Why teens shoot video of violence instead of helping

The incendiary trend of videotaped violence going viral on social media has raised the question: Why isn’t anyone helping?

On Long Island on Monday, a group of teens filmed 16-year-old Khaseen Morris being beaten in a strip-mall parking lot. Khaseen later died at the hospital. The young bystanders “videoed his death instead of helping him,” Detective Lt. Stephen Fitzpatrick said in a press conference Tuesday.

Experts say the problem is a relatively new one, which could have consequences on the teens’ mental health for the rest of their lives.

“It’s a new frontier,” Dr. Victor Fornari, chief of child and adolescent psychology at Northwell Health, tells The Post. “This is a phenomenon that can only occur during the time of the smartphone.”

The Morris case is the latest in what appears to be a growing issue of bystanders recording tragic incidents instead of stepping in to help.

In August, Canadian teens filmed a 14-year-old dying of a drug overdose at a skate park and left him to die. In 2017, five Florida teens filmed and mocked a man drowning in a pond instead of calling for help.

Fornari says there may be a link between posting on social media and teens wanting “widespread attention.”

“They want to know how many hits they get, how many people viewed it,” Fornari says.

So what would compel someone to film a violent encounter rather than help? For teens, it often comes down to not necessarily knowing the right thing to do, says Dr. Linda Charmaraman, director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley College.

“Adolescent brains are still developing — things like impulse control and moral development, and sometimes, they may not even think what’s happening is real,” says Charmaraman, who has studied how social media affects teen brains.

“People are becoming desensitized,” she adds. “We hear and see horrible things every day now on social media and the news.”

Charmaraman adds that another reason people may instinctively grab their phones to film — rather than help or call authorities — is out of fear of both personal harm and retaliation from other students for butting in.

But Fornari warns that this phenomenon could impact children for years to come, resulting in “stress disorders, PTSD, and the future development of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.”

“Youth at this age are impressionable,” Fornari says. “Witnessing and watching this kind of violence online can imprint on their thoughts and cause them significant disturbance in the months following the events and throughout life.”

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