I feel bad about this, I really do, but isn't it totally predictable? This is what teenagers are like. The idea that this "private picture" would have remained private is hopelessly naive. Boys who possess nude pictures of girls show them to their friends. This I know from experience, except that in my case, it was just a seventh grade friend of mine sneaking a Playboy into the back of the electronics lab. Teenagers love a victim, and they particularly love to call slut when it stands a chance of doing real damage.
Maybe there was a time when a girl could get away with this without major fallout. Like in the age of Polaroids. She could have snapped a photo and slipped it in her boyfriend's locker. Still, it might have been passed around among his friends, but no way it would have been seen by hundreds. It might have passed by word of mouth, but it would have just been plankton floating in the deep blue sea of the high school gossip, and most importantly, it would have been hearsay. She would have been teased, but she'd be able to plausibly deny having done it, and it would all blow over.
Digital media makes this sort of thing that much more dangerous because it's so easily copied and transmitted to others (and without sacrificing one's own copy). Furthermore, the ease of duplication makes the meme practically immortal for anyone who wants to get his hands on it.
What distressed me most was this passage:
The school resource officer at Sycamore [High School] said he tried to do something about Jessie’s case. He said he confronted the kids who were harassing Jessie and even took Jessie's case to the prosecutor to see if he could press charges. But he said that because Jessie was 18, there were no laws to protect her. He said he'd like to work with the Logans to have the laws changed.She was eighteen. She was so close to college, the part of your life where you really can, if you want to, reject everything that was ever said about your high school self, and start over fresh. You can reject the prudish but titillated clique that would torture you for something like this. You can lay down roots where they've never heard of you before. And you can conduct your naive, not-even-debauched forays into sexuality with relative impunity. Put it this way: I knew sluts in college, but I didn't know anybody with "a reputation." Even if a girl was objectively easy, she wasn't a victim of that fact; she owned it, and this was true to such a degree that (since, for me anyway, the centre hasn't held) it often registered more as a strength than as a weakness. Not in every case, but often enough to warrant my saying so.
Unrelated, but I wanted to welcome a new contributor, S. Not sure if you're going for anonymity or style on the name front. If it's the former, I need you to say so, because I don't want to accidentally "out" you by using your name, which I will most assuredly do eventually in the absence of specific instructions otherwise.
Also, good luck to Stirling at FCW.
Most welcomed: "S." is an attempt at minimal style by way of laziness or, with some polish, "expediency."
ReplyDeleteI'll have more to contribute, so far I haven't had enough time to read posts, research, if need be, and formulate cogent or interesting responses.
Good luck, Stirling!
Stan.
Truly, college can afford certain “lots” or “gaps” for freedom, but I’d caution that these possibilities are supremely circumstantial. They are not a given, simply because you are in “college”, or thinking of the popular Jim Belushi poster/shirt from Animal House: “COLLEGE.” Your frequent use of the word “can” in the paragraph that begins with “She was eighteen” supports this point, and I doubt that we’d disagree here.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of this poor, poor girl, or other people in similarly horrible binds, I’d fear that college might not secure that immanent, longed for freedom. The factors are numerocious:
Presuming that high school alums are at the college, what’s the total size of the student body?
What’s the proportion of high school people within that student body?
Will any of the girl’s college friend-groups contain or tangentially contain members from that high school?
Presuming much, to what extent could the girl retain her good friends from high school in college while limiting contact to other, less desirable high school alums now at the college?
Even without presuming that her high school alums are at the college, you might also ask:
Does the girl have the money or aid to attend a college that would afford her some freedoms?
How wide reaching was the incident? Did it spread to other towns, throughout the state, across the nation?
From the legal side:
Would prosecuting the boy and his friends bring more unwanted attention or less?
Any of the reparations that the court could offer wouldn’t really change her social situation (or would they?), so what could the court offer?
I’m more curious of the theoretical possibilities of this last question and less interested in disputing the possibility of an applicable law.
For the girl in question, I initially thought that her life could only improve with college, but I’m not so sure.
