Ruminations

A Mother's Pain, Society's Loss

Youth culture in Canada, as elsewhere in North America has become 'cosmopolitan', sickeningly, slickly sophisticated in a manner that we might never have imagined decades earlier.

More Canadian, very young people are smoking marijuana, the music that youth listen to is explicitly sexual in nature and degrading to women in a new and menacing manner, alluding to date rape and social drug use to loosen inhibitions. There is a generalized lack of respect for anything, and social media details just how cynical young people are, how degraded their values tend to be in the aggregate.

Bullying, in the sense of cliques and exclusion has always been around, but with the prevalence of social media, young people become ever more vulnerable to excess and abuse, when they're approached to be 'friended' on sites like Facebook. It was through Facebook invitations that a trio of female teens in Ottawa -- and a 15-year-old was the worst offender -- lured other teens with the promise of friendship, and managed to bully them into prostitution, the avails of which they took for themselves.

It has been through social media that teen-age boys advertise their prowess in sexual invitations to young girls. Nothing seems to be off limits. And the casual atmosphere surrounding people's privacy, and the easy availability of sexual favours only encourages youthful predators to become more overt, bolder, incautious and brutal.

Yet another young girl has fallen victim to gang rape, resulting in boasting videos available over the Internet, and ongoing harassment, causing her to commit suicide.

Now the same social media that seems to have given free license to youth to express themselves in whatever punishingly criminal manner they feel expresses their need to reveal themselves as virile, hormone-fuelled predators whose triumphs require public revelation, is responding with angry censure at their vile rejection of human decency.

Thousands of enraged people are calling upon the Halifax Regional School Board and Halifax police to revisit the events that led to Rehtaeh Parsons' death.

But, in fact, it is families, it is parents who are responsible for early exposure to decency and good social examples for youth; the school environment merely augments those values, it does not, and should not, initiate them. So where are all the responsible parents in all this?

Why aren't parents more involved in what their children are doing, what their interests are, to guide them and channel their curiosity and behaviours into acceptable, respectful and decent social behaviours?

Now, Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry pledges a review by his government of the manner in which police handled the case of a 17-year-old girl reporting being raped by three teens who went on to post photographs and videos of their criminal assault, exulting pridefully in their extraordinary adventure in destroying the psyche of a young girl.

What is puzzling is not only that it could occur with such a blatant disregard for the well-being of another human being, but that it could be celebrated, that others in the community, rather than being outraged at the vicious attack on one of their peers, chose instead to deride her and make light of her pain, rather than stand beside her to demand justice.

And what is extremely puzzling is that despite what must be seen as evidence in the prevalence of videos and photographs demonstrating what had occurred, and obvious witnesses to a gang rape at a teen party, police have not managed to amass sufficient evidence to make appropriate arrests, to bring the matter to trial, and to see justice done.

With the kind of response to her pain that Rehtaeh Parsons saw, there is little reason for her attackers to believe they would ever be punished, and there was little reason for Rehtaeh Parsons to think that her treatment by her peers, by authorities, by the justice system would ever produce a balm to her torment.