'Bum fight' videos and games have created a sickening culture that dehumanises and enables violence against the homeless.If you'd like some more laughs at the expense of "bums" then log on to www.bumrise.com, which proudly boasts being the 2008 browser game of the year with more than 3 million players. Here, you can establish your bum username, and then he – it's nearly always he – can collect cans or pickpocket pedestrians for money, which can be used to buy weapons to attack other homeless people. As one 10-year-old – who became a former player when he explained the purpose of the game to his dad – put it: "You are supposed to get in fights, beg for money and drink beer – to get more points!"
This might meet some people's definition of innocent fun (though not anyone I hope to know) until you read the 11th annual report released this week by the National Coalition for the Homeless, which documents over 1,000 vicious assaults on homeless persons. Of these attacks, 78% of which were carried out by males under the age of 25, the very demographic which is targeted by the creators of bumfight and bumrise and TV shows like South Park or American Dad where homeless people are continually portrayed, in the words of the report, as "contagious, walking dead zombies capable of only panhandling and fighting".
In 2009 alone, the report documents a total of 117 attacks on homeless people by non-homeless perpetrators: 43 of the attacks were fatal, and almost half of them were carried out by males under 20 years old. Some of the "highlights" of these attacks include a homeless man being beaten to death with a rock, a homeless man being doused with lighter fuel and set on fire by four teenagers, and a homeless man attacked by a hatchet-wielding youth.
One teenager, Jeffrey Spurgeon, who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a homeless man, claimed to have watched the bum fight videos hundreds of times. A group of pre-teens in Philadelphia created a game called "Catch and Wreck", the purpose of which is to rob and stomp on adults they believe to be homeless. Two of their victims ended up in hospital with footprints on the back of their heads and torsos. One victim remains in intensive care after suffering a heart attack as a result of the attack. When the kids were questioned by police, they described the game as "something stupid we do for fun".
Though it's impossible to measure any direct correlation between what the report describes as the "multimedia exploitation of homeless people" and the rising number of deadly and viscous attacks, clearly some impressionable young people are getting the message loud and clear that homeless people are a legitimate (and easy) target.
Obviously, there is an enormous need to raise awareness about how and why people fall into homelessness. There are currently around 3.5 million homeless Americans, many of whom are in this predicament because they became ill, lost a job or their job doesn't pay enough to cover market rents. They have enough to be getting on with, without being stereotyped as losers and degenerates.
The dictionary definition of a "bum", for example, is "an incompetent person; of poor, wretched or miserable quality; worthless". We should stop using that word, for starters.
Then, the bum fights videos should be banned for sale in the US, as they have been in the Canada, New Zealand and the UK, and more parents should follow the example of the father of the 10-year-old Bumrise enthusiast; he started a Facebook group called "Parents Against Bumrise", which is dedicated to having the game taken off the internet because of its negative depiction of homeless people.
Crimes against the homeless should also be officially acknowledged as hate crimes. Fatal assaults on the homeless more than double the total number of hate crime homicides against all other current protected classes combined, yet in the majority of states, these attacks and murders are not classified as hate crimes. A Hate Crimes Against Homeless bill has been introduced in congress by Senator Benjamin L Cardin, of Maryland, to "help determine what, if any, resources and tools are needed by local communities and law enforcement to protect our (homeless) citizens from such senseless, bias-motivated violence". Let's hope it passes.
The Guardian
