A year ago in Halifax, a 17-year-old child strung herself from a bathroom doorknob, having been discharged from Halifax’s IWK Children’s Mental Heath Unit after being strip searched on suicide watch. That final indignity had been Rehtaeh Parsons’ last encounter with the Maze. Before that, a rudderless education administration had negligently handled her guidance record across three schools, and 16 months earlier an over-clocked justice staff had privately set her plainly photographed sexual assault aside to address more likely convictions. Full stop.
In a nutshell, for the last year, that is the unvarnished maypole that virtually every authority in Nova Scotia and Ottawa have been dancing around. As a series of show reviews slowly make their way through the civil and administrative ranks — honourable members on all sides of both houses table ineptly advised cyber law reforms, rather than their own resignations as the ministers and deputies responsible on the files.
A woman holds a photo as several hundred people attend a community vigil to remember Rehtaeh Parsons at Victoria Park in Halifax on April 11. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan)
That a child was stolen this way momentarily enraged an entire world. And, while Rehtaeh Parsons might yet change that world — despite craven intimations that the circumstances of her death remain the result of her own instability and all those rotten kids with Internet access — I would give what is left of my eyes were it not on the head of a child so lost in the Maze, she just didn’t know she was not alone.
In so far as makes no difference #OpJustice4Rehtaeh also began this week last year, when two grieving families on the frozen shores of the North Atlantic tossed a message in a bottle to the Internet. On Facebook, Leah Parsons shared the surreal story of the fight to have her daughter acknowledged by those who take children away from parents who neglect their duty. Her father Glen Canning blogged what many hold to be the bravest tribute to a dead child written by a father in a generation.
A great many within our #Anonymous communities have witnessed horror so desperately craven that we will carry the scars of our abject powerlessness to stem the killing for the rest of our natural lives. You sometimes share the edited version of our efforts on prime-time news following the now almost-normal, seemingly ubiquitous, warning “graphic content.”
You might well wonder, as I assume the now deposed Minister of Justice for Nova Scotia sometimes must, why the diverse often-bickering international communities of hacktivists and travellers that make up the #Anonymous movement visited their attention upon a place where people still know their neighbours by name and downtown parents make rinks together on tennis courts at Christmas.
After all, she was drinking and there is a secret dog’s breakfast of a file at the Ministry of Justice that proved the case was unlikely to succeed. And, despite the fact that it remains illegal to photograph a 15-year-old in a sexually explicit manner in Canada — as some part of the crime was on the Internet — it was thereby somehow different and separate from the standing laws surrounding sexual battery and child endangerment as understood by our educational, mental health and justice professionals.
But to us, as far as can be measured, there are perhaps 200,000 earth-like Stars and maybe as many as 3,500 habitable planets in this galaxy. On Earth alone, there are over 7 billion people alive today. And yet, in all of the known universe, there was only one Rehtaeh Parsons.
The popular press on several continents have done many notable investigative features about #OpJustice4Rehtaeh — deftly juxtaposing the caricature of hot-wired masked avengers with shadowy figures claiming honours to which they may, or may not, be fully entitled. Like the political and judicial targets of #OpJustice4Rehtaeh, they too remain trapped by the narrative that planet wide #Anonymous fleet campaigns like #OpJustice4Rehtaeh are the result of some dormant international cabal of hundreds of thousands internet Taliban.
The fiction belies a much more subtle, and no doubt troubling, reality for responsible people unaccustomed to being openly called to directly account for their decisions — as they discover that any single one of us, at the right place and time, may now find live wired consensus from a world weary of the consistent failure of our institutions to understand that there was only ever going to be one Rehtaeh Parsons.
I have written before that the real power of #Anonymous, the thing that keeps our lords and masters up at night, is not the hackers. Nor is it the botnets, nor the site blockades or even the embarrassing leaks about their sordid relationship with each other’s privacy.
What keeps them up at night is that their own odious collection of metadata and routed internet traffic logs tell them that in fact — you — are #Anonymous.
The retweet you undertake just because its the right thing to do. The Facebook like you share, the reddit post you make, your comment to the editor, your petition click, the tagged selfie with a message of hope and love inked upon the palm of your hand.
That is what really terrifies them. And it should because what it means is that you are beginning to remember they were supposed to work for you. And in Nova Scotia at least, we remembered that right into the voting booth.
In Ottawa this month they will pass Bill C-13, the most draconian surveillance bill since the Second World War. Of the 70 pages that make up the headline-friendly but previously rejected cyber law, there are but four that address any part of its purported goal of protecting children. None address their failure to make sure Rehtaeh Parsons and children like her are not ignored to death when they do the right thing and call the police.
