[Moogs]

Many of you have probably heard about the Rutgers kid who committed suicide after his dumbass roommate decided to leave his webcam on, during a period of time when he was asked to be out of the room. Anyone who has ever lived in a dorm knows the rule: you respect your roommate's privacy and give them whatever time is agreed upon. Otherwise you may get no time and respect for privacy yourself. Well, not only did this dick record his roommate's private encounter with another student but then decided to put it on the web where hundreds or thousands of other people could watch it, and invited them for a second showing as well. All I can say is what a piece of shit.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/victim-secr...ry?id=11758716

I get that teenagers and college students are insecure and prone to ripping on / pranking one another in order to feel better about their own flaws (hell even adults do this in their own special, passive-aggressive ways), but this takes it to a new level. To be honest I'm surprised we haven't heard more stories like this, given how every kid's phone now has video and camera capabilities (and every kid has 5 different ways to get a video in front of a global audience in 90 seconds or less). Not to mention every square foot of public real estate (streets, work, etc) now seems to be under surveillance. We really need to rethink how all this stuff works and what it can do to normal people (we all have flaws) who don't realize they're on candid camera.

And of course the media turns this into a story about being gay (which, I get that too; it's a big factor in the equation) but ANYONE could have their life fucked up by something like this. Think about it. What would you do? I can think of some unpleasant outcomes, and some more tragic than a single suicide, that's for sure. Vengeance comes to mind. What if this kid was more unstable than he was and had access to guns or other weapons? We've seen students murder multiple classmates and faculty for a lot less.

Privacy is one of those things that is linked to mental health, and if you strip someone of it, you can really cause problems for them socially, professionally, etc. That's why we don't see our neighbors streaking to the mailbox every day or fucking their spouses on the front porch. We choose to share what we look like and who we are with very few people for a reason. Whether straight or gay, we all have failures and physical flaws and regrets and whatever else that maybe only 2 or 3 people in our lives know. You mess with that, and you're playing with fire. If I had kids, the first lesson they'd learn when getting their phones and Facebook pages is respect for people's privacy. I have to believe -as with all major kid fuck-ups- the parents have a role they're failing at here, which is to very forcefully drive home the message that other people's lives are not to be trifled with just because you have a little gadget that can turn you into instant paparazzi.

Frankly the 3rd degree and 4th degree misdemeanor status these two crimes (privacy invasion) carry (AFAICT) is a joke. Make it a class 2 felony and make a real example of these punks. Put them in juvy for 12 months a piece then lets go back with news cameras in a year, their egos broken, and ask them if it was worth it. Ask if the Facebook fame was a valuable payoff for them.

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[psmith2.0]

The ugly side of tech and easy sharing of private images and video. Won't be the last time, and it'll probably get worse as time goes on (and people get more mean, detached and careless with all this stuff).

You've got gazillions of soulless, empty shells running around with sci-fi tech at their disposal. What do people think is going to happen?

Thats the real story here, IMO. But yeah...leave it to the media to dwell on the other aspect.

[Capella]

Fair warning: this post is likely to be tl;dr, but this hits me personally both as a former Rutgers student and as an LGBT person who suffered from years of queer-baiting and bullying.

When I was in middle and high school, I was a favorite bully target. I fell outside of most of the demographics of my area, and as many of you know, kids love to pick on the different one. There were lots of slams because I was younger than everybody, and because I was poor. But the absolute worst kind of bullying I suffered was over the topic of being gay. I wasn't out- I knew I liked women, but until the middle of high school I didn't even feel the tiniest inclination to date anybody, and by the time I did, well, there was no way in hell I was confirming those rumors. But in 6th grade, people pegged me as a lesbian, so I suffered constant taunts over it for the next 6 years. I was told I needed to hook up with a real man to "cure" myself, some of the girls who liked me least would chase me into the farthest, darkest corner in the locker rooms for gym because "we don't want nobody like you looking at us" (when they weren't stealing my gym clothes out of my gym locker so that I couldn't even leave the locker room and attend gym, that is), having all sorts of obscene taunts thrown at me, have to walk down the halls while people said "oh don't get too close to her or you'll catch the gay", and called dyke so many times you could have been forgiven for assuming it was my name. (And this is just counting the pure gay insults, not all the religious talk about how I was going to burn, how I was sinful, how God hated me, how I was Satan's whore, etc.)

