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.
Seriously? Who is this? Why would you use this young woman's death to criticize Stephen Harper as a bully? Don't you hear yourself? He said what happened to her went beyond bullying (harassment and intimidation) and became a crime. Stephen Harper did grow up before the Facebook and other social media. Bullying used to happen primarily in person and the threats came with shoves and shows of force not words typed to appear on a screen.
ReplyDeleteI imagine Rehtaeh Parsons killed herself because she was depressed and thought the humiliation would never stop. While bullying can become a crime, I've never heard of a bully in the 80s and 90s posting pictures of others in sexually humiliating positions as part of their methods.
That Rehtaeh allowed them to do that to her, both treat her that way in the moment and let them take pictures ~ and that she was involved with anyone who would treat her that way ~ shows that she had low self-esteem and was humble, which made her vulnerable to what followed.
This was a nice girl. I'm afraid, though, that although I can't find anything about it on Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure I read that she grudgingly acknowledged that the sex with them was consensual.
You're the one using this tragedy for political purposes. I actually thought Rehtaeh Parsons had made this blog and I was going to read some of it to know her thoughts before she died. It's the beginning of 2021 now. Have you grown up since writing this?
Harassment and intimidation becomes a lot more serious when it involves sexual exploitation and graphic, public humiliation.
The closest to this kind of bullying I experienced as a male was being pantsed in the hallway. I wasn't wearing underwear and the few people around me saw this and I never got pantsed again. Nobody went around humiliating me for it, though they might have said something about me not wearing underwear. They were just farting around being jerks. They certainly didn't take pictures, post it to the internet then harass me about it.
What this young woman really needed was higher self-esteem so she would steer clear of the losers who did this to her, saving her further humiliation.
Ah. I've only now read more of this post. An anti-bullying program might have been nice. I think things have gotten better and I doubt this kind of thing will happen as much, and it's because of Parsons and Amanda Todd that this country cares so much and pays more attention. And because my generation has grown up and knows better than to continue this kind of crap. Most of us, or so I like to think.