Although I didn’t know it at the time (I only found out earlier this year just after my Dad died) that Dad had torn strips off Iain up at the police station, telling Iain that he’d ruined his life. I’d always known that Dad felt incedibly guilty about what had happened, but it was only when I found out what he’d said that night that I wondered if he’d felt tortured every day for 22 years because he knew that *he* had ruined his son’s life.

Even though it all happened so long ago, I ended up in bereavement counselling shortly after getting that hammerblow piece of information, trying to deal with the new perspective on the ways in which my life had been warped by that single event.

So much grief and trauma, so many lives damaged or destroyed – Iain, my parents, me, our grandmother – because my Dad didn’t have the emotional tools to stand there, put his anger, shock and embarrassment to one side and hold his son and say, “Fuck ‘em, we’re with you.”

the most news-worthy part of this whole story—especially since the article was published over a month after the fact—was the school’s surprising response to her behavior, the possibility that her parents and principal were part of the bullying

Rachel, although I certainly believe that is so, we’re not all going to agree about which parts of the story is most “news worthy.” That, right there, is why I think objective reporting solely on “tangible events” such as the kind in this instance is, frankly, an unimpressive goal at best. It’s also why I’m not a journalist. ;)

While I agree that the “sexting” was most likely not what drove her to suicide, I don’t know if anyone can definitively say what drove this girl to suicide.

Yes, the spotlight put on her by the adults in her life was cruel and unfair. However, there could still be any number of factors that might have led to what happened.

That being said, I think the broader point brought up in this post and the article commentary is one that needs to be considered in the larger social discourse. It’s as if adults don’t remember what it was like to be a teenager. That’s the time when people start to figure out their sexual identities. When I was 13, I was a total nerd who had barely kissed a boy, but many of my peers were far more aggressive when it came to exploring their sexuality. To think that today those kids would risk having permanent marks on their records blows my mind.

It’s insane to brand someone for life because they expressed their sexuality as a teenager.