The Endangered Child: Choking and Fainting Games in the Online Underground of Youtube
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Abstract
In 1987, a nine-year-old boy named Derek told a student fieldworker in Binghamton, New York, that he and his friends had taken turns putting a rope around their necks and pulling it tight, to see “who [could] choke himself the longest” (Tucker 2008, 79). Having expected to hear Derek speak about active but not life-threatening games, the student felt shocked and concerned. I also felt worried about Derek but knew that such games had been going on for years in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the late 1980s, choking and fainting games, as well as other games involving breath control, were not very familiar to the public. Iona and Peter Opie had identified fainting games as “misplaced audacity” in their book Children’s Games of Street and Playground (1969, 273-74), but their documentation of the games had not caused widespread concern. Children and adolescents had identified choking and fainting games by so many different names (including Pass Out, Space Monkey, California Dreaming, Purple Dragon, and the Gasp Game), that it was hard for adults to identify the games’ purpose. Because of the childhood underground — a network of young people that adults did not usually enter — choking and fainting games took place in relative obscurity until the early twenty-first century, when media reports of accidental deaths of game-players became common.
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