Perfunctory Tuesday: Teen committed suicide over ‘sexting’

[Mizango]

I think Parents need to start sitting down with their kids and telling them that shit in High School means nothing once you're out of there.

Exactly, looking back on all of my HS friends and classmates is awesome though. Many are homeless, have raging crack habits and/or went from Cheerleader to welfare queen in a matter of years.

High school is a fucking joke. A lot of people believe that truly is the apex of adulthood which is sad.

[Tomk]

I got to point at the parents here. High School teasing didn't start with cell phone pics and it isn't gonna end there. The pics are a big scapegoat for bad parenting.

On another note, she was teased by younger girls, not boys.... Yeah they were jealous.

[GeneJackit]

I do agree that High School really means nothing in the greater scheme of things, but c'mon, you really just cant tell someone that High School is meaningless when that is their life...I think you need to really to really teach you're kids to learn some perspective about high school...I dont think it would work if you just kept telling them over and over that its meaningless

I also think HS is a lot easier for guys as well (sorry ladies) so you really need to have a soft touch when it comes to a teenage girl

[Acturus]

Girl's fault for being stupid enough to take pictures of herself and send them, and then to not come clean to an authority figure about the ensuing abuse.

Ex-boyfriend's fault for coercing the girl into taking/giving the pictures, and he's definitely liable for some sort of child pornography charge, as are the "young girl" bullies.

School's fault for not having a better handle on bullying.

I'd also like to blame the mother, but it's too hard to say if she was closed off due to bad parenting, or normal teenagery.

What I'd like to know is that, out of this "39 percent of teens [that] are sending or posting sexually suggestive messages," how many are actually pictures and sexually explicit content, and how many are just "suggestive". In addition to that, how many images are of persons known by those senders or recipients, and how many are just downloaded porn.

And, it's nice to pretend that High School doesn't matter, but High School never leaves us. Out here in the real world, there's still petty drama, insecurities, and a desire for acceptance by our peers. High School is a template for life, and the best we can hope for is that we gain a good understanding of how to avoid the shit, and deal with it in a healthy manner when we can't avoid it. The only difference between High School and life is that most of us left our raging hormones behind. Mind you, that blessing is offset by the fact that we have no more safety net, and the whole "provide for myself" thing gets pretty tricky at times.

[Katlan]

This is just another example of people who get so worked up over things that the think their life is over. Seriously... Something fucked up happens to you and the only thing you can think of is to kill urself?

[DragonCloud64]

I haven't seen or heard her father during any of this(if she has one). Here's the news link if anyone's interested Teen Commits Suicide -- Is Sexting to Blame? - Lemondrop

[Dimmauk]

I think we should blame everyone but the girl who killed herself. I'm looking at you Zach Effron and High School Musical.

[Seraph]

I think we should blame everyone but the girl who killed herself. I'm looking at you Zach Effron and High School Musical.

If the chastity belt covered her whole body, this never would have happened!

[Eticket]

Reading through it again, I think her going on tv just fueled it. Typically teenagers have pretty short attention spans for this sort of thing. Like others have said it's a shame no one was there to tell her none of it really mattered and would go away eventually on its own.

I think we should blame everyone but the girl who killed herself. I'm looking at you Zach Effron and High School Musical.

lol

[ferigor]

This is more of a moral question. If you were the mother and you had the guy's name would you release it to the public? It would essentially ruin his life(at least for the foreseeable future.) Or would you take the "high road" and allow the douchebag to live his life?

If they charged him with distributing child porn, he'd have to get registered as a sex offender. This has been happening in a lot of these "Sexting" cases recently. Being a registered sex offender would be a pretty good way to fuck up the rest of your life anyway.

[Dimmauk]

lol

I wasn't sure anyone would get that. Good job LOL

[pohibaba]

I think it's absolutely moronic to ruin the rest of the ex-boyfriend's life simply for sending some pictures to some friends; for science's sake, she took them willingly.

[Elvis]

oh my science

[Snprphnx]

this is a sad case indeed. as my 12th grade english professor said:

"take a look around at your classmates. Everyone from mere acquaintances to closes friends. within 2 years of graduating, you will only be seeing or talking to 4-5 of them, and within 5 years, you may talk to 1 occasionally."

everyone who i have run into since then (11 years now) has only talked to those they bump in to here or there.

All you high school kids out there... There is life after graduation, and it won't involve the people you are in school with now

[tenriotaru]

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d8...4111991785.jpg
Pass these around during middle school. It'll catch on eventually.

[drwaffles]

It annoys me when people respond to these kinds of stories with comments along the lines of "how stupid, why kill yourself over this?!". We have no idea what else was going on in this girl's life that may have led her to suicide - common sense should tell us that there was more than simple bullying troubling her. Why else would an attractive young woman feel so desperate for a way out that she would resort to taking her own life?

Suicide is not melodramatic, it's too final. "Attempted" suicide for the purpose of gaining attention, sure, but not the real deal. Sane people don't tend to kill themselves over trivial matters.

[tenriotaru]

You've been a teenager before drwaffles (I hope.) Or you've at least been around a group of them, they get hung up on some of the most seemingly insignificant things or let really small things become the center of their attention whether it be good or bad. This girl was just unfortunate in that she had no one to point her to the ocean and say, "compared to this your problems are tiny! There are way bigger things in life than high reputation or what some stupid kids think about you."

The speech could go longer... I guess. It really does suck that she turned to that and it isn't completely her fault for not thinking about other alternatives since she was practically driven into that corner by a douche.

When I was in high school I was about 4'9" and everybody would pick me up and carry me places like I was some kind of kindergardner. Now to this day I'm wary around people taller than me and I HATE being picked up. That kind of trauma lasts awhile!

[Araelus]

Sane people don't tend to kill themselves over trivial matters.

It annoys me when people misjudge what doesn't matter and what has lasting significance. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Usually, it doesn't result in death.

Every case of suicide, to me, is someone making a bad decision which precludes them from making any more decisions. The path which led them to that decision no doubt influenced it. I once got a fortune cookie that said:

"Remember failure isn't final, unless it kills you."

I wondered who let Woody Allen back into the fortune-cookie plant.

For a number of reasons, this girl thought she was better off dead. She was wrong, but no-one stopped her in time. All we can do in examining counter-factual cases is try to figure out how she might have been convinced to do something concrete with her potential, instead of quitting life. And of course that raises the question of whether people should be allowed to kill themselves.

If society thinks you have a life ahead of you, it gets mad when you kill yourself. If society thinks your life sucks, it doesn't care much. Interesting.

[drwaffles]

Of course I'm not saying that teenagers aren't prone to adopting "end-of-the-world" mentalities over trivial things, I'm guilty of that myself sometimes. However, there's a big difference between feeling like that and wanting to kill yourself. That's my point.

[HAcoreRD]

Guess she cared too much what others thought of her?

I suppose the 'boyfriend' is going to be sued by her family and other crap now because the girl didn't realize what a picture can do.

"a picture's worth a thousand words", and this girl didn't see what a picture did to Vanessa Hudgens?

I sympathize for life loss, but at the same time, it was avoidable if she wasn't stupid about placing her trust.