November 12, 2011: Two fifteen year old girls attend a party where one of them has sex with two boys; because of the ages of the boys concerned, there is no issue of statutory rape. This case from Nova Scotia became notorious because the girl who had sex committed suicide two years later. It is widely claimed and believed that Rehtaeh Parsons was gang-raped; she was not, rather she was a willing participant in spite of both her age and her alcohol intake.
It is probably unfair to call her a teen slut because like teenage boys, teenage girls often do stupid things they come to regret, if not soon then twenty years down the line when they pass on their wisdom to their own offspring, only to see it ignored the same way they ignored their own parents.
Rehtaeh Parsons hanged herself because she was slut shamed on social media. Most of the nonsense that has been written about this case has emanated from social media, but veteran reporter Christie Blatchford has done it justice: in this article published shortly after the girl’s death, and this one from January 2015.
This tragic case shows too that girls can be just as cruel as boys at times, and no one comes out of it with any credit.
[Re the second article, this appears to have included a photograph from Facebook. When I found said article, the photo had been deleted.]
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