Hope
She was thirteen years old, and she wanted to make things grow. She wanted to ease green shoots from the brown earth. She wanted to nurse saplings into tall, strong trees. She wanted to mold soil into a living, sculpted landscape, shape the land with her artist's hands.
She was thirteen years old, and she wanted the boy she liked to like her too. She wanted him to like her, and she didn't know what to do. So, shy and a little clumsy in the quiet canopy of her bedroom, she pulled up her shirt. She unclasped her bra. She lifted her cell phone. She touched her finger to the button. Click. The photograph. Click. Sent.
Afterwards she would not be able to explain why she did it.
She was thirteen years old, and her name was Hope.
***
When the boy hears the buzz of his phone and reaches over to check it, he is not expecting the picture that greets him. A girl from the middle school, topless. Dusky rosebud nipples against white skin, delicate developing curves.
He doesn't know what to do.
He likes it, likes this soft secret, uncovered for him. He likes looking at it, studying it. He likes the way it makes him feel. But he shouldn't have this. She sent it to him, but there is something forbidden about this. He shouldn't have this, but he likes it. Maybe he'll just keep it for a little while.
***
On the school bus, another girl asks to borrow his phone. He hands it over: she is a friend of his; there is no easy way to say no. He is still thinking about the picture, hoping she won't find it.
She does. She forwards it to some classmates, and they forward it to more. Soon everyone knows; soon everyone has seen.
Later, when he is alone, he quietly deletes the picture and tries not to think about it. He tries not to think about what has happened to it.
***
When Hope goes to school, she knows something is wrong. In the hallway, the conversations go quiet when she approaches. Then someone turns and spits "whore" at her, looking at her as though she is one. When she walks into a classroom, she hears "Oh, here comes the slut."
Her friends take to escorting her through the hallways, acting like human shields against the volley of insults, the ridicule, the hateful words, the shame. Hope cannot bear these things, but she resolves to endure them. She blames herself. She took the picture. She sent it. She must have brought this upon herself.
At night, when she is sure that no one will be able to hear her, she curls in bed with her journal and cries.
***
During summer break, school officials find out about the picture. They call Hope's parents. They suspend her for the first week of eighth grade in the fall.
Hope's parents ground her for the summer. They take away her cell phone and her computer. She does not want these punishments, but she accepts them without protest. She is convinced she deserves them. She hopes, by facing the consequences, to put the entire wretched episode behind her.
***
At the beginning of the new school year, Hope finds out that her school won't let her run for student advisor of the Future Farmers of America, even though she served that role last year, even though she took two prizes at the state convention and placed first on the statewide exam. Hope is devastated. This is what she wants to do with her life, and now they won't let her. Now she can't. Now everything has changed and everything is over.
In the cafeteria, the boys still taunt her, still ask to see her breasts, still call her "whore" and "slut" as though these were her names. Their voices are still sneering, malicious, cruel. Nothing has gotten better. Nothing has changed.
Hope leaves in tears.
The next day she stays home from school. She cleans the house from top to bottom. She takes a razor blade and carves red marks into her thighs, swaps pain for blood. She is drowning, and there is no end to this unbearable hurt. She needs an end, and there is no end in sight.
***
When Hope goes back to school, a teacher notices the cuts on her leg. She is sent to the school social worker. The counselor takes out a contract: If I feel the urge to hurt myself, I will talk to an adult. Hope signs. The counselor signs.
At home, Hope crumbles the contract into a tight ball and throws it into her bedroom trash can. She writes in her journal. She tells her mother she is fine.
She takes a pink scarf and knots it to the wood frame of her canopy bed. She touches the other end, softly, mutely, almost absently, feeling the silky texture against her fingertips. She takes a deep breath, wraps the scarf around her neck, and leans into the welcoming dark.
That night, an ambulance rushes her to the local hospital, where she is pronounced dead.
***
Later, much later -- after the disbelief, the hysteria, the phone calls; after the memorial and the burial; after the piercing anguish of grief has settled into a dull, eternal ache; after there are hours when she does not cry -- Hope's mother goes to the media. She wants her daughter's story to be heard. Maybe there will be another girl, another mother, another family she can save from this.
The media takes the story. It is in the newspaper. MSNBC airs it on the TODAY show and invites Hope's mother for an interview. After all, this is only the second known case of a suicide linked to bullying after "sexting," the practice of transmitting sexual messages or images electronically. A recent poll shows that 20-some percent of teenagers admit they have sent nude pictures of themselves over cell phones. 44 percent of boys attending co-educational high schools have seen at least one naked picture of a female classmate. In this new digital age, cell phones and the internet can be dangerous tools, and the news media must make sure we know it.
In the interview, Hope's mother asks, "Should I have been more careful about what I allowed her to watch? Should I have been more careful about what I allowed her to read?" The message is clear: the problem laid with Hope, what information she could access about the world, what exposure caused her to cave in to a sexualized peer culture, what she did.
No one talks about the girl who first forwarded the picture -- a rival of Hope's for the affections of a boy -- and how her malicious act of cruelty went unpunished. No one talks about the other students, who received the picture and passed it on, and how they went unblamed. No one talks about the bullies at school, with their merciless taunts and ceaseless shaming, and the consequences they never faced. No one talks about the discipline from school that further ostracized a girl already daily tormented by her peers, about the punishments at home that isolated her from her support network, about how making a young girl who is hurting herself sign a contract saying she will stop is an entirely insensitive and inadequate response.
Hope may have made a mistake, but hers was not the last or the worst. Yet she alone bore any consequences for the classmates, bullies, school officials, parents, news media, and society that systemically failed her -- not by exposing her to technological innovation, but by withholding from her human compassion. The true failure here did not belong to Hope or to communications technology, but to everyone who could not see beyond one little girl's mistake to the mistakes of everyone who did not react in the way that she needed, in the way that would have kept her alive.
This entry is based on the true story of 13-year-old Hope Witsell, who committed suicide this September after enduring relentless bullying from classmates who spread a topless photograph of her that she had sent to a boy she liked.
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