Adorable Video Of Boys Refusing To Hit A Girl Goes Viral

An Italian magazine’s anti-violence message – a powerful video in which young boys resist when told to slap a girl – has gone viral on social media.

Entitled “Slap Her” in English translations (“Dalle Uno Schiaffo,” “From A Slap”), the three-minute video was produced by Italian magazine Fanpage.

In the video, five different boys, ranging in age from seven to eleven, make small talk with an off-camera interviewer, identified by SBS News as Luca Iavarone. The boys entertain questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Then, a girl is introduced: Martina, who looks to be slightly older than the boys. You can see immediately that the awkwardness between pre-adolescent boys and girls transcends cultures, as some of the boys giggle, some shy away (apparently “Cooties” exist in Italy, too), and one blurts out “I’d like to be your boyfriend.”

But the awkwardness and fun comes to an end when the interviewer abruptly tells them, “Now slap her. Hard.”

In an encouraging and uplifting turn of events, none of the boys hit the girl. The boys provide a variety of reasons, all of them touching.

“I don’t want to hurt her.”

“As the saying, goes, ‘Girls shouldn’t be hit, not even with a flower.'”

“Jesus doesn’t want us to hit others.”

Fanpage describes the video as an experiment that addresses the problem of domestic violence, and how boys have to be taught to hit girls – by seeing their fathers hit women, or by seeing it on TV and in the movies.

Despite the differences in language and culture, the message that boys shouldn’t hit girls has clearly resonated: as of this post, the video has over 434,000 Likes and 848,000 Shares on Facebook.

[Image courtesy of: SBS News]