Taylor Nigrelli
Assistant Sports Editor
The internet is a wonderfully fascinating invention. You can search any fact from an infinite base of knowledge from nearly anywhere. You can join the more than one billion people who use Facebook, you can share your thoughts with the world via blog or browse countless other sites.
Disturbingly, you can also harass and bully a 15- year-old girl into committing suicide.
On Oct. 10, 15-year-old Amanda Todd of British Columbia, Canada, was found dead in her home. The death was later ruled a suicide. Her death, and the story behind it, has since received international attention, including over 600,000 people joining a Facebook group in her honor, according to an Oct. 15 NationalPost.com story.
Incredibly, the buzz behind her death has been somewhat negative. On my personal social media sites and in examples shown in online articles, I’ve seen disgraceful and sickening posts.
Todd received local attention in her hometown after she was coaxed into “flashing” an unidentified older man on a webcam. The man took a picture of her breasts and posted them all over the internet. Todd was bullied into leaving her old school, only to be discovered and harassed again at her new school. The stress of the situation caused her to become a target of both physical and cyber bullying, lose friends, turn to drugs and alcohol and eventually engage in self-mutilation, according to a YouTube video she posted less than a month before her death.
Her suicide should exclusively be a lesson on the traumatic effects of cyber-bullying. Instead, people who have never met Todd have taken the opportunity to climb on their high horses and judge her for actions she took at the age of 13. Posts from her former classmates showed no remorse for their fatal actions. Instead, they echoed such sentiments as “I’m glad she’s dead,” “No one liked her anyway” and “It’s about time,” as reported in the NationalPost.com story.
People who never met her around the world posted about how it was Todd’s own fault she died and deserved to be bullied. One man, Justin Hutchings, was fired from his job at a men’s store in London, Ontario, for his negative post on the Amanda Todd memorial Facebook page, according to an Oct. 16 Toronto Star article.
Perhaps the most chilling part of this whole ordeal was the video Todd posted on YouTube telling her story of the last two years of her life. She details the mistakes she’s made and how horribly she was treated by everyone around her. People mocked her for her suicide attempts and posted Facebook statuses stating their desire for her to actually kill herself.
The most heart-wrenching moment of the video is when Todd holds up a card asking for help from anyone who will give it. The video ends with a picture of her wrists, fresh with blood.
It’s time for this heartless harassment to end. It’s time for everyone to realize that 13-year-olds make mistakes, and they shouldn’t be condemned for it.
Everyone needs to make a change, not just the bullies. It’s time for teachers to be more vigilant when it comes to demonstrating an anti-bullying philosophy. It’s time for parents to monitor what their children are doing and saying on the internet. It’s time for cyber-bullying to be taken seriously as a crime.
Even those who have come out in support of Todd can change. If someone’s being bullied, try to put an end to it. If you notice someone is subtly crying out for help, try to help them. If you notice cutting scars on someone’s arms or legs, talk to them and convince them to seek help.
As the late, great Tupac Shakur once said, “Let’s change the way we treat each other.”
nigreltn11@bonaventure.edu
