It Is Insensitive To Share Kandivali Girl’s Suicide Video

People are sharing a 14-year-old Mumbai girl’s suicide video on social media today,w ithout any qualms. It exposes the increasing insensitivity among us as a society, where gore and brutality are nothing more than a click bait. As per a report in The Hindustan Times, the 9^th standard student committed suicide by jumping from the eighth floor of a housing society in Kandivali (east) on June 28 evening. A local resident recorded the video of the incident and shared it on social media. While he can be heard shouting at her to stop, he also zooms in on the girl to get a clearer shot.

The video went viral by Friday afternoon, with people sharing it on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. How doesn’t it bother people, that it is a video of a girl ending her life, that they are sharing? Is merely labelling it shocking or saddening enough? Isn’t it insensitive of them to not grant this poor girl some dignity in her death?

Our obsession with sharing viral and graphic content has been on an alarming rise since technology conceived social media and put smartphones in our hands. Perhaps it has also killed the empathy centre in our brains

Has social media made us insensitive sensationalists?

So in modern times, when you see someone standing on the sill of a high-rise apartment, about to end his or her life, you don’t think of ways to preventing the suicide. You mindlessly reach for your smartphone and think of ways to get a better angle to shoot the incident. Death by accident or suicide, mammoth outbreaks of fire, freak cases and even molestation are not jarring incidents which must invoke humanity, pain and concern in us, anymore. They are just a golden chance to capture a viral video and have your 15 minutes of fame.

But the blame of insensitivity doesn’t just lie with those who shoot such videos. Those who share them on social media are equally heartless. Would these people have still shared that video, had the girl been a part to their family? Everyone who is sharing that video with their friends and WhatsApp groups should stop and ask that question to themselves.

This is not an isolated incident of sharing graphic content on social media. When a small plane crashed in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, on Thursday, people swarmed the crash site to capture images of the wreckage and shared it on Twitter

Every few days, one comes across a video of gruesome death or numbing mishaps, where people either get hurt badly or lose their lives. People keep forwarding them without thinking how morbid it is to be sharing someone’s last moments.

It is alarming how violence or graphic content is not bothersome anymore, neither to adults nor children. I saw a 14-year-old (ironically the same age as the deceased girl) talking about the video with a few grown up men yesterday evening. What disturbed me, was that there was no hint of concern in their voices. There was this indescribable thrill in their voice, at having viewed it. I cannot label it as excitement, but more like amusement.

Where is our collective social psych headed, if death is amusing these days? It’s not late just yet. Please find some empathy in the nook of your hearts and think about the pain parents of this child must be feeling. How cruel it is to those left behind to find the last moments of their loved ones being circulated around social media, just for some likes. No one would like to be in their place. No one should be.

Picture Credit: NY Times

Also Read: How Extensive Use Of Social Media Is Affecting Mental Health

Yamini Pustake Bhalerao is a writer with the SheThePeople team, in the Opinions section.  The views expressed are the author’s own