Unfortunate Realities

When people are in anguished pain, they want some relief from their suffering. When a child dies, preferring to voluntarily surrender life to the expedient of suicide, because life seems just too much to bear, a sense of guilt infuses all of society. Someone is surely to blame, the reason for that child's abandonment of life must be sought out, and the accused must carry the stigma of responsibility. There are times when a single cause is discovered and relief is found from the emotional dungeon of despair.

And then there are those times when the reasons are numerous, intertwined, and confusing. Where the victim of the tragedy that ensued out of what might be construed as a deviation of a normal rite of passage to social maturity caused shame and a social outcasting of someone who like everyone else wants to 'fit in' be just like everyone else finds herself the subject of universal scorn among her peers. The fault, if such can be said, can be found in personality, circumstances and opportunity.

Rehtaeh Parsons is shown in a handout photo from the Facebook tribute page "Angel Rehtaeh." The RCMP say they have made two arrests in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, the 17-year-old Halifax girl who was taken off life-support following a suicide attempt in April.    Photograph by: Handout, Facebook, THE CANADIAN PRESS

 

Grieving parents of a 17-year-old girl, raised in a culture and a society where sexual experimentation sometimes goes beyond experiment into practise and in the process brings shame to girls, want to find someone to blame. Where else to look but at those whose participation in a social event led them to a situation where alcohol sufficiently loosened inhibitions to the point where mutual acquiescence to sex benefited them?

Perhaps the parents of all concerned were consumed with guilt that they knew very well from their own experiences that the formula of youth, hormones, sex, alcohol and social partying could result in an orgy of distraction and compulsion. And while knowing, do nothing to forewarn, to chaperone, to themselves take guiding parental responsibility. In the case of Rehteah Parsons, who appealed for a stop to the shaming and the Internet circulation of a cellphone video that disgraced her, there are no easy solutions.

She is dead by her own hand, badgered, ridiculed and shamed as representing someone she had no wish to be, a "slut". At a party of her peers where young people mingled, listened to music, drank alcohol and flirted, daring one another, enticing each other, and some breaking off to isolate themselves in upstairs home bedrooms, Rehteah Parsons was a drunk, giggling and willing participant in sex; group sex actually.

Her best friend, with a more level, self-preserving mindset, tried to persuade Rehteah to leave the bedroom where she lay naked with several boys, but she refused. That friend left the premises and brought her mother back with her, and neither was able to persuade Rehteah to leave. Whom to blame? There was no rape, as Rehteah's desperately bereaved parents wanted to believe, and consequently no young men to shame and blame and place on trial for the death of their daughter.

There was, however, the circulation of a cellphone video on social media that serviced quite well to appeal to the mean streak in most people, who enjoy seeing the social alienation that can be brought upon others victimized by misfortune and circumstances often beyond their control. Rehteah did not enjoy being an object of derision, her pleas that these things halt and desist went unanswered. She responded by taking steps to put a stop to her own very personal anguish.

The only criminal charges left to be exercised to help society and mourning parents exorcise their demons is to charge three young men with the crime of circulating child pornography, victims of their very own misfortune.