novel was the concept that human beings are born “wild”, and as we grow up we are “tamed” by the civilised environment in which we now all co-exist — or “untamed” by the removal of said civilised environment.

So these teenage girls — a case of bad “taming”?

One of the trends in the comments in response to the aforementioned video clip pointed out that the bullies weren’t completely to blame for what had happened; turning the lens onto the issue of flawed parenting.

In fact one of the parents admitted that she “did not teach (her child) well” in a follow-up article published in The Star. Whether or not this was true she now knows that her style of parenting could have perhaps done with some adjustments.

But any mom or dad can tell you that parenting a child is extremely difficult, and there is no hard and fast way to get it done properly. Perhaps some steps need to be taken to make support in parenting more freely available and acceptable to Malaysian parents, and maybe then the bringing up process could be a lot less heavy on their shoulders.

Another of the speculated reasons why bullying is becoming so much more prevalent and severe these days is that the pre-visualised utopia of civic responsibility and social morality is now breaking down.

The world is not perfect, there is no such thing as the tooth fairy, and children are facing the harsh realities of life from a progressively younger age. Violence is better tolerated — and I think a good illustration to this statement is that amongst the bestselling games for Microsoft’s Xbox360 game consoles are “Call of Duty — Modern Warfare 2” and “Gears of War”.

Opinion is everywhere. People are encouraged to speak and act freely, but the troubles stem from just how easy it is for people to do this. If you harbour unpleasant thoughts about someone, it just takes five seconds of impulsive anger to post a status on Facebook and have the whole world know about it.

If instead of walking away from a fight you turn around and say something sharp to the other person then you could be starting a chronic feud. Let’s not make this article rated PG (Parental Guidance required) by describing what could happen if you were to get physical with the unleashing of your inner beast.

It is a lot harder to take things back now. Relationships have become a lot more complicated. And we all quite frequently encounter situations where the civilised environment is removed and it takes a whole lot of conditioning to be able to resist losing control.

So condition society. Make role models more responsible. Encourage a “healthier” media. Provide support and counselling for people of all ages who are in need of advice and a helping hand. Pay more attention to regulating the Internet for reported content. I could go on and on.

The point of this article was to demonstrate that these girls are not the only bullies out there, and there are many reasons underlying this behaviour. Expelling these girls from school and thus denying them an education, then closing the newspaper or changing the channel isn’t going to make the schools any safer or make the phenomena of bullying any less common.

It is our prerogative to make changes in other ways to nip the problem at the bud for our sake as well as the future generations’, and to do this whilst all the while keeping a firm hold on our inner beasts.

“We need more humanity, more care, more love. There are those who expect a political system to produce that; and others who expect the love to produce the system. My own faith is that the truth of the future lies between the two and we shall behave humanly and a bit humanely, stumbling along, haphazardly generous and gallant, foolishly and meanly wise until the rape of our planet is seen to be the preposterous folly that it is.” — William Golding, Nobel Lecture, Dec ember 7, 1983

* Angeline is a medical undergraduate at the University of Bristol.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.