It is a story for our times. The amateur DVD boasting the exploits of the self-described "teenage kings" of Werribee looked like any other. It had an R rating on the cover. The credits listed its ‘stars': ‘Boofa', ‘Choco', Brendan and the rest. In a homely note, it thanked one boy's mother for the use of her video camera. What the DVD contained, however, horrified a nation. Among teenage pranks like burnouts and throwing eggs was the centrepiece: the abuse, sexual humiliation and degradation of a 16-year-old girl with a mild intellectual disability.

Through an internet chat room, the girl agreed to meet two of the boys at the local shopping centre. There, she was surrounded, overpowered by up to 12 young men, and forced down to a nearby secluded riverbank. Her clothing was thrown in the mud; she was made to expose her breasts and perform oral sex while the rest of the gang watched and jeered. She had a cup of urine tipped over her; several of the young men urinated on her. They set her hair on fire three times. Called "The Victim," the teenager is pointed at and mocked. One youth turns to the camera and says, "What the fuck; she's the ugliest thing I've ever seen." At another point, the boys discuss pimping her. As one urges the others to give her a Brazilian wax, he says, "We've got to make this bitch look like a slut ... get with this whole deforestation thing." Throughout, the girl cowers, terrified but smiling pitifully.

The story gets worse. Segments of the film were displayed for over three months on YouTube, a website which posts video clips. One segment of the DVD, called ‘Pimp My Wife', was viewed by almost 2500 people without anyone finding anything amiss. As viewers around the globe snickered over its content, as the DVD was sold in Melbourne high schools for $5, the young female victim was shattered. Overnight, her father said, she changed from a "happy-go-lucky" kid to being withdrawn and terribly ashamed. Over the next three months she quietly disintegrated. She is now seeing a psychologist.

It was only when excerpts from the DVD were shown on Today Tonight that the full moral weight of the crime was felt. The victim finally made statements to police, and the boys came under investigation for rape. Even then, amid widespread outrage, messages of support for the lads were posted on the internet. The girl's anguished father was told by Channel 7 that the parents of some of the youths involved in the crimes had laughed it off as "a bit of fun". Other parents, while not endorsing the DVD, nonetheless knew of its contents but did nothing. Some local teens interviewed were sceptical that anything much wrong had occurred. ‘Daniel' thought it was "just like in the movies". ‘Alissa' said, "You can't make someone go down on their knees. You seriously can't do that ... no one is going to admit to giving a guy head in front of people."

As in the Dianne Brimble case, it was not just the actions themselves which were so horrifying, but the fact that they were photographed. As Brimble lay naked on the cabin floor, dying from an overdose of the date-rape drug Fantasy, no hand stirred to help her. Instead, those hands were holding a digital camera, capturing lurid photographic trophies to circulate. As with the Werribee DVD, no one realised or acted on the moral horror of what they were viewing. Some of the women on the cruise ship, to whom the photos of Brimble were shown, actually giggled.

Susan Sontag has written about another ‘bit of fun', the porno-torture photos of Abu Ghraib prison:

For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more ... part of "the true nature and heart of America".