Salon.com > Amanda Todd

Even a rocker can be bullied

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:03:00 +0000

It doesn't matter whether you're a lonely high school student or a successful, Billboard-charting star. One thing is certain: The trolls are going to find you. So what are you going to do when they come for you? More to the point, what are we all going to do, together?

That's a question musician Amanda Palmer, in her typically candid, crowd-sourcing way, got at in a blog post over the weekend, with revelatory results. In her post, she admits that while "ego surfing" for stories about herself one night, she found a different Amanda in her Google search. She hadn't heard of Amanda Todd before. She didn't know about the teenage girl who'd become a viral star for making a YouTube video about her struggles with "bullying, suicide, self harm." She didn't know that a month later, she committed suicide.

As Palmer notes, she shares more with Todd than just a first name. Both of them had been inspired by Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to tell their stories via a stream of note cards. And they both experienced the relentless viciousness of bullies.

A school reveals it has a “Fantasy Slut League”

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:56:00 +0000

No big deal. It was just a high school's secret "Fantasy Slut League." One in which female students, "unbeknownst to most of them," would be drafted and "male students [would] earn points for documented engagement in sexual activities" with them. One in which "participation often involved pressure/manipulation by older students that included alcohol to impair judgment/control and social demands to be popular, feel included and attractive to upper classmen." Or, as Piedmont, Calif.'s, school superintendent, Constance Hubbard, explains it, "The main thing is that I don't want to blow this out of proportion. I don't want to make it something that is some horrible big event that we found out about." I'm so glad that the "main thing" about the news of your school's society of secretly targeting girls, plying them with alcohol and sharing around "documented" evidence of sexual activity is, for your school superintendent, that nobody make a big deal about it. Way to prioritize, Constance Hubbard!

Amanda Todd’s only the start

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I picked up the phone and dialed the number for the local field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "I've found what I think is child porn," I told the operator, my voice shaking.

I was researching a popular "jailbait" message board this week when I discovered a thread filled with webcam screengrabs and videos of what looked to be pubescent girls in various states of undress and sexual activity. I've come across "barely legal" porn before, but this was different: These girls looked like they weren't a day over 13. The intimate webcam context lent an additional believability to it: It was easy to imagine someone convincing each of these seemingly underage girls via video chat to take off their clothes, all the while recording the action to later distribute far and wide or even to use as a bribe to get future "shows" out of them.

That is what so-called "cappers" do -- and they are what brought me to the jailbait message board in the first place, and ultimately to the FBI. They screen-capture live webcam chats -- which can involve anywhere from two to several hundred people -- while pressuring girls and young women to strip down. It starts with "show your stomach!" and quickly progresses from there like an online game of Truth or Dare. Sometimes all they get is a quick bra flash; other times they get a full-on "bate" (when a girl masturbates on camera). In the capper community, the latter would be called a "win."

The war on 12-year-old girls

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:05:00 +0000

Behold the scariest, most dangerous creature in America: the 12-year-old girl. Better shut her down.

It's been an alarmingly terrible week for girls. There's been the sickening story of the death of Amanda Todd, whose odyssey of bullying and shaming began when she was a curious seventh-grader who responded to a webcam user's request for a "flash" of her young breasts. On the bright side, though, there was also the cheery news that vaccinations won't turn 11- and 12-year-old girls into dirty whores. That's got to be some form of possible advancement for female health, because "promiscuity risk" is still the No. 1 concern parents have about Gardasil, the vaccine against the HPV virus that can lead to cervical cancer. Great to know we live in a country where families are more worried about the imaginary risk of their daughters' sexual behavior than the real one of viruses and cancer.

Amanda Todd’s “jailbait” blackmailer targeted

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:55:00 +0000

The story of 15-year-old Amanda Todd differs in many ways from that of 49-year-old Reddit troll Michael Brutsch. But where these two recent narratives dovetail is in the way they both illuminate the harrowing world of anonymous bullying — and the devastating real-world consequences of the stomach-turning online culture of "jailbait."

In September, the British Columbia teenager Todd posted a chronicle of "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" on YouTube. In the nearly nine-minute video, Todd silently told, via handwritten notes, of first going on webcam as a seventh-grade student, and of the person who'd asked her to flash him. She did, and a year later, he found her on Facebook and demanded she "put on a show" or he'd send the topless photo of her to her friends and family. She refused, and he followed through on his threat, setting off a chain of grotesque events. As Todd battled depression and anxiety and drugs, she said the man created a Facebook page to broadcast the image. She changed schools and still endured "name calling" and being "judged," and friendlessness. "I can never get that photo back. It's out there forever," she wrote. She was teased and harassed, beaten up. She attempted suicide by drinking bleach. "Every day I think, why am I still here?" she wrote. Now, she isn't. Todd died last week, and a local school official told the Star she'd committed suicide.