By: Landis Cornett and Chris Rider
This week, 15 year old Amanda Todd from Port Coquitlam took her own life. Over the past years she could not escape her bullies. As a young girl in grade 7 she liked to chat with friends on webcam. She met a guy online who told her how beautiful and perfect she was. He asked her to send a picture of her breasts, she agreed. What seemed like a new connection and something exciting turned into the worst situation for Amanda. One year after sending exposing pictures, the same guy tracked her down and sent her a Facebook message saying, “If you don’t put on a show for me I will send your picture to your friends, family, relatives and school.†It appears she refused and later that year, during Christmas break, Amanda found out that her picture had been sent to everyone she knew.
Amanda’s life was turned upside down by a choice she made in grade 7. She suffered humiliation, depression and constant harassment from her classmates and friends. She had to move to a new school to start fresh. Things were seemingly getting better. A year later, the guy sent her another message with a new list of all her friends and school. This time he also started a Facebook page with her breast as a profile picture. Once again Amanda had to deal with everyone judging, bullying and treating her like she was nothing. She moved schools again to escape the torment. Amanda was feeling vulnerable and again reached out to a person who she thought had cared for her. This time, it was a friend from her old school. He asked her to have sex and feeling like it was a path to a connection she obliged, even though she knew he had a girlfriend. She was confronted at her new school by the boy’s girlfriend, along with a large group of girls from her old school. She was punched and told that she should kill herself. She was being bullied every day, online, and at school.
Amanda was bullied to the point where she did not want to deal with life anymore. Life had become so painful and negative. No friends were there for her, no one stuck by her side and to think everything started from the mistake of sending an exposing picture. Amanda shared her story on YouTube through a sequence of brief messages written on white paper documenting the horrific things she endured and dealt with for years. A few weeks after sharing her video she took her life.
Reading this story today, the staff at BYTE felt heartbroken. We do a lot of work to reduce bullying in schools, and talk about it every day. But when a young girl commits suicide in such tragic circumstances, it makes this work feel more urgent and the task seems more monumental.
With technology, information is easier to access and connections with others can be easier to make, safe from the comfort of your own home. With this, comes the dark side. Predators have easier access to communicate with vulnerable youth and a new channel for bullying has become available. For someone whom the online space is such an integrated part of their life, “cyber-bullying†is just bullying. But using the online space for bullying can be devastating and the anonymity can make people vicious. To make matters worse, in many cases, the person responsible for bullying or spreading sensitive pictures is unknown and cannot be held accountable for the damage they have caused.
At BYTE, we will keep working hard to prevent bullying, inspired by the stories of young people like Amanda. From talking to youth, we know that rarely does a classmate mean it when they say something like “I hope you dieâ€. They say it without realising the deep hurt they cause. They say it because it will help them to seem acceptable amongst their peers. Or they say it because they have issues of their own and this is a way for them to vent. We will keep working to build confidence in youth, so they feel comfortable standing up to others who torment a classmate and we will use the story of Amanda, to show the real consequences of bullying.
We had already been planning to implement some programming for safe online behaviour and this story will give us more focus to get it complete. We hope we can be part of the solution, to help reduce the number of needless deaths. Amanda is not the only young person to commit suicide after years of torment, but the video she made makes her story more visceral and confronting. We hope this will be her legacy and that it will help to save more lives in the future.
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Amanda’s video was taken down from Youtube, but the full version can be seen on the CBC website.