II. Case Analysis A.

The Rage and Uproar of the Public When the video of a Chinese woman, crushing three rabbits with her stiletto heels, had gone viral on social networking websites, China Press reported that, several months after it had first surfaced on the Internet last 2010, the six-minute video had so far had 37,221 shares on Facebook. It was the same with the video that surfaced last 2013, showing three Filipinas stomping on a puppy to death with their bare feet, it had made rounds on social media websites, had caught the attention of various animal rights groups, and eventually the majority of the Philippine population who had seen the incident on national news programs. In this sense, it can be safely assumed that the said videos had made thousands of people condemn the vicious acts and called for the people involved in the grisly videos to be identified. These incidents had drawn the ire of the public, causing countless online reactions to erupt on various social networks. An example of this is by Kevin Wendt, a Facebook user, who suggests a more gruesome form of retaliation towards the three Filipinas: At first cut all their toes, after that all their fingers, take a gun, shoot [them] in the left knee, after that in the right. Follow up with their elbows. Then let them suffer for hours. Maybe then they [would] realize what they did to [the] poor animal Another cybercitizen, Jomar Dela Cruz, suggests that those who were part in the making of the videos were simply trying to attract attention, even adding that they were out of their minds. These reactions that consist mainly of hatred and rage can be understood and justified by anyone, considering the fact that the issue involved animal cruelty. But many would also believe this as an isolated incident, and that the girls in the videos have psychological problems, which is not entirely true. Because behind these girls, these crush videos, is an entire interest group, an interest group that caters to customers who have a specific sexual fetish, a crush fetish. And including the other girls that appeared in the video, this interest group are in business of abusing to death little animals for the sake of profit.

But yet again, people would not be ready to believe this, due to the probability that they do not know the presence of such fetish. Some might ask who in the right mind would buy and enjoy a video of an animal being abused. Crush fetish, compared to other paraphilias like pedophilia and other common and harmless fetishes, is so limited in its exposure and not enough information is made available to the public that the mere existence of such a thing often shocks people who were unaware of it. Needless to say, no matter how few are aware of this issue, crush videos are looming in the Worldwide Web and those who patronize these, exist among us. For the majority of people, its difficult to understand this fetish, but a small segment of the population is actually sexually aroused by watching these videos. B. Sexual Sadism According to Dr. Volkan, professor of the Psychology Program at the California State University, crush videos are sexual in nature and that those who watch crush videos do so to obtain sexual gratification. The desire to see animals crushed to death by the fetish object (foot or shoe) may be explained in terms of sexual sadism and masochism. Sexual sadism is where sexual gratification is achieved through the fantasy of harming a partner or as a consequence of directly subjecting the partner to pain and humiliation. Typically, sexual sadism involves a human partner. In the case of crush videos, the partner is an animal. The animals used for sadistic purposes range from insects to larger mammals such as dogs. Many crush videos use small mammals such as mice, rats, puppies and kittens but regardless of the victim, the cause and purpose of the action appear to be the same. It should also be mentioned that those involved in the creation and distribution of crush videos may themselves be sadists. It should be noted that there is a well-established relationship between animal sadism, antisocial personality disorder, which used to be called sociopathy, and violent crime. Sadistic acts perpetrated against animals may be an important indicator of someone who is capable of violent crime against human beings.

C. Sexual Masochism This is the feeling of sexual arousal or excitement resulting from receiving pain, suffering, or humiliation. The pain, suffering, or humiliation is real and not imagined and can be physical or psychological in nature. Volkan said, many who are involved in crush paraphilias take sexual pleasure in being crushed, squashed, or being put under pressure. Masochists often suffer from personality disorders in which they are only able to experience feelings in the context of situations where they are hurt or in pain. These people need to surrender their needs and identity and experience extremely disturbing things to feel that they exist and to feel pleasure. Masochism in which a person receives sexual gratification from being crushed has been reported in academic literature, but such reports are uncommon, perhaps due to a paucity of reporting of such cases. There are also reports of autoerotic asphyxiation due to chest compression, which may involve a masochistic component. In terms of the crush videos, it is possible that masochists identify with the animals being tortured and killed, actually seeing themselves as the animal being crushed, and these individuals obtain sexual gratification through this identification. D. Forced and Child Labour According to the International Labour Organization or ILO, forced labour takes different forms, including debt bondage; trafficking and other forms of modern slavery, slaves kept by illegal means and paid little or nothing. They also defined child labour as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development. Both are crimes and both describe the experience of some of the actors in crush videos. Although there are some who do it for their own sexual satisfaction and of their employers, others do it to satisfy their boss alone, just like the case of the girls in the Ridons 2011 crush videos, their ages, from 12 to 18, made it even worse. In China Smack, another Chinese girl, Huang Xiaoxiao, admitted after being exposed as the one filmed crushing a rabbit on a video. She narrated on how she ended up doing it. She said she was looking for a part-time job

when someone hired her to wear high heels and step on fruits, saying the video was to be published abroad. After stepping on fruits, her boss gradually changed the object being stepped on to toys, fish, worms, lobsters and other living things. The boss even asked her to pretend to be very happy, and if she did not look happy enough, they would have to redo it. Worms were the first thing she stepped on that was alive, and she was so disgusted that she vomited. So the boss demonstrated for her and threatened her that if she did not continue, he would make public on the internet the previous videos of her stepping on things. On one hand she was afraid of her reputation being affected and on the other, she was also afraid of losing this job, so Huang Xiaoxiao endured her disgust and continued doing it. She was still in high school when this happened. Fearful and terrified, her conscience felt imprisoned. Her conscience was filled with fear, always afraid that her disgraceful experience would be brought to light. These things were all done behind the backs of her family and friends, with none of them knowing that she had filmed animal abuse and crush videos. One day in 2008, she received a call from the boss, saying that the website had shut down. At that time, she thought that her conscience would finally be set free, no longer imprisoned, and she was happy for a while. But two years later, a video of her abusing a rabbit, spread wildly on the internet. And like the others, people condemned her. What does she think now? I am suffering inside, and this is the punishment the animals have given me, Huang Xiaoxiao says. This incident has exposed a trauma that she had suppressed for years. For years, she felt great distress. Being in a situation wherein her positive attitude towards animals was conflicted by her abusive behaviour (even if it was forced), made her experience cognitive dissonance. According to Leon Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance.

