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Save Lives: Stop Treating Nudity as Scandalous
A few years ago, a young girl’s suicide shocked the USA. Thirteen-year-old Izabel Laxamana jumped off an overpass and died after being shamed in a very public fashion by her father. Namely, he cut off her hair, taunted her for it after the fact, and filmed this to immortalize the punishment.
While controversy raged across the country over whether her father’s shaming itself had led to her death, a local news source reported that the police investigating her case — having read her suicide notes — concluded that she was driven to suicide largely because she’d been “worried the photo she’d sent to a boy would haunt her for the rest of her life.”
Countless news outlets referred to the photo in question as a “suggestive photo.” “Suggestive,” of course, is a very loaded and subjective term. But what was this photo?
It wasn’t even a nude.
Rather, according to Slate, it was a picture of Izabel Laxamana in “a sports bra and some leggings.”
Please pause to recognize the full weight of this tragedy: a 13-year-old girl felt so much shame and intimidation about having sent a photo of herself in a sports bra and leggings that she died by suicide. That is, as police explained, she feared that having sent such a “suggestive” photo” had already ruined her future.
