Elizabeth, Rehtaeh, and Audrie: With the Tools Against Them, the World Was Not Enough

    I've been avoiding writing about Rehaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott, the two teenage girls who committed suicide recently following sexual attacks, bullying and non-responses (or worse) from their communities. Not because I don't think their cases are important, but because the first time I delved into the world of a kind, loving and otherwise typical adolescent who was driven to suicide because of sexual violence and a negative response from her community, it nearly broke my heart. Her name was Elizabeth Seeberg, and she was 19. Rehtaeh was 17. Audrie, God keep her, was only 15.  Elizabeth was from Illinois, Rehtaeh from Nova Scotia, and Audrie from California. While they lived different lives, they had some observable characteristics in common, and these things are not unimportant. They underscore the horror these women experienced- less, possibly, from the attacks- then from the response that eventually drove them into the cold embrace of death. All three were objectively beautiful in terms of Western ideals. All three appear to have had (and I know personally that Elizabeth had), loving families and supportive caregivers. They were physically healthy and active. They had the resources of middle class incomes and the relative freedom to pursue their dreams in dynamic and democratic societies. Outside of the context of their victimization, in terms of their stations in life and potential, it could be argued that they had the world itself before them. And yet they're dead, all three of them, by their own hands.The world was not enough.That shouldn't be surprising, because nothing is enough when you're violated in the most fundamental way imaginable and then face the often greater nightmare of public humiliation, shame and rejection in its wake. Those things have always been reality for sexual violence survivors of course, particularly in non-stranger cases (the vast majority that occur). But it was modern technology- the kind that all three grew up with and that could have been listed among their assets as emerging citizens of the new age- that made their ordeals seem so horribly infinite."Infinite" is the carefully chosen and correct term for what Audrie and Rehtaeh in particular faced. The evermore nimble, powerful, and globally connected computers we still refer to as "cell phones" make the projection of our every memorialized moment as effortless as the practiced dance of slender, trained fingers over a tiny glass screen. In Elizabeth's case, text messaging warned her that the colossus, Notre Dame football, was not to be trifled with. In Audrie's case, her violators allegedly wrote on her body in permanent marker and then photographed their work with such a device. In Rehtaeh's case she was allegedly photographed unawares while being raped; as it was happening, an accomplice shouted "take a picture!"A picture. Once a delicate amalgam of chemicals on special paper, it's now merely another manifestation of electronic communication, ready instantly for a worldwide web of limitless vectors and endless, light-speed traveled avenues. For Audrie and Rehtaeh, trapped without locks in the incubators of dread that their own bedrooms became, the predicable questions were surely asked: My God, who will see this? How many times will it be traded, forwarded, posted, mocked? We might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Combine that with the judgment both girls know the viewers would surely deliver to them as the photograph's subjects.And then there stood the abyss, before them both.Technology will not go backward and sexual violence will not be eradicated anytime soon. The sole option is moving forward in technology's relentless grasp so that sexual violence, when it occurs, won't be mocked foolishly in cyberspace to the detriment of its victims. Lizzy, Audrie and Rehtaeh were wounded by users, not the tools at their disposal. But because the tools are so much more powerful, because they allow the cruel, the vindictive, or simply the ignorant to cause so much more damage than ever before, we have an absolute duty to address cruelty, vindictiveness and especially ignorance more than ever before.If we don't, we can expect the roll of the dead to grow even faster than the sickening rate in which we're seeing it now.