Aronson (Harmon-Jones 1999) later revised Festingers theory to state that cognitive dissonance was not simply an inconsistency between beliefs and behaviours but also a threat to self-concept, which is defined by Aronson as the desire of an individual to perceive oneself as a moral person, and that individuals are motivated to reduce dissonance to alleviate this threat. To Xiaoxiao, she saw herself not a moral person anymore, but rather than the behaviour, she chose to try and alter her attitude instead, which she still miserably failed. That is why, before she was even exposed to the public, she contemplated suicide, but was stopped by her mother. E. Sigmund Freuds Theory on Fetish In order to better understand the nature of a crush fetish, there is a need to first explain the origin of a fetish, but the number of theories that exist would be overwhelming. One theory would be from Sigmund Freud who believed that sexual fetishism in men is derived from the unconscious fear of the mother's genitals, from men's universal fear of castration, and from a man's fantasy that his mother had had a penis but that it had been cut off. He did not discuss sexual fetishism in women. Freud offered a widely different account of fetishism. At the root of it, in his view, is the fear produced by the castration anxiety of the Oedipus complex: "Probably no male human being is spared the shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals." The fetish itself stands for the penis, and takes the latter's place, as it were, as a defence against the horror of castration. Fetishism is thus a way of denying the condition of castration. It is a means of over-coming castration anxiety. It is an attempt to deny the lack of a penis in woman. Otto Fenichel, a psychoanalyst, sums up the "unconscious reasoning" as follows: "The thought that there are human beings without a penis, and that I might myself be one of them, makes it impossible for me to grant myself sexual excitement. But now I see here a symbol of a penis in woman; that helps me shut out my fear, and thus I can permit myself to be sexually excited." In this conception using the fetish object for sexual gratification was safe. Sexual sadism is thought by Freudians to be a defence against the anxiety produced by an aggressor. The sexual sadist identifies with this aggressor which reduces the sadists anxiety. Masochism on the other hand

represents pain that has become associated with pleasure. This also has a defensive characteristic in that by accepting the pain that is given the individual may avoid worse pain. Freud also talked about masochism being sadism turned in upon itself; from being active to passive. Most of the psychoanalytic explanations refer back to the original idea that paraphilias serve to ward off castration anxiety and this explanation would explain why most individuals who derive sexual gratification from paraphilias are men. While psychoanalysis does not have anything specific to say about crush paraphilias it would recognize the relationship of crush paraphilias to humiliation. As Susan Creede, a police investigator with the Ventura County District Attorneys Office, testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary in 1999, crush videos primarily appeal to men and are of most interest when the person doing the crushing is a woman. F. Conditioning and Imprinting Another way to explain fetishes is through behaviourism, which traced fetishism back to classical conditioning and came up with numerous specialized theories. The common theme running through all of them is that sexual stimulus and the fetish object are presented simultaneously, causing them to be connected in the learning process. This is similar to Alfred Binet's theory, according to him, fetishism was the pathological result of associations. Accidentally simultaneous presentation of a sexual stimulus and an inanimate object, he argued, led to the object being permanently connected to sexual arousal, though it differs in that it specifies association to classical conditioning and leaves out any judgment about pathogenicity. It is stressed that fetishes could be the result of generalization. For example, it may only be shiny skin that arouses a person at first, but in time more common stimuli, such as shiny latex, may have the same effect. The problem with such a theory was that classical conditioning normally needs many repetitions, but this form would require only one. To account for this the preparedness theory was put forward; it stated that reacting to an object with sexual arousal could be the result of an evolutionary process, because such a reaction could prove to be useful for survival. In pointing to how conditioned

sexual behaviour can persist over time, one may cite how, in 2004, when quails were trained to copulate with a piece of terry cloth, their conditioning was sustained through ongoing repetition. Because classical conditioning seemed to be unable to explain how the conditioned behaviour is kept alive over many years, without any repetition, some behaviourists came up with the theory that fetishism was the result of a special form of conditioning, called imprinting. Such conditioning happens during a specific time in early childhood in which sexual orientation is imprinted into the child's mind and remains there for the rest of his or her life. Psychological research has shown that many fetishes appear to be the result of early imprinting and conditioning experiences in childhood or adolescence, for instance, where sexual excitement and/or orgasm is paired with non-sexual objects or body parts, or as a consequence of strong traumatic, emotional and/or physical experience. Early psychology assumed that fetishism either is being conditioned or imprinted or the result of a possibly traumatic strong emotional or physical experience. Often, these experiences occurred in early childhood. For example, an individual who has been physically abused could either have a sexual obsession with intercourse, or they could be completely terrified by even the idea of being touched. It is assumed that those who have been sexually abused create an obsession with being touched or touching others, and possibly even abuse someone else, which is the animal, in terms of a crush fetish.