Gratuitous violence - Broadcast should be removed

IT is simply unconscionable that a reputable company such as Google, the internet server, should lend itself to the promotion of senseless violence and encourage impressionable young people to participate in it.

Yet, that is the only conclusion that can be reached when its subsidiary company YouTube, which it recently bought, is allowed to broadcast to the world the brutal assault of a young Dublin girl.

The recorded assault has been available for the past seven months on a worldwide basis and has been viewed by 8,000 people to date.

What they saw was the savage attack on the 16 year-old girl, launched by a youth just as young, during which her head narrowly missed a bollard.

The vicious attack, was recorded on something like a mobile phone, and accepted by YouTube and offered for the gratification of anybody around the world who chose to watch it.

Thousands of people did view, in graphic detail, the horrific attack and the exceptionally worrying aspect is that most of them were probably young.

That company was bought by Google just under a month ago and the first thing that it should have done was to remove this incredibly offensive material.

It is unthinkable that this example of grossness in public tastelessness should ever have been allowed on the internet, or anywhere else, in the first place.

A file on the assault itself may, or may not, have been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the gardaí yet, but that is not the issue here.

The worrying issue is that the internet channel is lending itself to gratuitous violence in this instance and the likelihood is that it could be instrumental in causing more.

The Government, or its agents, should be in a position to block the channel, if it refuses, or fails, to prevent this utterly moronic material from being broadcast.

For anybody to even vaguely suggest that such a course of action would be a form of censorship, would be to endorse this form of totally reprehensible voyeurism.