UK: violent "games" and litigation – a teenager in a coma

The TikTok challenge led to the irreparable – a 12-year-old British teenager fell into a long-term coma. Doctors refuse to continue treatment, parents sued.

April 7th, tells air force, 12-year-old Archie Battersby was found unconscious at home. As the investigation showed, it is likely that the teenager performed the Blackout Challenge from TikTok and received “catastrophic” brain damage. Its essence lies in the fact that a person needs to hold his breath until he loses consciousness due to lack of oxygen.

Doctors did their best to save Archie and kept him alive with medication and mechanical ventilation. They could not bring him back to life – the doctors reported that they found tissue necrosis in some parts of the brain. However, parents are sure that their son just needs more time to recover. Following the verdict on Archie’s medical condition, doctors and Battersby’s family argue in the courts over whether to continue treatment.

After the boy was transferred to the Royal London Hospital in east London, operated by the Barts Health NHS Trust, doctors told Archie’s family that they believed the damage to his brain was so severe that his brainstem could have died.

Doctors asked for a brain stem death test, but Archie’s family denied consent. This led to an action in the High Court of London for permission to conduct the survey.

Archie was described by his mother Holly Dance as “a natural born fighter.” Before the tragic incident, Archie was an active boy who practiced mixed martial arts and gymnastics, according to the family. This interest in mixed martial arts also spurred an interest in Christianity two years ago when he saw other fighters pray before a fight. On April 7, his mother found him unconscious after an incident at their home in Southend, Essex. She believed that he took part in an online challenge.

Health Minister Stephen Barclay asked the court for an urgent hearing to resolve the case, but three Court of Appeal judges upheld the original decision that life-sustaining treatment should be stopped. A further motion to challenge this decision was filed with the Supreme Court but was denied. The boy’s mother said she was “living through every parent’s worst nightmare” and vowed not to give up.

Earlier, our publication told how schoolchildren from the Russian Kaspiysk ended up in a hospital after playing with older comrades, offered on TikTok. The seventh graders, having spied on the idea in last year’s Skull Breaker flash mob, decided to have fun and play a trick on the guys from the second grade. The so-called game is as follows: one of the guys, in this case a second grader, jumps up, and the other two simultaneously hit his legs at the moment of the jump. The ending is predictable – the jumper falls, receiving severe head and back injuries. In this case, both victims were hospitalized. One second-grader was diagnosed with a concussion and a knee joint injury, the second had a hip fracture with displacement plus numerous hematomas.

Reference. Challenge is a genre of Internet videos in which a blogger performs a task on a video camera and posts it online, and then offers to repeat this task to his friend or an unlimited circle of users. The word “challenge” itself is usually translated as “challenge” – in the context of the phrase “challenge”.

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