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.
I’m not blaming any one person. I’m blaming the system that failed her.
I know you aren’t, you said “the school”. But there is no school outside of some hypothetical extreme tyrannical institute that exerts 24/7 control of word and deed of the student body, that could be reasonably expected to be able to completely prevent something like a student creating and spreading doctored images of another student, that’s all I’m saying.
Without knowing the entire context of this individual’s life, I could come up with a few things that the school could have done. I’m certain there are many many more things that could have been done that just weren’t. The school could have a vested interest in students’ interactions with each other through observation in classrooms and through faculty watching over them between class time. A school can and should be a place the students feel comfortable going to when other students are bullying them. A school can and should separate students who are unable to get along. A school can and should properly redirect antagonizing individuals and alert parents of negative interactions at some point.
Maybe the school is actively doing all of the things above and this is still the end result. That does not change the fact that the school failed to protect the children in their charge.