jbobsully11 wrote:Oh, for f... They’re
back.
Now, though, Mike Martin is already back, and he’s posting more “prank” videos under the name FamilyOFive. A YouTuber known as Amanda The Jedi broke this all down in a video of her own (via Reddit), and she points out that the Martins are still encouraging the three kids to fight and scream as some kind of sick joke. She says some of the new videos involve making jokes at the expense of the parents, which is an improvement, but a lot of it still centers around the kids getting embarrassed or injured.
The Daily Dot dug into the FamilyOFive channel a bit more, noting that there’s one video where Mike Martin “berates his son for not holding the camera steady while he’s yelling” and another shows one of the kids with “a bruise under his eye” that he says came from falling off of his bed. Both The Daily Dot and Amanda The Jedi expressed some surprise that the Martins are able to go right back to doing this even while under probation, but it evidently hasn’t stopped them.
Obviously, kids do bruise themselves accidentally sometimes--heck, my sister often acted like she had a death wish as a child. Still, given the family's history I hope CPS is following up to make sure that's what happened.
Beyond that, though, this sounds a lot like the ever-popular "but it's okay if I just do it
a little bit, right?" response, a classic bit of "bargaining" that people go through when they quit a bad habit. In addicts, this sounds like a guy saying "I don't need to quit drinking, I just need to cut back" after alcohol addiction costs him his job and gets him convicted for DUI. On the one hand, it's a classic example of backsliding, but on the other the mere fact that they're trying to "bargain" like this ("it's okay if we prank ourselves too and don't get
too mean, right?") does indicate recognition that there's a problem and an attempt to grapple with it. Not ideal, but it is a stage people go through while making changes like this, and it is an improvement over the Brock Turners of the world who don't even get that far.
I can understand why YouTube canceled their account--at some point it becomes a business problem for them if they're perceived to be doing nothing. However, I think it was the wrong move, because these videos provide valuable information to the public about what's going on in the household. Not only can they pass that information to authorities (as was done the first time around), they can also potentially lean on said authorities to take actual action, often a problem in child-welfare cases unless the parent is doing
this to their kid on a regular basis. If they're assuming that the parents will stop the show once the lights go out (the way trolls stop if you ignore them) their response might make sense for the children's welfare, but I'm skeptical of that premise.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn