Amanda Todd Tragedy and Fake Fundraising

Amanda Todd's Story (click it, it's a link!)

Hopefully some of you will watch the video Amanda Todd posted before she committed suicide that tells of her experiences with bullying and cyberspace.

This week in class we discussed how you can either be completely anonymous or too personal on the internet, and how sometimes the false anonymity we rely on comes back to haunt us. When she was 13 years old, Amanda Todd flashed her breasts on webcam to a man, who unbeknownst to her, took a screen cap of her doing so. She had been told that she was beautiful, sexy, desirable, and over a year coerced into "flashing". Not a huge shock there, for we've discussed our society's obsession with female sexuality and letting women, especially young girls, know that they are only as worthy as they are sexy.

The shock arrives when the stranger she flashed tracked Amanda's information down, found her Facebook page, her school and home addresses and the names of her friends and sent the topless photo of her to all of them. From then on, Amanda's life became a living hell and she was tormented, switched school due incredible amounts of bullying, and eventually took her own life.

How easy it is for strangers to access our personal information is scary and extremely dangerous. It's something we're all somewhat aware of, thanks to our protecting parents and other such adults. But something even scarier is how virtual chat rooms online are so appealing to young girls that are seeking some sort of approval. Parents allow their kids to have unsupervised access to the internet at earlier and earlier ages, and kids are starting to go through puberty at increasingly younger ages. Girls are exposed to the shocking expectations of the media from the time they are born and because they start puberty earlier they become insecure with their bodies earlier. This combination makes them much easier targets for pedophiles on the internet which could lead to horrible consequences.

An interesting article I stumbled upon while learning more about Amanda Todd's story was this one, which is about how people are creating fake fundraising websites and using the sympathy the public has for the family to make a profit. This ties in to our other conversation about fundraisers and petitions online and how difficult it is to find out what is really going on.

Overall, the internet is an amazing thing if used safely, but it's sometimes used as yet another way to exploit women's sexuality.