The thing is, I didn't do anything to back it up. I knew I was in the wrong town to come out, and while I wasn't going to go out with guys to cover myself, I certainly wasn't gonna confirm it. I think it didn't start to even ease up until high school and Junior ROTC, because by my third year there I was so well-respected by my fellow cadets that I was backed up by them. A few of the male cadets in drill team with me were all "you might be a dyke, but you're our dyke, and nobody's gonna beat you up anymore". So it got a little safer- but the words didn't stop. They never stopped.

All that abuse was heaped on me because they assumed I was gay. Without proof. And it was so bad that yeah, there were absolutely days when I wanted to kill myself. More frequently, I just wanted to mutilate my own body. If the problem was women liking women, well, maybe if I cut off my breasts, maybe if I could disfigure the lower regions, maybe if I could just not be a woman anymore, maybe they'd stop. Maybe it would go away. I hated the part of me that was female and I wanted it to burn. I'm not quite that bad anymore, but there are still, absolutely, days I would trade my female body for a male one in a heartbeat. Or at least de-sex it as much as possible to be as ambiguous as possible.

If there had been a shred of proof of my sexuality, if something like this webcam incident had happened and given other people absolute, concrete proof that I was gay- I would have killed myself. The harassment would have amped up to 11, and I wouldn't have been able to bear it any longer.

I get what you're saying, Moogs- and you're not the only one- that the media seems to be turning this into a gay issue over a privacy issue. And yeah, public exposure of sexual behavior is gonna hit anybody really hard, because obviously that is not the kind of shit you want spread all over the internet, and it's going to upset and demean you if it comes out. I'm not denying that. Nor am I denying that invasions of privacy are a horrible, horrible thing, and that we don't have education out there in place yet to make people stop and think about this, and that we're sharing way more than we ever should and having more shared about us than we ever should. This is absolutely a privacy issue, and one we need to deal with soon.

But to say it's not just as much a gay issue, or that the gay part of it matters less, is disregarding a just as massive problem that exists in the world today. There's still a ton of homophobia in the world. There's still a remarkable amount of intolerance and of bullying, and there are a lot of places where people in authority who should speak out and defend the kids don't. Maybe because they're religious, or homophobic, or maybe it's the more innocent crime of not knowing what to do, or the more sinister one of wanting to help but being afraid to because what if you lose your job because you tried to help this kid? But so many times, these gay kids are isolated, and alone, and have no support system. They're experiencing their first hormonal rushes. They don't know who they are yet, or what they want. They're insecure and trying to experiment- and what are they faced with? Curses and beatings and taunts, and no help in sight from anyone around them. So they close themselves in behind their shell, and they start to not trust anyone. They hide this deep secret inside of them, and that changes them, and that hurts them. Maybe they're religious and struggling to reconcile their faith-based upbringing with the things their faith (either in person or in media depictions) are telling them about themselves. So they're scared, and they're confused, and they're alone, and they're hiding this dark issue, and maybe it gets to be too much. Maybe it marks them permanently.

The fact is, we don't know too much about Tyler before Rutgers. Was he out to his parents? His friends? To the population as a whole? Perhaps he was bullied like I was. Imagine a young man who finally has escaped such a culture of bullying and found somewhere he can be out. Maybe he's taking his first steps towards figuring out who he is, of relaxing his guard and wanting to be himself in others. And then this happens. And suddenly everyone knows. All at once. That's many a gay kid's worst nightmare. Maybe I'm wrong and he was out. We don't know yet. I'm just trying to paint a picture of why this was so devastating, because my heart knows how easily I could have painted it with my own blood.

When I started attending Rutgers, it was a breath of fresh air to me. It was a diverse place, an open and welcoming place, somewhere where people were a lot less judgmental and intolerant compared to my high school. It summed up all the reasons I wanted to be in the Northeast instead of the Southeast. I was never deeply involved in the LGBTQ community, but I never feared for my safety. I felt like I could walk comfortably in my own skin, without constantly looking over my shoulder and waiting for the blows to drop.

I spent a lot of yesterday being torn up about this, especially when the news was airing shots of the campus. This was on my home turf. This was somewhere I went to. It feels like my home was just invaded and made horribly unsafe. From what I'm hearing from my friends still enrolled, there's a lot of upset, and anger, and a ton of shock. The LGBT community on campus is responding by asking for safe spaces and better education, which I think is totally the right reaction (personal bonus for me: led by my favorite professor).

So, yeah. I'm not trying to say that the invasion of privacy issue doesn't matter at all, because clearly it does, and clearly we need to raise the kids better so this kinda shit doesn't happen again. And I will probably reply to this post later discussing the privacy issues and what the fact that our kids consider this kind of illegal behavior okay and funny says about us separately. I've just also heard some crap on other sites about how everyone's making "too much a deal" over the "gay factor", and I wanted to bring the perspective of why this kind of privacy invasion was so particularly damaging.

