You may have read about the heartbreaking story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who recently posted a much-watched YouTube video (posted below) detailing the bullying and harassment she’d endured online and in real life. This past Wednesday, she was found dead, the apparent victim of suicide.
Here, from the Vancouver Sun, is the basic outline of Amanda’s story:
Amanda was 12 years old when she made a mistake that would haunt her until her death three years later.
Her ordeal started while she was fooling around online with friends. She probably didn’t think it was risky behaviour when she lifted her top to flash the person who was flattering her at the other end of the webcam.
Amanda’s moment of indiscretion was not unusual for someone her age: Sexting and using webcams to share sexual photos is a growing trend among children, some so young they are still in grade school.
“The Internet stalker she flashed kept stalking her,” said Carol. “Every time she moved schools he would go undercover and become a Facebook friend. What the guy did was he went online to the kids who went to (the new school) and said that he was going to be a new student — that he was starting school the following week and that he wanted some friends and could they friend him on Facebook.”
“He eventually gathered people’s names and sent Amanda’s video to her new school.”
The video and photos went to teachers, to parents, to Facebook friends, which lead to repeated taunts: “Oh, there’s the porn star.” …
Amanda was the victim of unrelenting blackmail. And the cyberspace stalker was aided by people in Amanda’s real-world life — kids who would share the photos on their cellphones, kids who would gang up to hurl first verbal abuse and then fists at her.
Amanda’s story illustrates what can happen to young girls when sexualized images of them floating around online, whether they’ve put these pictures up themselves in a moment of poor judgement or whether someone has stolen them from password-locked private photo albums, or whether someone has surreptitiously taken an “upskirt” or “down-the-blouse” or some other compromising picture of them in public. This is the sort of damage that things like the Jailbait and Creepshots subreddits can do to young girls. This is why it’s so important that things like these subreddits be shut the fuck down.
Sadly, even after her suicide, Amanda remains the target of bullies and assholes online.
One of these assholes? The MRA and atheist videoblogger and all-around terrible person known to the world as The Amazing Atheist, whom we first met when he had a Reddit meltdown and started spewing misogynistic abuse at his detractors. Now he’s spitting on Amanda’s memory.
Mocking the format of Amanda’s video, in which told her story by holding up sheets of paper to the camera describing the abuse she’s endured, The Amazing Atheist posted this picture to his Tumblr blog earlier today:
I simply can’t comprehend the mind of someone whose response to Amanda’s story is this. Beyond awful.
Here’s Amanda’s video:
[blockquote]I do wish the discourse around bullying was better, no one (well, aside from lefty/social justice-y blogs) seems to want to talk about the societal structures that lead to this happening.[blockquote] I don’t think there is much of a societal structure behind it. Children simply are 50% assholes , 50% scared of being expulsed from their peer group if they don’t join in on deriding somebody else.
Did someone call for some faith in humanity?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/13/bible-belt-conservative-year-gay?newsfeed=true
Okay… I second everyone else basically, and add one little thing: If people just ought to realise that it’s a horrible world and just live with it, shouldn’t he by the same “logic” just REALISE that it’s a RELIGIOUS world and just live with it?
I have to second some other comments here – agreed that creep websites should be shut the hell down and that TAA should shut the hell up, but the worst thing about this story is that it actually happened. The sheer amount of vile hatred and cruelty poor Amanda had to deal with is shocking and heartbreaking. If only it was not too late to save her. The police had damn well better find out who stalked her and kick his slimy paedophile ass.
It must be emphasised and emphasised again that Amanda ultimately died, not because she was bullied by other teens (although it of course did her great harm), but because some sick vindictive bastard failed to blackmail her into giving him the gratification he wanted and so decided he would punish her relentlessly. She was the victim of a conscious, deliberate and probably premeditated crime. Unless people understand this it will be difficult to fight back and prevent similar cases.
Sorry for the long post. May the poor child rest in peace.
Kids can be awful, but there’s more to bullying than that. Adults are also pretty useless when it comes to acting in favour of someone who’s in trouble as well. “The bystander effect” tells us that people who would unhesitatingly jump in and help an injured person if they were alone will stand helplessly immobilised if there’s a group of people who are also standing by.
Children need to be taught how to overcome the standby effect – by calling or going for help or simply saying something in words or by body language – and reduce the power of bullies and increase the resilience of targets. It can be done. And I think we’re learning that we need to do more by explicit teaching now that bullying nowadays is much less a matter of a punchup behind the bikesheds. In truth, it always was much more than a simple bout of fisticuffs but now there’s no way to avoid that knowledge as parents and teachers have been too often inclined to do.
It’s a shame some people can’t go to school because of creeps and bullies. And that, “Amazing Atheist” is a big fat asshole. Just because other people died that day, it doesn’t make Amanda Todd’s death less tragic.
Brain bleach.
Great post, Dave. The slut-shaming aspect of this type of bullying can’t go undeclared.