Last year, in an obvious and boorish effort to firm up support for a doomed election bid, the Government of Nova Scotia rushed through Bill-61, the Rehtaeh Parsons Cyber-Safety Act. To date, it has most prominently been used to halt a teenager in New Brunswick from posting pictures from the colourful film career of Lenore Zann, a currently sitting NDP member of the Nova Scotia Legislature.
To this day both Glen Canning and Leah Parsons remain the ongoing target of madmen so inconceivably bent, that there is no bottom to the vitriol awaiting both of them whenever they open their e-mail. Thus far, the cyber safety squad remain unable to halt the tide.
At the outset, the much lauded review into the Nova Scotia Ministry of Education was instructed to destroy any testimony collected before tabling its report, for fear that departmental bureaucrats would not be inclined to speak openly (not lie) to investigators. No specific failure by any of the three schools Rehtaeh attended in the two years leading up to her death was uncovered, and it was concluded that we as a society were primarily at fault for Rehtaeh’s suicide.
In the year since, all three administrations have refused to allow any sexual assault awareness posters from the student body referencing R.A.P.E.. A talented student artist has had her painting honouring Rehtaeh Parsons declined for exhibition and a third student has been sanctioned for presenting an unapproved spoken word tribute referencing Rehtaeh Parsons and rape culture. It is noteworthy that similar restrictions on student discourse are not imposed at the many other schools that make up the Halifax Regional School Board.
The subsequent review into the sordid events at the IWK Mental Health Unit also found no fault other than, in their professional view, a despondent Child on suicide watch may or may not have demanded her clothes be returned following a mandatory strip search on the ward and had perhaps slipped through the cracks at an understaffed facility. For privacy reasons they were unable to document the supporting evidence upon which their report is based.
The review of the Nova Scotia Justice Department remains ongoing, awaiting the outcome of the trial of two boys whose own futures have also been forfeit regardless of their innocence or guilt by the very inaction that ultimately led to the death of Rehtaeh Parsons. To date, their trial has been adjourned three times for reasons ranging from inclement weather, to missed flights, to a calendar conflict last week that saw their defence attorney on some other, evidently more important, business.
But, as I said at the outset, despite every apparent effort to make sure accountability will not be assigned, Rehtaeh Parsons might yet change the world because the embers left by the maelstrom that was #OpJustice4Rehtaeh continue to slowly burn through the layers of 19th century morality that defines the experience that is sexual assault in our time.
The forensic practitioners who returned the evidence needed to investigate Rehtaeh’s assault — before the investigation was shelved — are reporting regular and almost immediate blow back upon those who share their victim’s image or brag of their abuse as if it were a touch down or a game-winning goal. In work that is even more grim than ours, it is a small light at the end of the tunnel for men and women who had begun to despair that their efforts to validate actionable evidence was moribund and ineffectual.
Sexual Assault support organizations everywhere benefited from increased funding, which was finally allocated in the wake of #OpJustice4Rehtaeh and supported by subsequent investigative reporting undertaken locally by influential news teams worldwide. As one, they are doing everything in their power to make sure it is never OK to again infer a sexual assault victim was in some way duplicitous in their rape.
And it is working. Too slowly, only incrementally to be sure. But I know it is working because it isn’t law that makes change.
Real change happens when people exactly like you and me look into our hearts and come away with a different point of view. Change was already happening and is measurable by virtue of the depth of consensus that #OpJustice4Rehtaeh achieved.
In my father’s day, people of colour were welcome to work in the kitchen but not dine in the main room. When I was a young man, people lost in the Maze ended their lives because they liked boys more than girls or girls more than boys. Aids victims died shunned by their parents and their friends when the reaper merciful released them from their long lonely nightmares.
This week, two families are left to come to grips with the reality that, instead of justice, the institutions involved make a new law in a cynical attempt to make us all forget they failed to enforce the existing law when Rehtaeh Parsons needed them to.
But still, Change continues to happen.
And if you and I are luckily to live long enough, in our daughter’s day the only shame facing anyone when another teenager is ignored to death will be upon those who watch it happen and do nothing to stop it.
And may their god have mercy on them, because that is precisely the scar responsible people need to carry for the rest of their natural lives, if yet another generation of men and women are to continue to die for want of a change..
Cole Harbour High School Hacked - 3 months ago
Students and parents in the dark as Halifax high school hack compromises email and data