Montgomery County students have not even been back in the building for a full three months before acting out. Keyboards in toilets, soap dispensers ripped from walls, rolls of toilet paper strewn across the floor, these are just some of the “devious licks” schools have seen across the nation.
According to Curbed, the trend started when a teenager posted a video of taking stolen masks out of his backpack which he referred to as a “lick” or a successful type of theft. A similar video followed in which another student was shown unzipping a backpack with a hand-sanitizer dispenser inside. The caption read, “Only a month into school and got this absolute devious lick,” the video racking up over 7.2 million views in the span of two days.
Following the video’s blowup on TikTok, there are now hundreds of students across the country imitating the same deviant acts of vandalism and theft. A majority of the TikToks are filmed in school restrooms where students are tearing sinks from the walls, upending toilets from the floor and smashing mirrors into pieces.
These instances have school and government officials rattled and determined to find ways to put an end to the challenge. According to CNN, some schools are taking the approach of locking up their bathrooms for large periods of the day in attempts to stop the vandalism.
Although this method lowers the amount of devious licks performed in school bathrooms, it is not an effective technique in restricting the challenge as a whole since students are still given free range of the rest of the school. Shutting down bathrooms also unfairly punishes students who have nothing to do with these acts of defiance and prevents students from freely going to the bathroom.
Another preventative method used in attempts to stop the challenge is arresting students who partake in the trend. Stealing school property is a felony and as such, students reap the consequences of breaking the law. Students as young as 15 have been arrested and charged in states including Kentucky, Arizona, Florida and Alabama for engaging in these acts.
Arresting individual students who participate in the challenge is a much more effective strategy in trying to stop the trend. It enforces the seriousness of the students’ actions by giving them a criminal record while also punishing them on an individual level for their misdemeanor. In contrast, shutting down bathrooms does not send as strong of a message and punishes everyone in the school.
In attempts to counteract the negative of the devious licks challenge, a new TikTok challenge called angelic yields has also emerged. In contrast to the goals of devious licks, this challenge encourages students to engage in acts of kindness to help improve their school such as replacing stolen items. The idea of the challenge is well-intentioned, however it will not do anything to hinder the students who are still engaging in devious licks.
Furthermore, other less direct preventative measures have also been pursued. Newsweek reported that TikTok has played their role in trying to stop the challenge by banning the devious licks hashtags and taking down any videos that violate Community Guidelines. School principals have also sent warning letters to parents and students reminding them of the consequences of partaking in vandalism.
While these methods can discourage students from performing a devious lick, at the end of the day, many of these defiant students will not stop until they are physically made to stop. Therefore, the most effective way to mitigate the devious licks trend is through the involvement of law enforcement.
Although other methods such as bathroom locking and warnings from school principals are less detrimental to students’ futures, arrests directly target those participating in the trend and threaten a permanent blemish on their record. Cracking down on devious highschoolers and showing them that they are cheating themselves out of a good future may be the only hope for an end to this madness.
Article by Alexandra Doncheva of Richard Montgomery High School
Graphic by Charles Wang