“Would you take a column on Baby Shark ? “, I asked the members of my team, at the newspaper, Thursday morning. ” Yes !!! », replied my boss, a young mother, with slightly suspicious enthusiasm. “At home,” she added, “it’s “the song of torture”…”
Posted at 7:40 p.m.
She didn’t think she was saying that well.
Baby Sharkan ultra-popular children’s song that went viral in 2016 thanks to a Korean entertainment company, it can be torture. Literally.
In Oklahoma last year, two prison guards pleaded guilty to cruelty charges against four inmates. They led them into an empty room, handcuffed, and forced them to listen Baby Shark at high volume, on loop, for four hours.
Imagine. Baby Shark dou dou dou dou dou dou dou…
At the top of your voice.
For four hours.
There are limits to human cruelty. A judge understood this well: he sentenced the two prison guards to community service, in addition to imposing two years’ probation on them, during which they would be prohibited from working in law enforcement.
In downtown Montreal, the Complexe Desjardins broadcasts Baby Shark at full volume to keep the homeless away from its fire escapes, my colleague Henri Ouellette-Vézina told us on Thursday.
Read the article “ Baby Shark to drive out the homeless”
Obviously we’re not talking about an Oklahoma prison here. Homeless people do not have to put themselves through this torture. They don’t have to stay.
The problem is that they don’t have that many places to go…
The dissuasion tactic adopted by the Complexe Desjardins has been widely criticized by the community, who consider it dehumanizing, as well as by the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, who described measures of this type as “questionable”.
We were already using “hostile architecture”, by installing segmented benches in parks and “anti-homeless peaks” along busy streets. Here we are transforming children’s music into a weapon against the most marginalized members of our society.
That said, the problem is not Complexe Desjardins. After all, it is not up to a shopping center to resolve a social crisis as serious as that of homelessness in Montreal. Like other public places in the city, it must deal as best it can with this worrying reality. He also employs two social workers for this purpose – and that is to his credit.
It is also too easy, not to say hypocritical, to blame the so-called selfishness of traders who proclaim “not in my backyard” at every turn. Those who tend to lecture others from the heights of their fine principles probably have no business cleaning up their own backyard of urine, feces, and dirty needles.
However, this story illustrates a broader societal problem.
A widespread lack of compassion for vulnerable human beings, who need a place to warm and sleep, like all human beings. There are at least 4,700 homeless people in Montreal. Winter is coming. We can’t just push them away and hope they go away.
“If we want to stop seeing homelessness, we should above all tackle the structural causes that create it. Otherwise, we are fueling a vicious circle that leads to precariousness,” Jérémie Lamarche, spokesperson for the Support Network for Single and Homeless People of Montreal, rightly recalled on Thursday.
We must provide more support to community organizations, redouble our efforts to treat mental health disorders, and find lasting solutions to the housing crisis. We must do more, and better, to resolve the problem at the source.
The Complexe Desjardins has not invented anything.
It was 7-Eleven convenience stores established in Canada that were the first to play loud music – Mozart and Beethoven – to repel teenagers who were loitering in their parking lots, in 1985.
Since then, many public places have sought to keep undesirables away in the same way. In Florida, city officials in West Palm Beach hope to discourage people from spending the night in a park by broadcasting Baby Shark.
In 2013, Britney Spears’ music was used by the British navy to scare away Somali pirates who were plaguing the east coast of Africa. As soon as they heard the first notes of Oops !… I Did It Again, the pirates fled, it seems, without asking for their rest.
Musical torture was also used to force Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican embassy, where the former Panama strongman was holed up in 1989.
And then, among the interrogation techniques in vogue at the American military base at Guantanámo Bay in the 2000s, there was that of breaking detainees’ ears with Enter Sandman by Metallica.
Fortunately for these poor inmates who Baby Shark did not yet exist. This song may have been listened to 15 billion (!!!) times on YouTube, but all young parents in the world know that there can be no worse torture than this perfidious earworm.
Baby Shark dou dou dou dou dou dou dou…
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