They’re out
Brighton Grammar expelled the two boys who set up the Instagram account to post pictures of much younger girls and label them “sluts.”
Police are investigating the social media account, which was created on Friday and featured photos of girls as young as 11 without their knowledge.
The school is reeling from the scandal, and reassuring parents and students that it will not tolerate “disrespectful behaviour on any social media”.
“Disrespectful” is not the right word. It’s much, much too mild. What those boys did is misogynist, and cruel, and damaging. We really need to not trivialize or minimize this kind of shit. We need to name it accurately.
The case was brought to the public’s attention after a concerned Melbourne mother wrote on Facebook that photos of her young daughter had been uploaded onto the vile Instagram account.
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The mother told the ABC her daughter was walking with Grade 6 friends after school to meet her at an arranged pick up point when she was unwittingly snapped. They did not know about the post until seeing it online that night.
She said her family had been involved with Brighton Grammar for generations and she did not blame the school.
Instead, she blamed the boys’ parents, adding that misogyny was at the root of Australia’s domestic violence crisis.
There. She recognizes it for what it is; the school should be able to do the same.
“Shame on you for raising boys who have violated young girls … If this was isolated, perhaps I wouldn’t be as enraged as I am right now, but I hold those parents as responsible, as I do those boys.”
She said it was not a once-off event and she had screen shots of numerous offensive messages the same boys had sent to other girls in the past.
“Disrespectful” just doesn’t begin to cover it.
Of course, the parents may not be raising them that way, either. I learned to my horror as a mother of a teen boy exactly how much control I had over what he was learning. It was not zero, but there are so many ribbons of messages that get through every day, the casual sexism of people who would never consider themselves sexist, the messages that boys are better than girls, the messages that girls are a commodity and need to be hot – this isn’t just the parents, and I’ve known some parents who have done all they could to raise children who were decent members of society, but still ended up with raging assholes as their children grew.
I am grateful every day that the most my son ever did was choose to ignore his schoolwork. He is a decent human being today, but with all the messages he was being fed (even without social media; TV commercials alone are enough to make someone vomit at the sexism), it could have been so much different. So, parents? Maybe. But the surrounding culture has a lot to answer for.
I know, I know, and it’s only getting worse. It just makes me despair sometimes.
The fact that it is often *not* the parents is part of what makes messaging the mothers of grown men who harass women useful. Which, you know, it shouldn’t have to be something a woman has to worry about, getting notified that her 28 year old son is sending unsolicited dick pics and then insulting women for rejecting him. And yet, I have seen the conversations where the mother thanks the person notifying her, because she is *still* his mother and going to set him straight.