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.
In 2011, when I was fourteen, I was outed as trans by someone that I thought was my best friend. As a result, three of my classmates raped me with an object on school grounds before classes began one morning. I reported it to the principal. Her response was “Well, that’s what happens. What have we learned?”, basically saying that me being trans meant that I should have expected to be raped and that I’d deserved it.
(Previously, one of the rapists had taken a nude photo of me while I was changing and uploaded it to MySpace. I had also reported this to the principal, and she’d told me I was “creating problems where there are none”. MySpace took it down at least, so I guess Tom cared more about my safety than the adult whose literal job was to protect kids.)
I was very, very quickly expelled from the school after the rape. I’m not sure what the official “reason” given was, my parents didn’t tell me. They also didn’t fight it, considering what had happened. I had to be homeschooled until graduation.
I became selectively mute after this, a problem that remains to this day. The rapists never got punished for what they did to me. The local PD (in Texas) never followed up on the report my parents made.
Sad that nothing’s changed about how schools handle sexual abuse in the almost-fifteen-years that have passed since then.
I have no words other than to say I am deeply sorry that this happened to you. What a truly atrocious story. I sincerely hope you can heal from this trauma.