Another good one: http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/feminista/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-misogyny-involved-amanda-todds-life-and-death
These shits love to brag about the harm they’ve caused- surely he’s out there bragging on some creep-site forum.
@aworld,
finding new friends to be more comfortable is totally normal. So is going through various groups/individuals of friends over time, as circumstances and people change
It sounds like things are going more smoothly at school, I hope that’s the case.
this is not at all true. If it were then bullying would be a huge problem in other places where children gather (including large families and voluntary groups), and would not be a big problem in groups of adults. Neither of these things are true.
I think its school. I absolutely do. Children are immersed in an environment where they are only around other kids roughly the same age as they are, so they never see what is next in life or how far they have come compared to younger kids. Assholerly doesn’t seem consequential in such an environment, time virtually stands still. Outside of school people are never age segregated to such an extent. Kids in school virtually never have to help each other (outside of group projects, collaboration is actually punished, called “cheating”). Helping a teacher earns you the derision of everyone else. Asking for help is looked down on generally. Kids are classified and graded like meat and taught contempt for people who are graded/classified differently than they are, so once again the moral is to not give a shit about anyone else if they are too different. The only sources of authority are usually over worked and unresponsive to complaints of bullying, while some are perpetrators of bullying themselves. Those same authorities are never subject to question and enforce ridiculous rules all the time, so children learn the biggest and strongest person gets their way because they are the biggest. I don’t know how the hell anyone could be put through more than a decade of that and come out of it without bullying someone, being bullied, or watching and not caring that bullying is happening. All the seminars and heartfelt talks int he world won’t undo what kids know to be true from years of experience in the design of school- they learn that no one gives a fuck about anyone else, and if you can’t deal with that then you deserve whatever happens to you.
@skeptifem – agreed. I got my first real job in between my sophomore and junior years in high school, and I also got my driver’s license. When I went back to school in the fall, I was a different person. The bullying didn’t end overnight, but I wasn’t the only one who’d started working, and a lot of people seemed to have realized about that time that there was a whole wider world out there. High school suddenly wasn’t the entire universe anymore, and it gave the people inside it a lot less power, at least over me. I had a job working alongside a bunch of adults who didn’t give a shit about my social status at school. That changed a lot of my frustrated anger into contempt, which is not what the bullies wanted.
I think bullying is also about power. The years when it peaks in schools are the years when kids are starting to evolve into teenagers and beginning the journey to adulthood. All sorts of things in their lives are changing, often rapidly, and they’re being told they have to start taking on more and more responsibility. At the same time, they have virtually no power over any aspect of their lives. They are in school for 8 hours a day, being told “Go here, do this, now go here.” They can’t choose what to do with their time, their mobility is fairly limited, and they’re still children and still vulnerable.
What do you do when you’re frustrated and can’t exert any control over most of your life? You find someone who has even less power than you and cling to that fact, reinforce it by exerting that power over whoever you can. If that’s the only way you can feel in control of anything, you’re going to take it. Add in the heaping doses of misogyny, homophobia, abilism and so forth that the US culture is swimming in, plus our schizophrenic attitude toward sex, it’s not all that surprising that schools become pressure cookers.
Someone out there is sendign the message that shit is funny, that it is ok to shame particular members of society in a particular way. Kids are just mirroring what they see adults do every day, but, since they’re kids, they don’t have a concept of when it’s appropriate to stop. People keep looking to kids to figure out why they think bullying is ok, and kids are looking at us and seeing an adult version of bullying in all of our media, in our social interactions, in our attitudes towards each other. Kids aren’t the problem, schools aren’t the problem, parents aren’t the problem, what we have given kids to emulate is the problem.
TAA is massive douchenozzle.
Skeptifem, I don’t think it’s just the way school is set up – it’s more a part of the mechanism of bullying, but not the whole explanation.
When I was bullied in grade school, all of the teachers knew it. No one decided to do the decent thing and tell my parents because my parents were active in the church (I went to Catholic school) and were afraid of their reaction. My parents didn’t believe me, either, thinking I was just being oversensitive about being teased. They didn’t realize that I was being harassed on a daily basis for years, and near the end, harassed by kids from other schools because of the lies that my classmates had told them. Plus, kids do shit that falls under the radar of adults. Much of the bullying was when the teacher’s back was turned and no adults were around. Everyone knew how bad it was for me, based on what they observed, but it was far, far worse than that. And it wasn’t so much that people didn’t give a fuck – there were people to whom I wish have awesome lives because they did care, and there were a lot of people who didn’t feel that I deserved it even if they were apathetic in general. It’s just that it was such a huge problem that no one wanted to try to find a solution a for it, and I also think that they didn’t know how to stop it. That, coupled with the fact that adults didn’t take me seriously as to how bad it was because they didn’t see the under-the-radar stuff, created a perfect storm of misery until I went to high school.
