A US couple have lost custody of their children after featuring them in allegedly abusive prank videos. They’re not the first to go too far in search of hits

Pranks have been a booming part of YouTube’s scene for years – but it’s a subculture prone to attracting controversy. The latest incident has led to a US father and a stepmother losing custody of two of their children as a result of some of their prank videos.

Mike Martin of Baltimore ran a channel named DaddyOFive, featuring his wife, Heather, and their five children. At the height of the controversy, but before his videos were made private, DaddyOFive had more than 750,000 subscribers and the clips were viewed more than 176m times.

Family YouTube channels are not uncommon – but the Martins were accused of child abuse because they regularly made their children the subject of their pranks.

One video uploaded earlier this month showed Heather spraying disappearing ink on the floor of the bedroom of youngest child, Cody. The Martins scream at him: “What the fuck did you do?” as Cody breaks down in tears, thinking he’s in trouble, and maintains he didn’t do anything. His parents reveal the whole thing is a joke. “It’s just a prank, brah,” Martin tells him, still filming.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s just a prank.’

Commenters were unimpressed. So were other YouTubers – Philip DeFranco, with more than five million subscribers to his channel, was among the first to criticise the parents, calling their treatment abuse. Others said Cody seemed to be the target of most pranks, such as one in which his dad pushed him into a shelf, appearing to cause him to bleed.

The Martins’ response was initially defiant. They posted a video defending their content and prompted their children to do the same. But later they backtracked, declaring the videos to be fake and scripted, and issued an apology.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The couple apologise.

“We did do pranks, but most of the time the kids knew about them and they were planned,” Heather Martin told Good Morning America. “The characters you see on our YouTube channel is not a reflection of who we are. It’s a character, it was a show. A bad show, but it was a show.”

Last Monday, the controversy reached a new level after Rose Hall, the biological mother of Mike Martin’s youngest children, Cody and Emma, said she had been granted emergency custody of them.

In a YouTube video uploaded by her lawyer, Tim Conlon, she said: “Emma and Cody are with me, I have emergency custody – they’re doing good. They’re getting back to their playful selves.”

YouTube didn’t have a specific comment on the DaddyOFive case, but it confirmed that ads were removed from the channel.

DaddyOFive is far from the only prankster YouTuber. The genre has grown on the site since its inception. YouTube itself has acknowledged and profited from this. In the grand tradition of You’ve Been Framed!, the videos are hugely popular and often rack up millions of views.

Last year, it created a series called Prank Academy for its paid streaming subscription service, YouTube Red, which showed Jesse Wellens and Jennifer Smith teaching other YouTuber stars how to pull off pranks.

Tony Blockley, a criminologist at the University of Derby, sees people’s obsession with YouTube pranks as part and parcel of a society that increasingly lives its life online, but also enjoys engaging in a particular kind of schadenfreude.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prank Academy.

“We celebrate what people post online and we live our lives on social media,” he says. “And there’s this kind of voyeurism. There are people who like to see others at times of distress or coming to harm. “The question is,” he says, “is the problem with the person who creates the content, or the people who watch it?

“Absolutely, the creators have to take responsibility, but if nobody watched it, then nobody would make these videos. When people see they can get views, it becomes a competition to see who can get more, which leads to more extreme pranks.”

One YouTuber who has become infamous for his pranks is former Big Brother contestant Sam Pepper. In 2014, he came under fire for a video called “Fake Hand Ass Pinch”, which showed him grabbing women while wearing a fake hand. He claimed the video was a “social experiment”. After the controversy, some young women came forward and accused Pepper of sexual assault, accusations he has denied.

Pepper got into more hot water in 2015, with a prank in which he tricked a vlogger into believing his best friend was murdered in front of him.

Amelia Tait of the New Statesman points out that there is no regulation for prank videos online. “Though YouTube removes videos that breach its ‘community guidelines’, it seems illogical that we trust the service to police itself,” she writes.

“Since the invention of the radio, we have assumed that independent bodies are needed to scrutinise the media – so why you should the largest video-sharing platform on the planet be exempt?” In DaddyOFive’s case, other YouTubers seem to have acted as their own form of regulation, ensuring the videos were brought to the authorities’ attention even when they were all made private.As yet, there has been no update on DaddyOFive’s social media channels, and the Martins’ lawyers have declined to comment. Further court hearings on permanent custody of the children are pending.

There are cases where police have become involved with pranks which have gone too far. UK-based YouTube channel Trollstation regularly fools passersby, and often the internet, with its staged prank videos.

Last year, members of the group were jailed after they staged a fake robbery at the National Portrait Gallery and a fake kidnapping at Tate Britain.

“If the police get involved, then it will be because of a statutory or legislative criminal act, or if someone reports it to them,” says Blockley. “But just because a crime hasn’t necessarily taken place, doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.”