The tragic death of Amanda Todd, tormented into suicide by online bullying, galvanized Canada into confronting the dark world faced by many of our country's young people. It's sad that a final, desperate cry for help like this is needed to bring widespread attention to the way that people treat each other.
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| Peterborough's Miss January, in a photo from the Toronto Star. Granny got run over by a smear campaign. |
In today's digital world, casual and anonymous hatred passes for conversation. Violent and extreme language, delivered instantly for all to see, passes for entertainment.
It's reflective of the invention of the printing press; it's first widespread uses were not to disseminate the Bible, as we are often told, but to wage the vicious propaganda war that came with the Protestant Reformation.
It took many years, and a lot of legal reforms for a widely literate society to understand the power of the written word and to accept that freedom of expression carries responsibility and has limits. Perhaps that's what's missing in the Lord-of-the-Flies universe of online media.
But it isn't just youth with too little guidance and too much cell phone power who make up Canada's bullying population. Our own city council and staff are quite aware that adults will use the cloak of anonymity to spew violent and hateful language, which would bring them to shame, if not arrest, if they said the same things in public, or signed a printed document with the same words.
In Peterborough, Ont., a group of 11 women, including a 98-year-old lifetime church member, became targets of both public and anonymous bullying, for their attempt to raise some money for a duplex purchase by a local non-profit for homeless people.
What made them targets? They posed for a hockey-based calendar on sale for $20. The OHL's Peterborough Petes, and hockey legend Eddie Shack were backers.
The photos are the usual tasteful-but-slightly-bare fare that has adorned community fundraiser calendars around the world, since the 2003 movie Calendar Girls made these projects popular.
But since 2003, society seems to have grown a bit less accepting and much more spiteful. These women were attacked in public, online, and even from church pulpits as purveyors of pornography, elder abuse and the objectification of women.
Their neighbours felt entitled to engage what is described as a "vitriolic" smear campaign.
These are not teens, taunting each other with misspelled non-gramatical insults in text messages. These are grown people who consider themselves good citizens, and who do not see their incivility as any crime whatsoever.
For them, bullying is totally acceptable behaviour – when they wish to engage in it.
So why should Canada get upset that young people bully each other, when upstanding adults feel entirely free to attack people they don't like, freely, anonymously, viciously and at will?
Check Question Period in the House of Commons. Read – if you can still find them – the social media exchanges and advertising in the last U.S. elections. Phillip Melancthon, Martin Luther's collaborator and propagandist, called the Pope the Antichrist (and worse), but he had nothing on the people thumbing their 140-character anonymous slurs in today's social media.
In the small town of Hanna, long before the adult world knew of Amanda Todd's private suffering, local RCMP approached town council about proposing a bullying bylaw. Just as the legal world took a long time to catch up to moveable type technology, the Criminal Code offers police too little means to deal with harassment effectively.
So mayor Mark Nikota and council passed a bylaw calling for fines up to $1,000 for bullying. You can even get a $100 ticket for being a bystander, if you do not speak up when you see bullies at work.
The local school board, under provincial law that supersedes local bylaws, is onside to extend the bylaw's intent.
After what happened when Red Deer's bike lane pilot project was installed this summer, maybe our city council should consider something similar. Adult ratepayers can be pretty spiteful, when they think they can get away with it.
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