It’s really hard to struggle through this stuff when you are effectively alone and people are making comments like “Why haven’t you killed yourself already?” But it’s not just the way the school structure is – it’s that no one wants to believe you. I knew their parents, and most of the bullies’ parents were decent people who probably would have been horrified had they known what their child was doing. Hell, it was a Catholic school, and some of those bullies had brothers and/or sisters in other grades, and even they were a bit shocked at the bullying, but again, it’s not like anyone really did anything to help me. I wasn’t different from anybody else, our teachers didn’t really bully us and for the most part were nice people, and my mother was fiercely anti-bullying. I think it was more of people not really comprehending what was going on or how bad it was and assuming that my eventual silence on the subject meant that everything was okay.
I was just a normal kid, and if that kind of shit can happen to normal kids…well, that idea’s a little a scary for a parent, that your child can be bullied so harshly that they want to commit suicide. It’s like any victim blaming, really. Most people don’t want to acknowledge that it can happen to their children. Honestly, though, I wish I had that luxury but I don’t. And I really feel for Amanda and her family and I hope that they find the peace that they deserve.
[blockquote] Talking about the suicide of 15-year-old Amanda Todd, it’s tempting to look for quick answers, to condemn the technology she was using, to believe we can prevent future Amandas from making the same choice by speaking out against “bullying.” But calling it “bullying” or even “cyberbullying” doesn’t do it justice. “Bullying” erases specific social factors and makes it seem like something that you age out of. Adding the “cyber” prefix doesn’t necessarily make it more accurate. Technology was a catalyst, but webcams, cellphones, and the Internet aren’t the key to understanding what happened to Amanda; systemic sexism was. [/blockquote] This article is dead on: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jarrah-hodge/amanda-todd-bullying-gender-slut-shaming_b_1964337.html
@drashizu
Firefighter + kitten = the best thing.
[Putting on former sociology minor hat]. In one of my sociology classes, we read Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids by Murray Milner and (simplification ahead) he argues that the reason high school is so awful is that given the lack of choices that teenagers have combined with the free time they end up forming what a status-based hierarchy that is fairly similar to a caste system, since status–which only exists in the minds of your peers–cannot be taken away from you by outsiders. The problem is that status-based systems are inelastic, so you can’t go up without booting someone down, so what happens is once it gets established everyone above you rabidly defends their place against you, and you rabidly defend your place against those below you. Also, he argues that in many schools, the boys’ ranks are based on traits like athleticism and the girls’ ranks are based on how attractive they are to guys, so…
The importance of this tends to decline in the older years of high school because everyone gains a bit of status just from aging up and also probably because they start to have lives outside of school (though all my summer jobs taught me is “I don’t want to work these kinds of jobs anymore”).
He also argues that there is a continuum between hierarchical schools, where there are different groups arranged in a hierarchy, and pluralistic schools, where there are different groups but they don’t rank neatly. The first tend to be nastier for bullying.
I was just at the grocery store, and overheard a conversation between two men that made me want to go back outside and slam my head in the truck door. These two fine upstanding gentlemen were talking about “loose women,” and who amongst their acquaintance fit this bill, I shit you not. It took all my self-control not to say, “You should get down on your knees and thank whoever that ANY women are giving your stank asses the time of day.”
Seriously, guys, it’s 2012, knock off the slut-shaming. This shit needs to end.
As was covered in Encyclopedia Dramatica, TJ has been harassed in a similar fashion over the last year or so. He’s probably upset that most people don’t feel sorry for him.
Wait, he’s got nudes out there and he was being blackmailed with them? Odd.
Yeah… I guess my give-a-shit is broken when it comes to vile shitstains being harassed in ways similar to their own behavior. I know I should probably get that looked at, but it’s probably going in the queue behind the sink full of dishes and the unpacked boxes from moving four months ago and…
@lowquacks – No, it’s an Anglican church and primary school. Hopefully they also have a low opinion of that tosser Jensen (did you see he was whining recently about funerals celebrating people’s lives – and playing Going My Way, oh the horror! – instead of pushing the ‘you’re all going to hell’ line? Thank goodness the old tosser’s retiring).
I’m glad to see the ‘they don’t speak for us’ isn’t just this church. The more who say Wallace and co. are losers, liars and scumbags the better. Put ’em on the outer, like Westboro. Maybe the politicians will eventually get the idea that a) the fundies don’t represent Christianity and b) Christianity doesn’t represent Australia.
I am not really seeing how his nudes being distributed would in any way excuse his behavior in the OP.
For one, he is a grown ass man, Amanda was a 14 year-old girl (and girl does apply here unlike when MRA like to use the word). Grown-ups generally tend to be able to deal with harassment a little easier than kids/teenagers.
I also highly doubt that he was literally physically assaulted by his peers and abandoned by all his friends once the nudes where released.
IMO, it’s not even remotely comparable and the fact that he’s making out that Amanda was somehow less “strong” than him because she couldn’t stand it, is especially stupid seeing as she had obviously had to deal with more shit over it than he did. That he is trying to make himself out to be a hero over this just makes me even less sympathetic to him.
Did anyone see this post by Eivind Berge?
http://fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=90076