New Inspirational Thrills

"It's a new sort of variable in our trying to understand young people and criminal behaviours and violent behaviours."  Raymond Corrado, criminologist, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Home made clips playing out on YouTube, popular with the younger set.  A new Canadian study suggests an already serious arson problem in society among young people is becoming a popular new past time for bored youth.  The report states a growing number of kids in the arson prevention program for children at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health report having watched videos.

They're being compared, these short and graphic videos of kids spraying accelerants on one another, then lighting matches, to the phenomenon of online recordings of fights and other types of violence that have also been finding large audiences among young people. Causing those who work with problem kids to be concerned about a "contamination" effect.

Scientists have recently published a paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health.  Juvenile fire settings and arson are becoming a growing problem in society.  Little reported on, but the results causing great harm to those involved and by extension society at large.  Fires deliberately set in places of residence that cause injury and death.

These, apart from the fires set by young and curious kids under age six playing with matches and lighters, unobserved by care-tenders, and representing in part 'normal' dangerous types of activities that curious young children have always engaged in.  These are different.

American authorities claim child fire starters to be behind 56,300 of blazes reported to American fire departments from 2005 to 2009.  Those fires resulted in 110 civilian deaths, 880 injuries and $268-million in property damage.  Half of the children were five years old or younger, as reported by the Juvenile Fire Starter Intervention Program located in Illinois.

Children over five years of age often act out as a result of emotional or mental disturbances.  These are children who are often deleteriously impacted in their lives as a result of parental divorce, death or innumerable crises disrupting their lives.  The Toronto authors of the article published in the Journal of Adolescent Health conducted an on-line search.

"Fire, fun" turned up 27,200 clips for them to peruse, 50 of which they examined closely.  Three quarters of those were comprised of "completely inappropriate" fire-related behaviours.  Such as a video with boys spraying an aerosol accelerant on their clothing; the crotch of one boy; and then setting their clothing afire. 

In 16% of the clips, someone was set on fire; 10% resulting in suspected injuries.

The popularity of the videos speak for themselves; one third viewed over ten thousand times, 8% with over 100,000 hits.  So, where is parental oversight?  "It's just brought it more out in the open, more people share it whereas when I was a kid, if someone did something bad, it was a very small group that saw it", explained chief of the Langley Township fire department in B.C.

"You worry about the ones who are on the borderline.  Does this inspire them?"