Somebody done you wrong? Private justice on SNS here to stay

Maybe you’ve seen this: a video circulating online showing vicious bullying by classmates of a Tochigi Prefecture senior high school boy. Shocked and horrified viewers multiplied as word got around. Outrage mounted. So this is what goes on behind the coverups, the denials, the inaction of schools, school boards and local governments. But here it was, live, living, undeniable, in plain public view. The school in question called a parents’ meeting. The school board issued an apology. Action was taken, justice was served – not by “the system” but rather behind the system’s back. The Net is open to all. Got a grievance? Air it here.

Another time and place had another name for this kind of thing: “vigilante justice.” It produced horrible excesses, lynching most notoriously. Might something similar happen here and now? It might, Spa (Feb 3) admits, but inclines all the same towards positive thinking.

The Tochigi video sparked (as so many things do) a boom. Similar ones followed in quick succession. One in Kumamoto led to the arrest of the junior high school bully. Another in Kochi starred a senior high school baseball coach dressing down three of his players: “Scum! I’ll kill you!” He was “disciplined.”

The Tochigi video that started it all owes its initial popularity to online “influencer” Masao Mado, author of a novel titled “Deathdol Note” (sic), himself a former bullying victim who knows firsthand the pain of the unredressed grievance. “I wanted to do something,” he tells Spa. “I realize it’s ‘private justice,’ but nothing less will get grownups moving.” Coverup seems the first impulse. Episodes like these can shred a school’s reputation.

His reward – besides grownups in motion, rewarding enough – is the 600-odd messages he claims to receive daily, expressions of support and gratitude. Thanks to him, they tell him, “The bully apologized to me;” “My tormentors leave me alone now;” “My teachers finally started taking me seriously.”

Just one thing, Mado warns: some bullies, far from apologizing, may seek revenge. One likes to think of children as innocent by nature, but some get warped early and are perhaps the more dangerous for being children, thus innocent of adult restraint. “Consult grownups before going public,” he advises. “Have your recorded evidence ready to show school authorities or police. If they still do nothing, send your material to us” – the “influencing” committee grouped around him. They’ll “influence” its online circulation for you.

Mado raises, in passing, a key question: Is “private justice” justice? In the examples given here, yes. Always? The word “vigilante,” derived from the Spanish word for watchman, acquired currency in the American frontier of the 19th century, the fabled “wild west,” populated by rough, vagrant spirits too proud, impatient and well-armed to defer to established legal authority – when such existed, as it rarely did. They avenged offenses real and imagined on their own, in their own way, murderously more often than not. Sometimes it wasn’t even a matter of offense, merely of personal dislike or greed or racial prejudice, blacks being especially vulnerable. So we, reading Spa and Mado and congratulating victims for their triumph over bullies and indifferent authorities, need a reminder, perhaps, of the danger involved: of convicting possibly innocent people without trial, of punishing offenders out of proportion to the offense (public exposure can do incalculable damage), and of stimulating fake victimhood as a means of settling personal grudges.

Both Spa and Mado are alert to this, and advise (and Mado claims to exercise) extreme caution in exacting “private justice.” But it’s here to stay, fruit ultimately of society’s failure to adequately address a long-festering bullying problem. Maybe now it wishes it had.