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:
P Z Myers also blogged about that.
The Unamazing @$$hole then responded with this comment:
http://amazingatheist.tumblr.com/post/33569882975/hey-tj-you-are-not-liked-over-pharyngula-right-now
“Pharyngula? Isn’t that PZ Myers shitty little let’s-all-get-offended blog? Who could give a fuck about that anymore? In 2008 maybe that meant something, but that guy has gone off the deep end. The Thunderf00t debacle bears that out.”
The Amazing Manbaby has no empathy. He has a track record of saying this kind of heartless crap about suicidal people before.
Just because HE isn’t troubled by suicidal thoughts, he thinks everyone who has committed or attempted suicide is stupid. He’s the king of lazy internet solipsism.
I read the article someone linked above. The article was good, but the apologists in the comment thread made me throw up in my mouth a little. They could of just kept their mouths shut and let people empathize and mourn this poor girl, but something about framing her tragedy as driven by sexism and misogyny just made some of these guys livid.
But still, what couldn’t they just keep their mouths shut? I mean, just this once?
There was a lot of smack talk about how she made “mistakes” and how she should be responsible for them, and blah-blah-blargity-blah.
Someone totally fucked with her, then her peers fucked with her. Really, no sympathy at all? Would admitting that a girl was fucked with such a threat to their insular worldview?
These people are very small and unevolved…I don’t know how else to say it.
Huffington Post seems to have quite the MRA/NiceGuy troll family – though in fairness that’s on the US version I’ve seen most often, not this one, and none of the names were familiar. I gave up reading that site because not one single article could be posted about women’s concerns without the squeals about “why isn’t there a HuffPo men’s page?” and “women are evil sluts who then deny sex to their poor husbands” and so on and so on.
Jeko: Are you paying attention?
No.
1: This is Dave’s place. Think of it as his living room, and we are all guests. If he doesn’t like the way we act, he’s absolutely entitled to give us the bum’s rush.
2: He, by and large, doesn’t. Take a good look at any other thread. Examine them in detail I recommend you look for NWO. You could do a google string search for Brandon, David K. Meller, NWO Slave, or M R A L (take the spaces out), Tom Martin, or Toy Soldier, and see how much slack they were given.
3: He warned people., straight up, what was allowed. They chose to ignore that warning. Oops. If you go to China Lake Naval Weapons Station, and cross the fence, don’t be surprised if they shoot you; that’s if you don’t get killed by the minefields the signs on the fence warn you about. They aren’t joking.
I dunno, kitteh, I guess my mistake was trying to understand the mind-set of these whining trolls. They kind of remind of a bratty child who was under the impression they were the center of their parents’ universe, then another kid comes along and gets some attention because she scraped her knee. And they get all, “Waaaaah! She isn’t in pain! Now look at meeeeeeee!” Eh, I dunno.
Yeah, it’s not a mindset I can grasp without putting my Cynical Cap and Hostile Glasses on.
Well, me neither. I guess I find their lack of self-awareness unbelieveable. I mean, has no one in their life ever said, “Would you just listen to yourself?” I guess not. The self-examination just isn’t there.
http://xkcd.com/481/
Yes! That’s what I’m talking about, Sir Bodsworth.
I read all those comments, too, and they were awful. They were trying to make her mom into the villian and the stalker as either a victim or another woman. If they had actually read the stories or watched her video, they would have known better, unless they were just straight up lying.
@Sporklift
It’s bizarre to hear that your mother was fiercely anti-bullying and yet she didn’t recognise what was happening to you, and she didn’t do anything about it.
Have you spoken to her about it now you’re older? Does she believe it now? What did she consider to be ‘real’ bullying? What do you think she should/could have done at the time to fix things?
Gotta love facebook. Let’s see what the responses to this incident were: blaming the girl, blaming the parents, wanting the stalker to be raped/tortured/executed (even by vigilantes, it’s ok). Dammit, I’m forgetting some.
Well, anyway, FB is just not that good for your sanity.
Sir Bodsworth – if only!
Mind you there are those out there who’d listen to their own horrible messages and still think they were heroes.
@theboinicmommy
I saw those comments on that article too. If you look at the username of the one trying to pin the stalker as a lesbian, you’ll notice it looks very, very familiar.
For those who don’t want to look it up (provided it hasn’t been deleted) it’s our old friend “Dr.” Pell. I guess the lying little troll followed the link too.
There are “people” who live today that are no different than the people who lives in the times of the Roman coliseums, the theaters of death that pervaded that era of violence and butchery. Sick, twisted, perverse, and loathsome people who won’t stop a second to see the pain and misery they cause other people from their indifference to their fellow human beings, beings as valuable and vital as they think they are. These “people” can blame the mother and father for not being there, or whomever, but they don’t own the intelligence and compassion to blame the real perpetrators of her slide into suicide – their inhumanity.
Oh fuck, Dave’s not letting them spew their shit here, so they take it out on this poor blogger I linked who has no familiarity with these fuckwits whatever. Poor person must be wondering what the hell happened to the internet to make everyone so awful.
Did anyone call the little weasel-turd out?
What the hell is wrong with this guy?
Shit, I received some pretty traumatic bullying in Jr. High. I wore a shirt with Fido Dido wearing a clown hat, and some asshole told everyone it was a klansman. For the next 3 months, I had people I didn’t know telling me their friend saw a burnt cross in my front yard. I had girls smack me in the head in class without repercussion. I had friends ditch me in favour of the bullies, to the point where they participated in helping me get beat up. I began having suicidal thought, which honestly have never really gone away, even 25 years later.
I was lucky; I still had good friends and a fantastic family, and the fear of hurting them by my actions outweighed the pain I was going through. It was the only thing preventing my fantasies of walking into the gym locker room with pipe bombs and several pounds of nails from becoming a reality.
And TAA has gone through bullying himself? How can anyone who has gone through that sort of bullying have anything but sympathy for Amanda Todd?
Amazing Atheist, you’re an amazing asshole!
Pecunium, I think you’re going to have to be a bit more specific about the weasel turd in question.
Pell. I was wondering if anyone who saw his comments there pointed out what a sad sack of shit he is.
I see he’s also an admitted liar, unless of course he killed himself later that day?
That takes me back to the 1990s and (this is a reference probably only Aussies will know about) that idiot Pauline Hanson and her “If you are watching this video, I am dead” nonsense. Which she wasn’t, and isn’t.
“Amanda was 12 years old when she made a mistake that would haunt her until her death three years later.”
Oh, fuck this shit! Mistake? She made a mistake? Consensually posting a picture of your boobs isn’t a mistake. Spreading a picture of someone’s breasts without the breasts-owner’s consent is sexual assault. It wasn’t a “mistake” that haunted her; it was a rapey piece of rat shit.