IMHO, this kind of publicity is a double-edge sword. It gets the tragedy of bullying out there so that maybe douchebags will grow a conscience and think about their actions. But it also creates a well-intentioned pageantry around suicide. “They hate me now, but wait till they see my tragic story on the internet. Then they’ll be sorry.”
Am I the only one who thinks this?
If anyone needs to be charged, it’s whoever distributed the pics of a 12-yo flashing. Child porn charges.
And while I’m not sure the state of the law in Canada, I would not be surprised if they have much more stringent anti-harassment laws than the US.
BUT I wouldn’t be surprised if she were somewhat vulnerable & damaged before all this & would have been courting the Reaper at an early age anyway.
Somehow, we need to toughen up the kids, help them be more resilient & less vulnerable. The “It Gets Better” campaign was a noble step but there have been a few high profile stories of kids making triumphant IGB almost immediately prior to offing themselves.
No. I’m afraid you are right on.
I was on FB a while ago, and participated in a discussion about this. Someone was complaining about politicians proposing anti-bullying laws as a result of this case, which will supposedly curtail everyone’s civil rights. This is the first I hear of this. Can anyone elaborate?
FTR, I was bullied in school myself. I had few friends, and my parents tried to help, but they were immigrants who were busy enough working and raising four other kids with problems of their own. They did intervene when the bullying escalated to food thrown at me on the bus. I was called a snitch afterward, but at least I knew that my parents cared enough to get involved. Where were the girl’s parents on all this? Why didn’t they forbid or at least restrict her access to a computer? Wasn’t homeschooling an option? What about counseling for her substance abuse and suicidal feelings? I think these parents have a lot to answer for.
Yes, there was a chance.
Of course, there was a chance.
Cutting, drug abuse, attempted suicide, and other forms of self-destruction are difficult to treat, but that is no reason to give up on a child. Even if these illnesses can’t be cured, treatment can still provide respite, recovery, and insight into the disease processes.
Even if there was no chance at all, we should still try, because there is always the chance that we will figure something out, some crucial data that makes it possible to help.
To say otherwise, when a life is at stake, is morally wrong and evil.
Did I imply anyone should have given up on her?
It would be nice if the perp was over the age of 18 and could be tried in an adult court, but we have a young offender problem with that idea. Its no real different from the sexting which is going on now all over the place. So I dont think that idea would fly.
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And while I’m not sure the state of the law in Canada, I would not be surprised if they have much more stringent anti-harassment laws than the US.
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Quite possibly on paper, but in real life I dont think I have heard of any instances were this was applicable. The RCMP does say that it has enough to go on for several avenues of making charges, but they are talking kinda wishy washy about taking a long time to “drill down” as they put it , and no right away ansewers.
Frankly if this happened in the states with the same fervor , I would be expecting a preliminary status update with in hours, and perps brought before the court within days. It cant be that hard to track her whole class and put em to the question.
I think based on several of those q cards, that she was at first ostrasized, and then excommunicated by her peers, in other words, she was one of them before her fall from grace. It was only after the rug got pulled from under her that she could not cope.
Declan
You are refusing to make the causal link. She flashed someone over the Internet because it’s really, really, really easy to get kids to do. Blaming her for that is like blaming a statutory rape victim. The pictures are released, causing her to lose her friends at a crucial time in her life, making her anxious and depressed. Thus everything after that is an attempt to make up for that.
Seeing that all these bad things happened before the suicide is evidence of how badly we fucked up at saving this child. We had ample opportunity to intervene, and we didn’t. This is precisely why she should be the poster child, as her life is one we could have saved.
This sort of thing is why victim blaming is wrong. It leads to people dismissing what happened and what they could have done to prevent it.
brickbacon, you stated:
Why on earth make that statement if you weren’t looking to minimize the loss of her life or excuse the adults in her life for not doing everything in their power to help her?
I’m at a loss. Really. Because the only context I have ever seen statements like that is when the speaker is trying to make a loss or death or failure acceptable by making it inevitable. If you had added “but we should have . . .” that would be one thing. You didn’t.
Would you like to now?
They can’t be trying that hard, his identity is all over /b/.
If he has any sense he’ll hand himself in now or kill himself.
God, I’m happy the internet wasn’t big when I was a teen. It was the place the outcast teens that didn’t have friends in physical life went. I wish we could teach teens to lock down their Facebooks to only the people they trust, but they don’t want to do that, because people will bug them for it and they feel they’ll miss out on new friends.
Personally, I feel there isn’t a hell of a lot we can do as adults to help with cyberbullying. Most parents don’t have the skills to combat online bullies. Their peers and idols need to get the message to them. Bieber needs to make a song about how much he loves a girl that was trashed online.
Teenager makes bad decisions. Film at 11.
I don’t think that’s true. I work with kids around her age, and I am reasonably certain the vast majority of them do not flash strangers on the internet. Also, it’s likely that the person convincing her was also a kid, not some manipulative adult; but that is (somewhat) beside the point. Either way I disagree that it is easy to get a well-adjusted kid to flash you over the internet.