"less interested in disputing the creation of an applicable law." I mean.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Well, I suppose I had phrased my hopes for her in terms of shaking the dust of her shitty little town from her feet and hightailing it as far across the country as she could make it. And if the option were available to her (fiscally, etc.), that's exactly what I'd tell her to do, since she clearly grew up surrounded by people she'd be better off without.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right that going cross-country for college isn't an option for everybody, and even if long distance wouldn't create an unbearable financial burden, timing could be a problem. For example, if the shit hit the fan in the middle of spring, it could be too late to garner a new acceptance at a far-away school.
Even so, I don't think it's impossible to lose shitty people in a crowd even if you're stuck close to home for a year. LSU was maybe a fifteen minute drive from my high school, but by the end of my first year, I could count on one hand the number of people from my senior class that I kept in regular touch with. And I wasn't even trying to get rid of them.
Maybe just as importantly, college would broaden the horizons for her tormentors as well. I mean, seriously, it would not take long for them to recognize that on a college campus, this would make for some pretty tame gossip.
Finally, more than likely, peer pressure was an important factor in driving contempt to become so uniform thoughout the high school student body. Students who independently could not have cared less about the photo probably joined in the sneering because they saw others doing it. Assuming that the coherence of a high school peer group dissipates rather rapidly upon reaching college (as it has in my experience), the peer group probably would not be able to exert the same kind of pressure to conform as it did in high school.
As far as the legal issues, a restraining order forbidding communication could be justified in some circumstances, assuming that there are laws that would allow for one to issue.
I'm not sure that in this instance the purpose of prosecution would be to punish the harassers. Rather, if there were a law on the books criminalizing this sort of harassment, then the hope would be that by threatening to prosecute, you could put a stop to the behavior, without having to follow through on the threat.
Upon rereading, I should admit that all of the reasons I've given in my previous comment for why I think that going to college, even if it's the same one where many of her high school peers matriculated, would have worked a considerable benefit, are definitely contingent upon my assumption that the high school peer group would become significantly diluted at college.
ReplyDeleteAre there any colleges you're aware of though, that are overrun by students from one particular high school? I feel like that assumption is generally-speaking a pretty good one.
A few points.
ReplyDeleteYour more extended response certainly applies to large state schools and perhaps some middle-sized schools. It also applies to those people who can afford to go somewhere distant and freeing, scholarship recipients, the middle-upper middle class. At least roughly speculating. So, yeah, I don't have much of a quarrel with the generalization.
Although, some of my ULL friends did say that they saw people from their high school all the time while walking around campus. Of course, high school alums weren't the only people they saw.
I do now wonder whether or not people who attend community colleges, division II schools, generally small schools, or (maybe as a stretch) trade schools would also find that freedom. I also wonder whether the people that attend these schools are more likely to come from lower-income families and are less likely to attend colleges farther away.
Seems like if you are poor, are near a small local college, and are in a region of a state where the colleges are extremely far apart, you might continue to suffer.
Hmm, seems like kids who earn scholarships, no matter their class, as well as the middle and upper-middle classes might a better chance at freedom in college. Guess it depends on size of schools nearby, size of city, distance of colleges, etc.
Legally, I'm curious to know what sort of objections other people might have to creating applicable harassment laws. Eh, but that could be a different post.
Your link to the article is the wrong link. I was wondering where it said that she was going to college at all.
ReplyDeleteI think you also have to figure there might be more to this suicide. If you think this is tragic, I've heard several stories over the years of suicides from internet ridicule. Sometimes it's not enough to be anonymous.
The link is fixed. I don't know how that happened. Sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteI assumed that college was on the horizon for her. That's not in the article, and I could be wrong.
Sean, as for what you said about Internet harassment, while I know that this never occurs to its victims, it's actually not that hard to drop off the grid entirely. Unlike a bully who beats you up in the parking lot after school, you can unilaterally keep people from harassing you on the Internet. If the harassment is that bad, just shut down your MySpace account, Facebook account, blogs, and email addresses and start fresh. The harassment will stop.
ReplyDeleteIt may be a drastic solution (particularly to the mind of a high schooler), but if it's that or kill yourself, it looks like a no-brainer to me.
That was my point. It couldn't be simpler to fall off the grid, but suicides still happen. I was trying to say that sometimes, when people commit suicide, it says more about them than it does about their situation.
ReplyDeleteOK, I follow you now. It's just hard to know whether it's a good comparison, since the form of harassment she was suffering was not something that she could unilaterally turn off. Still, it's worth considering.
ReplyDelete