Who failed Rehtaeh Parsons?

April 9, 2013 - 6:10am BY SELENA ROSS STAFF REPORTER

Rehtaeh Parsons. (Family photo)

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science.

On Sunday night, the 17-year-old’s family took her off life-support.

Three days earlier, on Thursday night, she hanged herself in the bathroom.

It was 17 months before that when “the person Rehtaeh once was all changed,” her mother wrote Monday on a Facebook memorial page.

“She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home, she was raped by four young boys,” wrote Leah Parsons.

“One of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community, where it quickly went viral.”

Rehtaeh, a 15-year-old Cole Harbour District High School student at the time, was shunned, wrote her mother.

“They all go to the same school. She couldn’t go back to the school,” Parsons said Monday in an interview.

Rehtaeh spent the past year and a half trying to handle the fallout from that night, said her mother, who runs a dog rescue.

Her daughter moved from Cole Harbour to Halifax to start anew and she checked into a hospital at one point to cope with anger, depression and thoughts of suicide.

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Rehtaeh ultimately made some new, supportive friends and heard from some old friends who decided to stand by her, Parsons wrote on Facebook. Rehtaeh returned to Dartmouth, where she was attending Prince Andrew High School.

However, lately the girl had struggled with mood swings, and after an outburst on Thursday, she locked herself in the bathroom, Parsons said in the interview.

“She acted on an impulse, but I truly, in my heart of heart, do not feel she meant to kill herself,” her mother wrote on Facebook.

“By the time I broke into the bathroom, it was too late.”

There are things to be learned from the girl’s death, Parsons said in the interview. That is why she is talking about what happened, and why her daughter did the same.

“Rehtaeh would want her story out there,” she said.

For one thing, social media can be toxic, said the mother. After Rehtaeh left her school, other kids were relentless.

“People texted her all the time, saying ‘Will you have sex with me?’” she remembered. “Girls texting, saying ‘You’re such a slut.’”

But then there is the question of how the adults handled the alleged sexual assault that Rehtaeh described to her mother.

The RCMP investigation took a year, said Parsons.

RCMP spokesman Cpl. Scott MacRae confirmed the police are now investigating a sudden death involving a young person.

“An investigation into an earlier sexual assault was completed, and in consultation with the Crown, there was insufficient evidence to lay charges,” MacRae said.

Out of respect for the family, and because of privacy laws, he couldn’t discuss details of the investigation Monday, and the force sent its sympathy to Rehtaeh’s loved ones, he said.

Parsons said she was unhappy with what she saw of the investigation.

“They didn’t even interview the boys until much, much later. To me, I’d think you’d get the boys right away, separate them.”

When it came to the photo or photos taken that night, “nothing was done about that because they couldn’t prove who had pressed the photo button on the phone,” she said.

She was told that the distribution of the photos is “not really a criminal issue, it’s more of a community issue,” she said.

“Even though she was 15 at the time, which is child pornography.

“The whole case was full of things like that. We didn’t have a rape kit done because we didn’t even know (anything had happened) until several days later when she had a breakdown in my kitchen.

“She was trying to keep it to herself.”

Rehtaeh’s former classmates at Prince Andrew High were sent counsellors Monday to provide support, said Doug Hadley, spokesman for the Halifax regional school board.

“We’ve been working very closely with the family for several, several months to provide supports to her,” Hadley said.

“Right now, we’re very saddened by what has taken place.”

Rehtaeh always cared for the underdog and was interested in social issues, a girl who “read everything she could get her hands on,” said her mother.

On March 3, Rehtaeh posted a photo of herself on Facebook next to a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

(sross@herald.ca)

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“The Exhibition” Documentary World Premiering at Hot Docs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“The Exhibition” Documentary World Premiering at Hot Docs

Vancouver, BC (March 19, 2013) - Jove Pictures is pleased to announce that its feature documentary “The Exhibition” will world premiere at this years Hot Docs Int’l Documentary Film Festival in Toronto.
The Exhibition follows Vancouver artist Pamela Masik’s controversial struggle to mount a large-scale exhibition of paintings based on a police poster of missing women—twenty-six of whom are found murdered on a serial killer’s (Robert Pickton) farm. The film takes an inside look at the artist’s creation of the work, the controversy that ensues, and the many issues and facts surrounding Canada’s largest serial murder case as told by the people closest to it.
Official website and trailer:
http://TheExhibitionMovie.com/

Hot Docs:
http://www.HotDocs.ca//film/title/exhibition

About The Exhibition:

The Exhibition is directed by Damon Vignale, produced by Miho Yamamoto and Damon Vignale, executive produced by Robert Straight. The Exhibition will air this fall on Super Channel. The Exhibition is produced with the participation of the Canada Media Fund, produced in association with Super Channel, and produced with the participation of the Canadian Film and Television Tax Credit, and the province of British Columbia, Film Incentive BC. 

