Last Labor Day weekend, 15-year-old Audrie Pott went to a small party
thrown by one of her classmates at Saratoga High School, a small
suburban public school sandwiched between Apple headquarters and Big
Basin’s redwood forest in Northern California. Audrie and her friends
drank Gatorade and alcohol that evening, but after a while, Audrie began
to feel like she’d had too much, and she went upstairs to sleep in an
empty bedroom.
What happened next has become the subject of
countless international headlines and left behind grieving family and
friends, and yet it took seven months, thirteen confiscated cell phones,
and three arrest warrants for Audrie’s parents to finally conclude why
their bubbly, witty teenage daughter who loved art and soccer committed
suicide a week after the party by hanging herself in her parents’
bathroom: She was sexually assaulted by her friends, then aggressively
cyberbullied by her classmates while an indifferent school
administration refused to intervene.
It’s become vogue to decry
and denounce cyberbullying — the public persecution of someone via
social media. This popular cause not only seems a collective catharsis
for those concerned by the expanding digital intrusion into individual
privacy, but the issue also couples the hot topics of sexuality and the
internet.
The tragic story of Audrie Pott has become the latest to
gain traction in this narrative of web bullying pushing young people
over the edge. Audrie’s family, after retracing their deceased
daughter’s digital footprints, is convinced she was driven to
self-destruction by the mass online circulation of sexually explicit
photos of her. “With no assault, with no cyberbullying, Audrie is in art
class right now,” Larry Pott, Audrie’s father, told reporters shortly
after the family decided to go public with Audrie’s story.
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