HOUSEHOLD names such as Pepsi, Starbucks and Sony PlayStation are benefiting from advertisements next to internet footage of children as young as 10 beating each other up in organised fights.
The brawls, often planned using social networking websites such as Facebook, take place in front of crowds in parks, alleys and youth club car parks.
They are filmed on mobile phones and the footage put on video websites such as YouTube as well as more specialised sites such as streetfightvidz.com and nothingtoxic.com.
Last week a video on streefightvidz.com showed two boys in an alley in Leeds smashing each other’s faces so badly that one fell to the ground spattered in blood to cheers from a crowd. Next to the footage was an advert inviting viewers to “Win £1,000 with your video clips & show us how much you love Pepsi”.
The cola manufacturer said this weekend that it did not condone violent websites and would have the advert removed. It had been unaware of the advert’s appearance on the fight website because it had paid a third party to place its internet commercials.
In a fight in Hackney, east London, shown on the same site, a teenager is beaten so hard a tooth falls out. The video appears alongside an advert reading: “Buy street fight videos on eBay”.
A spokesman for the auction website said the advert, placed by an agency, “fell well short of the standards we expect”.
Adverts for other companies including Starbucks, PlayStation, Apple iPod and Ann Summers, the adult toys retailer, have all appeared next to fight videos, many involving British children. All the companies said they were concerned about the adverts’ placing, adding that outside agencies were responsible for the specific sites chosen for adverts.
The organised punch-ups are often referred to as fight clubs, after the 1999 film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt. Teenagers and children use social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo to arrange the fights.
One posting by a teenager on Facebook read: “I want to fight a chav . . . if anyone is up for it I will be in London. Hope to make some money out of it as well.”
Often the fights do not stop until the victim has been left unconscious, bloodied or with broken bones. Bets are sometimes placed on the outcome.
One former participant in fight clubs, a 19-year-old youth worker from Surrey who declined to be named, described how he had set up a fight club at a local youth centre. “It was better than going out in the streets and beating someone up,” he said. “People would come out a bit bloody but mostly it was for fun, though the atmosphere could be aggressive.
“Many of us were part of a happy-clappy church community which had no way of relating to our problems. The fights were a way of channelling our anger. We followed the rules of [the film] Fight Club. No weapons and no talking about the club. We used the internet to tell each other when the fights were on and wrote our messages in code so the moderators couldn’t find us.” Some of the advertisements that appear next to fight footage are placed direct by companies. Others are placed when advertisers pay for automated programs such as AdSense, run by Google, to trawl the internet and choose sites where the logos appear.
Google said: “When we find or are made aware of a site that violates our policies we review the site quickly and remove the publisher from AdSense if necessary.”
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said that while consensual fighting was not always illegal, internet fight clubs were a “growing problem and a real cause for concern”.
Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness at the NSPCC said: “It is not okay in the real world to provide an open forum for people who conspire to cause harm and violence. It should be the same in the online world.”
Websites contacted this weekend said that while they regularly screened content and removed offensive material, they could not exercise complete control over what was posted.
It's pathetic! No wonder we end up with what happened last week with Alad.