B.C. sex workers want a say in Ontario legal battle against prostitution laws

THE CANADIAN PRESS APRIL 3, 2013

B.C. sex trade workers are asking Canada's highest court to hear their stories before deciding whether the nation's prostitution laws should be deemed unconstitutional.

Photograph by: CARL DE SOUZA, AFP/Getty Images

VANCOUVER - Sheryl Kiselbach has worked in the sex trade nearly half her life, and at 62 years old, she has expertise she said Canada's highest court needs to hear when it decides if the nation's prostitution laws are unconstitutional.

Kiselbach is one of many British Columbian sex trade workers represented by lawyers and advocacy groups applying to intervene in a June Supreme Court of Canada hearing.

They want to be allowed to tell their stories of street-based sex work, with the hope the evidence will sway the court to abolish Canada's current laws surrounding prostitution.

The prostitution-advocacy organizations announced their application to intervene in the court fight at a news conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.

"Sex work is work," Kiselbach said. "It should be perceived as such, as is any other career or work in our land."

The Supreme Court case will essentially determine whether the prostitution laws violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While selling sex is technically legal in Canada, the Criminal Code prohibits many of the activities surrounding it. Current laws prohibit living off "the avails" of prostitution, engaging in prostitution at indoor bawdy houses, and communicating with potential clients for the purposes of securing "a date."

However, Kiselbach said such provisions should be wiped from the books because they violate sex workers' rights to freedom, security and equal treatment under the law.

"When (people) think of a sex worker, they think of somebody who's leaning against a pole, with high boots under a light. That's only 10 to 15 per cent of ... the sex-work population. Those kinds of biases need to be thrown out," she said.

The federal hearing will have a direct effect on sex workers across the country, and Kiselbach said it's important the court hears the unique experiences of those in B.C.

"I was a sex worker for 30 years," Kiselbach said. "I was a street-level sex worker, I worked indoors, I did sex-industry dancing."

While she went into the sex trade with her icy-blue eyes "wide open" because she wanted to make fast cash and travel the world, Kiselbach said that isn't the case with many who sell themselves to put food on the table.

She is now working as the violence prevention co-ordinator at PACE Society, a Vancouver-based support and prostitution-advocacy group, and Kiselbach said she sees her fair share of women who sell sex to survive.

"Some people are exploited, some people are pushed, some people don't have any options," she said.

Prohibitive prostitution laws force sex workers to into risky business, Kiselbach added.

"Many times I didn't report things," she said, of her work during the 1980s. "You'd get the idea that (police) think, 'Well, you deserve it, you put yourself in that place.'"

Relationships with police in Vancouver have improved since then but aren't perfect, Kiselbach said, adding that she ultimately hopes prostitutes will stop being treated as criminals, and stop viewing themselves as such.

It's why, Kiselbach said, she and other organizations such as the Pivot Legal Society and Sex Workers United Against Violence are pushing for "survival" and street-based sex workers to have their say in Ontario's courts as interveners.

"Every sex worker's story is a little bit different, Kiselbach said. "We can't all be put into one pot, you know?"

Representing these sex-worker advocacy groups is Lawyer Kat Kinch, who said it will be up to the Supreme Court to assess whether the B.C. groups bring new evidence to support the case, which stems from a 2007 ruling involving former dominatrix Terry-Lynne Bedford.

Kinch said she expects to hear if B.C. sex workers will be granted intervener status in May, a month before the high court hearings begin.

The Canadian Bar Association's criminal law section co-chair said B.C. sex workers know better than anyone how over-zealous prostitution laws can marginalize a vulnerable portion of society.

"British Columbia has just been through a major soul-searching effort with regard to how we've treated vulnerable women who find themselves in the sex trade," association lawyer Paul Pearson said in a telephone interview.

"The (Robert) Pickton case exemplified the most horrible of circumstances and how these women can be marginalized to the extent that they disappear and a serial killer can go undetected," Pearson said.

He said it's highly unlikely those calling for an outright ban on the sex trade will ever get their way.

"There's a reason it's called the oldest profession. It's going to go on," Pearson said, adding lawmakers can often get caught in the complex grey area of harm mitigation, and trying to create legislation that protects prostitutes from abusive pimps and shady back-alley dealings.

"It's a very difficult line to draw between the voluntary, sophisticated woman who wants to earn money by engaging in prostitution, and the woman who's being either trafficked or exploited or dominated or abused in such a fashion that she's forced into that position," he said.

"It's not an easy one to resolve."

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