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Can ‘Sexting’ Lead To Suicide?
A few months ago, young teen Hope Witsell was found hanging in her bedroom. Her suicide was apparently a response to relentless bullying at school following an incident in which she sent a topless photo of herself to a boy, who showed it around the school.
Witsell was punished by her parents and by school administrators for her “crime”, and the taunting by her classmates continued unabated into a new school year.
Was this death by sexting?
Get real. As blogger Sylvia at Sylvia Has a Problem so eloquently points out, this kid did not die because she “sexted” a topless picture.
This is just another example of our frenzied fear about keeping kids safe doing them more harm than good. It’s awful and stupid that this young woman is dead. Blaming her sexy cell phone pics for it just makes it more likely that this tragedy will repeat itself, with another young girl being shamed to death over her emerging sexuality.
According to CBS, a “shocking” 20 percent of teens will admit to “sexting” when asked about it by adults taking a survey. The only thing shocking about that statistic is that CBS can report it as “shocking” with a straight face. These are teenagers. With cell phones that take pictures. What did we all expect them to do?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot more than 20% are doing it and not fessing up. Most of those kids don’t wind up dead. Most of them probably don’t even end up regretting that they used their phone camera to flirt.
I think we need to look beyond technology to get at why Hope Witsell killed herself. The article describing her suicide tries to lay the blame on her and on the “dangerous game” she played when she took that photo.
My money is on the same causes that lead to so many tragic teen suicides: a crack in her support system big enough for her to fall through, changing body chemistry that causes depression and a lack of perspective that made her think her whole life would suck as much as 8th grade.
Instead of fighting a losing war to police teenagers’ flirtations, let’s try to support them in developing healthy self-esteem and sexuality. It’s not “sexting” that’s the problem here, it’s a culture that labels any sexually aware girl a slut and any teenager caught taking naughty pics of her own body a criminal.
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7 Comments
Black Sheep commented on Dec 15 09 at 2:47 pmI’m sorry, but I still think it is shocking that so many kids do this. I went to high school in the 80′s and I can’t imagine kids doing that back then, even if they had the technology. People just would have been too embarrassed. Not that kids weren’t sexualized, they were. But this exhibitionism is definitely a new thing.
Michele commented on Dec 15 09 at 3:26 pmSierra, have you ever been embarrassed, ashamed, whatever by something that everyone in your school had seen? You’re right, she may have fallen into a hole but this is what pushed her over the edge. Everyone has a breaking point. Sexting is “dangerous” for kids because they don’t understand yet the far reaching consequences. Hope you don’t have a middle schooler.
Jkelly commented on Dec 15 09 at 7:57 pmKids these days! At least bicycle face and Elvis’ hips weren’t deadly!
Another generation, another moral panic.
Carolyn commented on Dec 16 09 at 9:51 amI agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion that it is the pervasive culture of sexual shaming, and not this young woman’s “sexting”, which should be blamed for her suicide. However, I think that the question of how to effectively implement a new set of norms about how we talk and think about sex, particularly teen sexuality, is enormously complicated and hard to make happen.
K commented on Dec 16 09 at 10:15 amYou are right it wasn’t the ‘sexting.’ It was the aftermath. Some kids ‘sext’ and never get targeted by their peers. Others aren’t so lucky. If you’ve never been the targeting of bullying then you would never even begin to understand what it does to your life. These kids don’t even get punished for it either. It leaves you feeling alone because no one understands. I was stalked and targeted so badly in high school I stopped going. But do you know why? Because they school told me this boy came from a bad family. So what? So that made him exempt. So they put ME in counseling and on meds. I was made into the fool. The system failed me and so did my own family. But do you know why I was targeted? It wasn’t for sexting. It was was for being the new girl and I rode horses. That’s it. That is all it takes. You think this is a simple fix? It isn’t. Teachers don’t even bother standing up for their bullied students either. They let it happen. Everyone should be involved when it comes to bullying. The person being bullied needs support and to be shown that the person bullying them will get reprimanded. At such a fragile time in your life where you have to make so many decisions. It is a lot of pressure. I will never forget that time in my life. Ever. Neither would she. She would of just learned to accept it. Teens need to be taught to respect their bodies and themselves. I am not entirely opposed to sexting but I’d advise against it if only for these reasons alone.
Jen commented on Dec 16 09 at 12:25 pmI agree with the article. We didn’t have cell phones or the internet when I was in middle and high school, but we still had rumors. I was the subject of many of those rumors. You don’t need a picture to go through what this girl did. The pictures make it worse and I don’t think kids realize how permanent stuff like this is, but this level of teasing and harrassment in schools has been going on far longer than cell phones and ‘sexting’ has existed. New technology has just made things more complicated.
Randy commented on Dec 17 09 at 5:05 pmI wholeheartedly agree with the article, but I’d take it even a step further to lay the blame where it really belongs: socially accepted (or ignored) bullying. The naked pictures simply makes this a sexy news story, nothing more. It’s the bullying that is the real problem, though, and our reaction to it…. or lack of, in most cases. It DISGUSTS me that people would consider, even briefly, that “sexting” is a bigger problem than bullying, aggression, and violence. Stupid America.
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