Oh, look, everyone, the panic attack of the "Knockout game" is back.
Media reports of the so-called "knockout game" date back at least a decade and persist despite experts debunking it as not a coherent trend.
www.businessinsider.com
If the so-called "knockout game" may sound familiar, it's because tabloids and right-wing media over the years have repeatedly promoted the notion of young people engaged in a hyper-violent and widespread trend. The reality, as law enforcement officials and researchers have documented in the past, is that the "game" is largely an urban myth and buzzword that media have used as a catchall for random assaults.
Even after many have
debunked the "trend" as mostly unrelated incidents with no connection to any online challenge or game, reports attributing the crimes to the "knockout game" have persisted. The phrase also has a racially-motivated history — often deployed to describe young Black people committing assaults on white people, and
experts say it has been used to stoke moral panic and play into
racist rhetoric.
There's currently no documented evidence that the 21-year-old suspect in New York this week was participating in a game when he allegedly struck the man, who survived the attack. And although various incarnations of individual challenges to commit assaults have existed over the years, these have always been rare and fringe activities compared with the media attention that they receive.
Fear surrounding variations of the purported "knockout game" have existed in some form since at least the 1990s, Chris Ferguson, a Professor of Psychology at Stetson University, told Insider.
