Most of the blog responses that we've written so far have been simple. This one isn't. I know it probably hit home for a lot of you. Not necessarily the specific subject of "sexting," but the broader issues of bullying, trust, and the ignorance of inexperience. It wasn’t so long ago that we would have been in our own high school classes making our own mistakes. This period of my life still hangs fresh in my mind, as it does for the rest of my classmates. I read the class blogs and see how so many of them, mine included, reference their high school days with complete clarity. Constantly calling back to happier times to share with the rest of us why they are here today. Thanks to great teachers and great moments and great experiences, we now find ourselves embracing our new path. But we know it wasn’t all great, a realization that’s probably all the more clear as we react to the tragedies of Hope and Jesse.
I sit here wanting to blame someone, wanting to find a bad guy. It’s easy to blame the kids, and those to who put these girls through their last, torturous years deserve what they get, but that doesn’t solve the problem. These girls could have been helped. They suffered alone because of the unconscionable responses to one shortsighted mistake. And it wasn’t just the kids. The FFA, a club where Hope sought refuge, stripped her of her leadership status, the school, adults whom Hope had been told she could trust and seek out for guidance, suspended her, and her family, all of them looked to punish her first and foremost. They heard about what she did and reacted as if they were dealing with someone who had not yet come to understand the consequences of her actions when, in fact, they were the ones in ignorance of the situation. They, like her unthinking classmates, treated Hope like a “slut.”
Hope Witsell was a 13-year-old girl whose life had been destroyed with the push of a button, and I know things could have been different. But how could things have been changed? Once again all adults in the lives of these kids have to immediately push past the concept of taboo. These are ignorant little people with access to technology that we could never dream of and a ridiculous amount of free time to come up with crazy stuff to do with it. They need guidance and it has to come from all sides. Teachers during the day, parents at night, kids have to know where the line is and, more importantly, why some can’t be crossed. How do you get these messages across to selfish, shortsighted, ignorant, know-it-alls? I have no idea. I don’t know how you would be able to convince a girl that a guy that she trusts intimately may not be the man she thinks he is, nor do I have any idea how we’re supposed to get all sex-obsessed high school guys to not be jack asses. Certainly not all kids are bad, but they are all inexperienced, and they are all prone to moments of weakness and lapses of judgment. I don’t know how to fix everything, only that we all need to keep trying, learning, progressing and evolving, because this can’t happen again.
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