This morning, I woke up and followed a link to some incredibly poignant commentary about Hope Witsell’s suicide, a topic I tried and failed to talk about the way I wanted to on the most recent Kink On Tap episode. Thankfully, I now have Sylvia’s words to put to my feelings. In What happened to Hope Witsell, Sylvia writes:
It was not that, as this putrid “news†article disgustingly asserts, “The downward spiral of Hope’s life was unstoppable.â€
If everyone I know who had a picture of their boobs on the internet before their 18th birthday killed themselves, I’d have a lot of dead friends. I wouldn’t be around to remember them, though, since I’d be dead too.
It wasn’t SEXTING.
It was you, adults, all the adults in her life.
I feel that the full blog post is simply required reading.
On Twitter, Cos pointed me at another commentary from The Curvature. He sent this commentary to Andrew Meacham, the author of the original news story. Although I tried, I simply couldn’t read through Mr. Meacham’s article because of the overwhelming anger I felt at each turn where he (and the numerous commenters on the article) twisted this story around to blame Hope herself, to stigmatize her because she was stigmatized, to shame her for being a victim, to paint her as the one to be punished for her “impetuous move.”
We as a society have become so good at victimizing victims, at absolving ourselves of any wrongdoing, of telling ourselves all the lies we need to hear to make everyone believe “there was nothing we could do,” when in fact we did nothing at best, or were the active ingredient in creating the terminal disease of sexual shaming at worst. If you can’t see that there is a parasitic insistence of a karmic theory of she-got-what-she-deserved so insidiously lodged into the minds and hearts of so many people, then you may not have Hope’s—and other youth like Hope’s—best interests in mind. For god’s sake, please look again.
In her TEDTalk, gang rape survivor and real-life hero Sunitha Krishnan, says:
I was 15 when I was gang raped by 8 men. I don’t remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were 8 men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn’t go into my consciousness. I never felt like a rape victim then or now. But what lingered from then to now—I’m 40 today—is this huge outrageous anger. [For] two years I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated because I was a victim. […] We, as a civil society, we have Ph.D.s in victimizing a victim.
(Skip to 2:45 for the quote.)
Back on Twitter, Cos urged me to write to Mr. Meacham. So I wrote him this, which I want to share here:
Dear Mr. Meacham,
I am writing to direct your attention to some very poignant commentary regarding your article in the St. Petersburg Times printed on the TampaBay.com website covering the tragic suicide of Hope Witsell.
The commentary I hope you will read is here:
http://sylviasproblem.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-happened-to-hope-witsell/
I believe the commentary I linked above is extremely important because it expressly discusses the angle with which news stories like this are covered and provides some insight into how to do so in order to help the Witsell and other families in the future.
It is my sincerest hope that you read the above commentary with an open mind.
Thank you very much.
This is about all I can take before breakfast time. I hope the rest of my day isn’t quite so depressing.
Update: Mr. Meacham replied to my email, although I won’t republish his email here as I never asked if I could do so. My understanding of his reply is that, as a reporter, he feels it is only appropriate to report on things that actually occurred (i.e., tangible events), and not to make any implications about their cause or effects. This is a very appropriate thing for a reporter to be doing.
by Gorgias
14 Dec 2009 at 16:28
If it was only appropriate to report on actual events, he shouldn’t have gone heavy handed on the “her suicide is a result of her posting naked pictures,” thing.l
by Rachel C.
26 Dec 2009 at 08:46
I’m a journalism student, and it would be really disheartening if someone told me that my job was only to recount “tangible events” like a logbook keeper might, and therefore should not be asking questions about cause and effect or looking for those answers. As you really smartly pointed out, probably 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. I would have wanted to ask school officials what they were thinking, and how they disciplined (or didn’t) the student-bullies? Granted, it sounds like Meacham contacted the school district through a spokeswoman who declined to comment, but it was irresponsible of him not to pursue those questions any further, opting instead to write a story that merely details and, in some places, sensationalizes Hope’s life and the events leading to her death.
by Sascha
29 Dec 2009 at 16:10
What a heartwrenching story.
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.
by maymay
04 Jan 2010 at 14:06
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. ;)
by Madam Harkonnen
07 Jan 2010 at 13:30
My brother hung himself at the age of 17 (22 years ago) after going down to the beach one night for a quiet wank by himself, getting spotted and then reported by someone out walking their dog and then being arrested.
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.”