Basically, I hope that these kids get expelled. I also want them to get a prison term, of course, because they deserve punishment for breaking the law and invading other people's privacy. But I'm gonna be really pissed if Rutgers doesn't kick their butts out and make sure they can never, ever come back.

[Moogs]

Originally Posted by Capella So, yeah. I'm not trying to say that the invasion of privacy issue doesn't matter at all, because clearly it does, and clearly we need to raise the kids better so this kinda shit doesn't happen again. And I will probably reply to this post later discussing the privacy issues and what the fact that our kids consider this kind of illegal behavior okay and funny says about us separately. I've just also heard some crap on other sites about how everyone's making "too much a deal" over the "gay factor", and I wanted to bring the perspective of why this kind of privacy invasion was so particularly damaging. Basically, I hope that these kids get expelled. I also want them to get a prison term, of course, because they deserve punishment for breaking the law and invading other people's privacy. But I'm gonna be really pissed if Rutgers doesn't kick their butts out and make sure they can never, ever come back.

Thanks for sharing that story; sorry you had to go through so much shit just to live in peace. Not surprising you got that treatment in the deep south. You probably would've gotten abused to some degree just about anywhere, but Northern and central Florida might as well be Mississippi or Alabama. The smallest minds cause the biggest trouble. People in certain parts of the country have their extra neat and tidy, compartmentalized view of the world and if you don't fit, they make life difficult for you.

Not to go too far afield, but I wish science could turn off the "spiteful-asshole-factor-because-I'm-an-insecure-malcontent-with-raging-hormones" aspect of teenagers and puberty. I think the most rare thing in the world is a well-adjusted teenager who (aside from doing well for themselves) can look at his or her peers who are struggling with school, sports, sexual identity or whatever... and not feel compelled in the least to belittle them. Or God forbid, even be supportive from time to time. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 students in a class of 400+ in high school, who fit that definition. Seriously. Even the kids who were definitely not jerks or popular a-hole types, had their moments of smallness and petty cut-downs for no reason, every year. Myself included. Kids' brains just shut down when that stuff happens. It's like "Oh, I might feel less shitty about having no control over my life / my failures / my imperfect looks if I make this person over here feel like dirt. YAH! Great idea!"

On one level it's all a part of life and growing up (in any culture), but on another it gets taken way too far in the U.S., especially these days with all the bat-shit-crazy hazing stories we hear about, etc. Everything is taken to extremes, and this "prank" is a perfect example of that. No respect, no boundaries, no "OK this is bullshit; I'm not doing this to anyone, whether I like them or not because I have a little more class and self-respect than that." Never mind the fact that not liking someone because they're gay is retarded.

Anyway I do get what you're saying and for the record, I agree that him being gay and people's reaction to that is a big part of this. I was mostly alluding to the fact that the media always has the knee-jerk reaction of framing things as a "gay issue" whenever a gay person is involved, whether or not that's the key issue. Here I wish they would give equal attention to kids having no respect for privacy and the technology involved being a bigtime enabler. Obviously, some crimes ARE definitely about hatred towards gays and actions taken to that effect. Here it sounds like the roommate didn't expect to find what he found on his webcam, and once he did, he made the even more classless move of making it a gay ridicule thing, even inviting people to join in the privacy invasion because the kid was gay. And of course the victim's reaction seems likely to be a result of being publicly outed in a humiliating and disrespectful way.

But to my twisted way of thinking, the biggest crime is the invasion itself. No matter who you are or what your situation is, there are things that you always keep for yourself and the person you're with --or, if we're talking non-sexual stuff-- a sibling or close friend or whoever. As soon as someone comes in and rips that from you and puts it on display for the whole fucking world (literally) to see; that's a flash-point. That's uncontrolled rage waiting to happen when the victim finds out, depending on who it is. You just DON'T do that kind of stuff to people. And I agree all the more painful and harmful because he was gay / finally felt like he was in a good place, and his roommate totally betrayed his trust.

The vindictive asshole in me wants to see the roommate abused in juvy / minimum security prison. He deserves pain. Give him a few months there; it won't ruin his life (he'll eventually be back to school somewhere and get a job somewhere and everyone will forget and he can pretend like he didn't push his roommate off a bridge (effectively)... but the experience will change him and will drive home the ole privacy (because he'll have none) and consequences (getting the shit kicked out of him) lessons mom and dad apparently forgot.