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Processing personal pain when the whole world is your F-list

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Savannah Dietrich is a 17-year-old victim of sexual assault who was given a court-order to not reveal the names of her underage assailants. Feeling frustrated with the lenient plea deal her assailants got, she tweeted their names anyway and also criticized the court’s handling of the case, and was promptly threatened with jail time for contempt. The internet rose up in fury,, and the charge was withdrawn by the defendant attorney because “there was no point” anymore now that The Internet was on the case.

There is so much to unwrap here.

The boys sexually assaulted Dietrich in August of 2011, took photos of her while they did so, and later posted those photos online. It’s utterly reprehensible, and heartbreakingly common. Dietrich herself has cited the experience as incredibly traumatic, and that

“For months, I cried myself to sleep. I couldn’t go out in public places…You just sit there and wonder, who saw [the pictures], who knows?”

I don’t need to explain that it’s insult-to-injury that she was silenced by the gag order, and I think she was incredibly brave to speak out as she did:

“There you go, lock me up,” Savannah Dietrich tweeted, as she named the boys who she said sexually assaulted her. “I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell.”

“So many of my rights have been taken away by these boys,” said Dietrich, who waived confidentiality in her case to speak to The Courier-Journal. Her parents also gave their written permission for her to speak with the newspaper.

“I’m at the point, that if I have to go to jail for my rights, I will do it,” she said. “If they really feel it’s necessary to throw me in jail for talking about what happened to me … as opposed to throwing these boys in jail for what they did to me, then I don’t understand justice.”

It turns out that in terms of legal precedent, gag orders are mainly applicable to the media, and it’s generally regarded a violation of first amendment rights for the courts to attempt to silence the parties who are intimate to the actual proceedings from discussing those proceedings. As well it should be.

That same legal blog also has a great point about the biased protection of the First Amendment as it applies to victims and bullies:

But the appalling part to me is how, in this day in age, the Westboro Baptist Church can confidently harass the grieving family members of those who died in the Aurora shootings, cowards nationwide can confidently lie about their military decorations to obtain employment and be elected to office, you can buy a video of a dog getting stomped to death on the Internet, and the Koch brothers can funnel millions into deceptive political advertising confident that they are protected by the First Amendment, but the moment an under-age sexual assault victim attempting to comply with the law complains publicly about what the public officials are doing in her case — an issue of undeniable public importance — then suddenly there’s a problem, and it’s time for her to sweat under the gun wondering if she had free speech rights or not.

(There was also lots of other legal incompetence in that case, apparently, and the court attorney is in the process of being removed from the case. It’s just a mess all around.)

Silencing the victim to protect the assailants is an incredibly fucked up thing to do. It would be, even if we didn’t live in a culture that blames rape victims for being assaulted and tells women who protest mistreatment that they’re making too much of a fuss. A legal system that prioritizes the rights of someone who violated the social contract over the rights of someone who was the victim of that violation is incredibly broken. What’s worse is the penalization of the pursuit of “proper” means of recourse: if Dietrich had not sought justice within the justice system, she could have named her assailants with impunity in every media outlet that chose to listen to her and run those boys down to the end of the earth. But because she tried to pursue her assailants through the legitimate way, her voice must necessarily be silenced.

That…doesn’t seem right. I signed the petition and sent it out on my social media channels, and I was incredibly relieved to find the charges against Dietrich dropped.

However. However.

I don’t believe that people are never capable of rehabilitation, and in such an event that the assailants do learn the mistakes of their ways and turn out to be decent human beings, it would be an unfortunate consequence that future associates Googling their names find their past crimes. That’s the whole principle behind confidentiality in juvenile court, and I believe that it’s a sound one, in theory.

Let’s assume for a moment that these boys will one day realize how terrible their actions truly were, and will repent and become okay people. Come play in my idealistic world for a bit. Back before the internet, a gag order on the media was sufficient to protect minors from being haunted by their juvenile criminal records for the rest of their lives. The victim could talk to their parents, their friends, their school, their community…but with restrictions on any sort of mainstream media, the victim couldn’t talk to the world about who their assailants were, and definitely not in a permanent fashion. This allows the victim to deal with their experience in a way that feels right for them, while affording some level of protection for juveniles who screwed up.

But the line between “media” and “private actor” seems more and more nebulous lately, doesn’t it?  I’m not talking about whether bloggers can be journalists. I’m talking about how anything anyone writes online could be seen by millions of people within a few hours, if the right channels were activated.

With things like social media being as prevalent as they are, your community really is–and this is so cliché–the world. Any post you write on Tumblr that’s intended for your little circle of fandom geeks, any tweet you send out expecting that only your 12 followers would read it…that could get picked up by someone, somewhere, and spectacularly blow up in terms of its global reach. Get retweeted by someone famous, and prepare for an audience we could’ve never imagined even fifteen years ago, hanging on our every word.

Where’s the balance, then, for allowing the potential for rehabilitation while being just to the victim? Do you look at restricting social media or written public records? How can you, when so much of our socializing, community building, and self-actualizing takes place online now? Is there a duty of care to change your privacy settings to be more restrictive in talking about these things? What do you do when anyone can take what you’ve written and repost it because it is now negligible to copy large amounts of data and replicate it? Would it be fair to deny victims the solace to be found in the kindness of strangers by forcing them to restrict their speech? Is there even any point, when the collective consciousness is so fickle in deciding what to pay attention to and it’s often a fluke as to what goes viral, when all this information is hosted by media companies who change up the settings every other month anyway?

I will personally always err on the side of more freedom of speech for the victim rather than less, and I’m 100% behind Dietrich’s actions in this case, but I can’t pretend that the ability to reach millions within one day, to have my words permanently engraved in Google and the Wayback machine, doesn’t change the game quite a bit. I don’t think there are answers to my questions that fit into the compartments of the existing legal framework, but an overhaul of how confidentiality in juvenile court is treated…well, I’m not holding my breath.


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