This is her editorializing. That’s fine if you want to take it at face value, but doesn’t the lack of any criminal action make you a little suspicious? Don’t you think it’s weird that there was no criminal action was taken at the time against a person distributing what amounts to child pornography?
Many kids who have been bullied, don’t act out in the ways she did. It leads me to believe there were other issues at play here. Doesn’t mean it’s her fault, but it does mitigate the blame we should heap on others.
People did intervene. She was in counseling, she moved schools, attended an alternative school, switched homes, etc. I think reasonable steps were taken. Obviously, they did not do enough to save her, but I think it’s fair to ask whether that was possible given her disposition.
I am not blaming the victim. I just just refusing to treat this case as a particularly egregious case of the system failing. People seemed to be trying to help her to no avail.
There is a difference between failing despite your actions, and not giving a shit. People keep acting as though this type of outcome was entirely avoidable even though there is little specific evidence that that is true. Not everything is someone else’s fault. Now obviously the pieces of shit that were tormenting her deserve everything that is coming to them, but I am not sure it’s fair to say they caused her to commit suicide.
Like to what? I am not sure I follow you.
My broader point is that it’s not always easy to modify a child’s behavior, or intervene to improve their situation. Especially if they are on drugs, or dealing with other issues. Assuming we could have prevented this wishful thinking IMO. Doesn’t mean her death isn’t sad, but it does mean we should question whether she is a particularly compelling anti-bullying story.
The group anonymous has already dropped the hammer on him. A little poetic justice would be nice here, if he commits suicide.
Declan
Word?? Daaaamn. Yall are harsh.
Parents in these circumstances may be at a loss to understand what to do, and may face a quandary as to what’s the right step to take without creating more pain. For instance: taking away or strictly monitoring social-network activity, homeschooling, etc.. That protects the bullied kids. But would she in turn rather view that not as protecting but as punishing HER by taking away her venues of expression and socialization, thus making things worse?
Even those of us who have been in some form of the network for decades may not really understand the full scope of what its current form means to the kids – we saw it evolve and remember a time when the world moved right ahead w/o hourly status updates, so when confronted with online nasties we can more easily say “Huh, check it out, another asshat with no life” and move on.
Teens growing with social media have a particular vulnerability due to the way this venue of interaction gets used - it facilitates the widespread dissemination of your bad decisions, and people seem to take its virtuality as license to unleash the nasty side a lot more casually.
It is something to worry about, yes. Someone in a vulnerable state may be receptive to a “martyrdom” angle. But when we try and make the pitch that this is not the right exit strategy, we need to tread carefully to avoid being perceived as saying the victim did the wrong thing.
Oh, and while at it the wishing for the responsible party to be themselves hounded to suicide is in kind of bad taste and IMO not really “justice”.
Look, forget the Amanda Todd details. Bullying is a serious problem, but I think we can all agree Miss Todd had some other issues, too; she was suffering from pretty severe depression. It is telling what one of her final messages was “I have no one,” a statement that was incontrovertibly false - her family was helping her quite vigorously - but that’s the way people in the throes of deep depression feel. I think brickbacon’s point is that steps WERE taken here, and it didn’t work. Perhaps the wrong steps were taken; maybe they spent too much time worrying about the bullying and nto enough worrying about whether she needed medical attention, I don’t know. The poor girl’s dead and I’m not going to rip on her parents.
The question is, what do you do about it? And what most people suggest is bullshit.
Here is a very, very insightful column that should be required reading on the subject (as well as the studies it cites):
All along I’ve been a bit surprised that the RCMP couldn’t work with the FBI and Facebook to find the goon behind the naked photos. At one point, he was using her naked photo for his Facebook avatar! I can’t imagine the various courts wouldn’t have jumped on that. It also argues for a certain lack of circumspection in the creep’s online behavior which should have made it easier to find him.
Anonymous seems to agree with me, and took the matter into their own hands.
Here’s an article detailing their find at Vice magazine
And an image with connected information about the suspect (which is kind of hard to see, actually):
The man they’ve identified is currently facing charges of sexual interference with a minor (a different person, not Amanda Todd.) The man is also known to post at jailbait photo sites on the internet. He claims he was friends with Amanda and tried to help her, and that he told the RCMP that the real creeper was a different guy in New York.
The RCMP have his computer. Hopefully they can figure this out.
The RCMP are a police force doing an investigation - they will neither tell us everything they are doing nor tell us the results when we think they should - they’ll do their jobs.
They’re doing their jobs now. That’s nice and all. But I’m unimpressed by the way they did their jobs years ago when this first became an issue.
If the guilty party is Kody Maxson and he worked at Facebook for a while, I wonder if he or his colleagues there helped blunt the investigation of the guy using Amanda’s naked photo as a wall photo.