All Posts Tagged With: "Amanda Todd"
The five biggest campus news stories of 2012
From the turmoil of Quebec to the rise of the West
A naked protest in Montreal (DmpstrBaby/Flickr)
It was a record year for Maclean’s On Campus with more readers than ever, but perhaps that’s unsurprising considering how much there was to talk about. Based on clicks and comments, here are the top five campus news stories of 2012.
1. Quebec student groups helped toss a government and won a tuition freeze.
In March, Quebec student groups declared war on a planned tuition hike of roughly $2,000 over five years. By April, students at 11 of Quebec’s 18 universities and 14 of its 48 CEGEPs had declared “strikes” and were skipping classes. There were nightly marches in Montreal that made life miserable for many who lived and worked downtown. Students who dared go to classes, even after judges orders allowing them to return, were stopped by masked protesters. The nightly marches started turning violent and threatened the tourism industry. Something had to be done.
Continue reading The five biggest campus news stories of 2012
Children’s singer Raffi advocates for social media safety
Red Hood Project is response to death of Amanda Todd
Children’s entertainer and advocate Raffi says he was “shaken” and “angry” when he heard about the death of Amanda Todd, a British Columbia teen who committed suicide in October following years of Internet sexual exploitation and bullying by her peers, and that’s why he co-founded the Red Hood Project.
Billed as a movement to make social media safe for young users, the project includes a website, a Facebook and Twitter page, and a letter the beloved “Baby Beluga” singer-songwriter co-wrote and sent to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on Nov. 14.
The letter, which includes Todd’s mother’s signature, says that the 15-year-old was blackmailed through Facebook and urges the social media company to correct “the security failures that made such victimization possible.”
“Of course education of parents and young users is important, we recognize that, but we think the onus ought to be on those businesses — social media companies who create the risk in the first place — to do all that they can,” Raffi Cavoukian, who goes by just his first name onstage, said in a recent interview.
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Eight girls arrested for bullying in London, Ont.
Information came through reporting tool on school website
Eight girls are facing charges in a bullying case at a high school in London, police in the southwestern Ontario city said.
The arrests were made as part of an investigation that revealed a student at the school had been the target of physical, emotional and cyber bullying, police said.
The eight suspects are each charged with criminal harassment and have been released from custody on a promise to appear in court.
Police could not say Friday when the hearing would take place.
They said information about the alleged bullying came from direct statements and through an anonymous reporting portal on the school website.
Continue reading Eight girls arrested for bullying in London, Ont.
Teen sexual exploitation proliferating online
Tip line was contacted about B.C. teen who killed herself
Mikael Miettinen/Flickr
A national child exploitation group received a tip almost a year ago about 15-year-old Amanda Todd, the British Columbia teenager who took her own life last week after being sexually exploited by an online stalker and bullied by her peers.
A concerned citizen contacted cybertip.ca last November to report that images of then-12-year-old Todd were being circulated online, said Signey Arnason, director of the tipline for reporting online sexual exploitation of children.
“We did receive one report, and that was passed along to law enforcement as well as child welfare,” Arnason said Monday. “It was not a report from her, but it was a report from a concerned citizen.”
Todd died last Wednesday, a month after posting a haunting video on YouTube that cited the sexualized attack that set her down a path of anxiety, depression and drug and alcohol abuse.
During her nine-minute video, the teen explained in hand-written notes that she was in Grade 7 when she was lured by an unidentified male to expose her breasts via webcam.
Continue reading Teen sexual exploitation proliferating online
I was bullied every day—then things got better
One woman reflects on her high school torment
The author at age 15
When I read about Amanda Todd’s suicide, I was affected, not only because someone so young decided to take her life, but also because of how it reminded me of my own adolescence.
To the right is a photo of me at Todd’s age. By the time that picture was taken, I had been bullied practically every day for five years. It started with some older girls who thought my name, Ravanne, sounded funny. They would chase me, scream at me, and throw food at me. Although concerned classmates stood up for me, it never stopped.
As early as sixth grade, I was depressed and socially anxious. When I entered junior high school, I was afraid to talk to new people out of fear that they too would laugh at me. I did make some friends, but for every friend I made, at least two people would obsessively bully me.
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Teen who posted anti-bullying video kills herself
Amanda Todd was attacked online and at school
There was an outpouring of condolences on social media following the suspected suicide of a British Columbia teenager who last month posted a gut-wrenching video to YouTube of her treatment at the hands of relentless bullies.
Coroner Barb McLintock said Thursday night that preliminary indications suggest Amanda Todd, 15, took her own life one day earlier.
Todd posted a haunting, black-and-white, nine-minute video on Sept. 7 in which she doesn’t speak, but holds up a series of white pieces of paper with brief sentences in black marker.
On the papers, the teen explains that as a Grade 7 student, she was lured by an unidentified male to expose her breasts via webcam.
One year later, Todd said she got a message from him on Facebook, though she didn’t know how he knew her name or where to find her.
Continue reading Teen who posted anti-bullying video kills herself
