It's hard to imagine a worse horror story.
A young woman is sexually assaulted, and publicly humiliated.
Her school does nothing. A police investigation goes nowhere.
Then she is bullied, and then she kills herself.
But still it gets worse. Because now there are vigilantes, and calls for mob justice. And Stephen Harper is using all that to try to cover-up one horror with another. Trying to play up the crime, and downplay the bullying.
The prime minister said what Rehtaeh claims happened to her goes beyond bullying. "I think we've got to stop using just the term bullying to describe some of these things. Bullying to me has a kind of connotation … of kids misbehaving.
What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances is simply criminal activity. It is youth criminal activity, it is violent criminal activity, it is sexual criminal activity and it is often internet criminal activity," said Harper.
As if bullying was just "kids misbehaving." As if it wasn't bullying that killed Rehtaeh.
The cruelty, the public humiliation.
The relentless bullying she couldn't escape...
“She was never left alone. Her friends turned against her, people harassed her, boys she didn’t know started texting her and Facebooking asking her to have sex with them since she had had sex with their friends. It just never stopped...”
Anyone who doesn't understand that, either can't remember what it was like to be young. Or went to school before they invented the internet.
But of course, that's not what Stephen Harper, the worst bully this country has ever known, wants you to believe. Because him and his foul Cons would rather not remind Canadians how they recently killed a plan for a national anti-bullying strategy.
Votes from a handful of Conservative backbenchers weren’t enough to push through an NDP proposal to strike an all-party committee to study and craft a national anti-bullying strategy.
Just to pleasure their rabid religious base, who fear that anti-bullying programs will stop them from abusing gay kids.
Even though so many Canadian children are being bullied to death...
Even though national anti-bullying programs have proved effective in helping to save the lives of young people in other countries. Where there are governments willing to tackle the problem, and know that only EDUCATION can solve it.
Unlike the Harper Cons who would use this tragedy to push their fascist law and order agenda. And would rather spend millions on their fraudulent Porky Action Plan ads, than create a national ad campaign aimed at saving the lives of Canadian kids.
Oh well. I've been fighting bullies on this blog for eight years, and before that I fought them in school. And this latest tragedy will only motivate me to fight them and the bully Cons even harder.
