A 13-year-old girl at a Louisiana middle school got into a fight with classmates who were sharing AI-generated nude images of her
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
That’s not a question for me to answer. It is, in fact, the school faculty’s duty to educate our school children as well as protect them. It is up to them to determine how to do that. It is also true that they failed her in this instance. There are preventative measures that schools can take to stop bullying both on campus and online. Every time a student is bullied into taking their own drastic measures has been failed by the system. In this case, doubly so as on top of her being bullied into retaliation, she was punished by the system for being failed by the system.
Then you also shouldn’t be saying that the school “failed” to do something, if you’re not able to even articulate how it could have possibly succeeded in doing that something, no?
Only to a degree that makes sense, though. There’s no way a school can ever stop a student from saying a mean thing to another student, for example. It can only punish after the fact (and “protect” implies prevention, not after-the-fact amelioration).
You can absolutely identify someone failing to do their job without fully understanding how to do said job. You know a bad doctor when you see one just as you know a bad cashier. I’m not a professional educator nor am I a child care professional. But I can absolutely tell when the people we trust to watch and teach our children every day, fail to do so.
But what’s happening here is similar to a pharmacist being accused of failing to do their job because they filled a prescription that the patient’s doctor erred in prescribing. It’s absolutely not fair to blame the pharmacist for that.
It would be similarly unfair to accuse a cashier of not doing their job because they didn’t apply a discount they were neither ever told about, nor was it labeled on the merchandise it was supposed to apply to, either.
Expecting a school to have the ability to prevent (again, that’s the key word) an image, any image, being shared between students on the bus, is absurd. You can say they failed in appropriately punishing the act after the fact, but it is absolutely not fair to expect that the school can stop it from happening in the first place.
I’m not blaming any one person. I’m blaming the system that failed her.
I know you aren’t, you said “the school”. But there is no school outside of some hypothetical extreme tyrannical institute that exerts 24/7 control of word and deed of the student body, that could be reasonably expected to be able to completely prevent something like a student creating and spreading doctored images of another student, that’s all I’m saying.
Without knowing the entire context of this individual’s life, I could come up with a few things that the school could have done. I’m certain there are many many more things that could have been done that just weren’t. The school could have a vested interest in students’ interactions with each other through observation in classrooms and through faculty watching over them between class time. A school can and should be a place the students feel comfortable going to when other students are bullying them. A school can and should separate students who are unable to get along. A school can and should properly redirect antagonizing individuals and alert parents of negative interactions at some point.
Maybe the school is actively doing all of the things above and this is still the end result. That does not change the fact that the school failed to protect the children in their charge.