It might find yourself costing lives.
Koreaboo
Three weeks have handed because the deadly crowd rush at Itaewon, Seoul ended up claiming 158 lives, with many extra severely wounded bodily and psychologically. While South Korean residents are nonetheless making an attempt to deal with the tragedy, a disturbing development surrounding the incident amongst faculty kids has left folks in shock.
The hashtags “Itaewon Game” and “Itaewon Crush Game” are on the rise on social media. In this “game,” a number of college students lie on prime of one another, forming a human stack, and the coed on the backside wins primarily based on how many individuals they’ll endure on prime of their physique.
Now, the sport itself has been round for years underneath completely different names, such because the “Hamburger Game,” the “Pass-out Challenge,” and the “Sandwich Game.” Now, some Korean schoolchildren appear to be in search of a twisted pleasure out of mimicking the group on Halloween that fell sufferer to the stampede by renaming it the “Itaewon Game.”
A excessive schooler going by the surname of Park from Seoul described the entire means of the sport. First, the scholars transfer all of the desks to the aspect, after which one child lies on the bottom on the classroom’s heart. After that, ten or extra folks will begin stacking themselves on prime, making an attempt to squish the particular person on the backside. Apparently, this recreation has develop into a frequent break-time exercise. But some college students are repelled by the idea, very similar to Park who stated, “I was really shocked to see that kids would play the ‘Hamburger Game’ and call it the Itaewon Crush Game.”
According to different scholar testimonies on-line, children are additionally imitating the tragedy throughout lunchtime. An on-line publish described, “When we are getting lunch, kids shout ‘Push, push’ and mimic the Itaewon tragedy. A group of kids picks on a student by crushing them with the ‘Hamburger Game’ to bully them.” Another scholar wrote, “Students at my school played it again today, and one boy said his back hurt, and he couldn’t breathe.”
The rising development of this Itaewon Game has shaken dad and mom, and plenty of worry this would possibly develop into a brand new and deadly approach of bullying in colleges. And this worry is sadly not groundless. In 2011, a center schooler was allegedly killed in the course of the hamburger recreation after being crushed by classmates who have been making an attempt to bully them.
The Korean Association of Teachers of Media Literacy (KATOM) has expressed concern over this situation.
If kids and youngsters play a recreation mimicking an incident, there’s a excessive danger that it’ll result in an enormous safety-related accident as they aren’t correctly conscious of the chance.
—KATOM
Some consultants really feel that younger college students want correct steerage on the right way to react to public tragedies of this scale.
As unfiltered, edited movies of the catastrophe are being shared on social media, there are nice considerations that college students might have a distorted notion…Although mass trauma is already being felt, it’s an enormous downside that no training is being offered on how college students ought to settle for and acknowledge disasters.
—Professor Yoo Hyun Jae, Department of Communications at Sogang University
Lim Myung Ho, a professor of psychology at Dankuk University, added that youngsters imitate all the pieces by nature. This conduct was as soon as mirrored within the “Suicide Game,” alternatively generally known as the “Blue Whale Challenge,” which plagued the globe round 2016. Professor Lim added that when such distorted ideas develop into tendencies, most youngsters observe them with out eager about the results.
Lee Chang Ho, a senior researcher on the National Youth Policy Institute, opined that college students should be taught vital considering to keep away from such perversions round a catastrophic occasion just like the Itaewon tragedy.
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