"And on a Facebook page called 'Justice for Izabel,' commenters called for the father to be prosecuted or publicly shamed himself. The video is just the latest in a growing trend of 'shaming' videos, in which angry parents around the country seek to discipline disobedient children by filming their humiliation. The videos are then uploaded to Web sites like YouTube or Facebook where the child’s friends can watch. Laxamana’s original 'shaming' video has been removed from the Internet, but a bootleg recording of the video appears to show Laxamana in her family’s garage. Sporting a fresh, jagged haircut, she stares at the camera as a man, reportedly her father Jeff, films her. 'The consequences of getting messed up, man, you lost all that beautiful hair,' he says. The camera then pans down to a tangle of black hair on the ground. 'Was it worth it?' the man says. 'No,' Laxamana replies faintly. 'How many times did I warn you?' he asks. 'A lot,' she says in a near whisper."
From a WaPo piece called "'I could have died too' says driver hit by 'shamed' girl who jumped from bridge."
As for the call to publicly shame the father, this is already the public shaming of the father, the father who lost his 13-year-old child.
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I can't even imagine and the "shaming videos" would add up to nothing in the pain.
So if your reasoning is that shaming causes death, and you want to shame the father, you are attempting murder, no? But it's totes cool because you're one of the good people.
What does "getting messed up" mean? She was drinking? Smoking pot? Other drugs? All of the above? If she was doing drugs, did they contribute to her suicidal state of mind?
Either you know damned well it's a lot more complicated than that, or you don't, and you're trying to kill him. Pick.
And maybe don't be so arrogant as to believe you care about this girl more than her father did, even if he made a mistake that he obviously didn't think would lead to this.
I feel sorry for the woman that lost her car.
Not that we actually know if it had anything at all to do with it.
I can't imagine doing that to my daughter. The father deserves what he's getting. It's shame what the daughter had to do to teach him his lesson.
"What does "getting messed up" mean?"
Exactly. I read the story and there is no information. If she was on drugs, that might play a role, too.
Still, the father sounds cruel. No backstory so why post this ?
You have to read pretty far into the story and even then it's written in a way that obscures rather than makes clear the fact that her father did not post the video. He gave it to the daughter. We don't know how it got out.
Honor killings is what they call them in the Islamic world
I lived in India where they normally beat them until they use the gas stove to commit suicide, but it aint much different. 'Murcia!
From my understanding, the father did not release the video, a third party did after the girls death. The police have said repeatedly that the video had nothing to do with her suicide, but when has the mob ever let facts get in the way of a good story line?
"So if your reasoning is that shaming causes death, and you want to shame the father, you are attempting murder, no? But it's totes cool because you're one of the good people."
Killing a CHILD, especially a FEMALE child, is a terrible thing. Killing an adult male is like swatting a fly.
Why did the father record it in the first place????
Cutting off a child's hair is still abuse recorded or not. It's publicly shaming her, when people ask about the haircut.
it's written in a way that obscures rather than makes clear the fact that her father did not post the video. He gave it to the daughter. We don't know how it got out
A) who made the video in the first place?; B)who lost "custody" of it?; C) who doesn't understand how easy digital information can travel?
This would be like a girl letting a guy record their sex and then being all butt-hurt that someone else got to see it.
I'm putting this all on the father - he is no "victim" here.
I wonder what role, if any, the cultural background of the family may have played in the decision to cut the girl's hair.
Tragedy for all: the girl, the father and the woman who had to see the result. The only thing replaceable is the car.
Mark:
"I lived in India where they normally beat them until they use the gas stove to commit suicide, but it aint much different. 'Murcia!"
I'm curious: What does "''Murcia" mean?
Tim Maguire:
"The father deserves what he's getting."
Not knowing anything more than what's in the story, I'm going to venture that I wouldn't much like the father or care for his style of parenting. But deserves? I'd say maybe he deserved to have his daughter grow up, tell her kids what a nasty father she had and how cruel he could be while convinced he was doing the right thing for her, and freeze him out of her life.
Funny, I'm in Seattle, and the local media hasn't mentioned this story.
The father doesn't seem to have been cruel from what we know. "Messed up" usually means stoned or drunk in Americanese. It seems like he was trying to get across to her that this behavior was dangerous and would impact her life before she got into real-world trouble for being stoned or drunk.
How many teen girls have become victims of sexual assault when they've gotten stoned or drunk? Quite a few. Some of them have been suicide stats, haven't they?
Her suicide is tragic!!! Blaming it on the father is problematic.
Finally, creating the media impression that if you end your life really spectacularly because you are a teen fighting with your parents, this deed WILL REALLY MAKE THEM FEEL BAD AND EVERYONE WILL BE ON YOUR SIDE FINALLY is an abysmally stupid thing to do. Might has well hand out loaded guns in the high school hallways.
If you can't have compassion for the father, those castigating him should have sympathy for other teens to whom they might be sending the wrong cue.
Instead of celebrating teen suicides, we should all be deriding them, commenting how this just proves the teen was a loser, and so forth. Never, never romanticize or celebrate suicide to a teen. NEVER.
Therefore I say: the girl was troubled and on the wrong LOSER path. Her father was trying to help her get off it. She was too weak to get back on the right path, and finally she ended her life in an impulsive act that demonstrated acute narcissistic despair and a lack of empathy with others. There was nothing admirable about it, and nothing that should generate a suspicion that the parents abused her. She abused herself to death as the way out because she was too weak to stop abusing herself.
That's my verdict and I am cruelly sticking with it in the cause of life.
For the family, I have compassion. For the impact lady, I have the deepest sympathy. For the girl, grief and sorrow at a wasted life.
To other teens, ending your life just writes the final epitaph on you as one of LIFE'S BIG LOSERS, and you, and only you, bear the responsibility for that.
MaxedOutMama:
"The father doesn't seem to have been cruel from what we know."
I don't know if you're answering me but that was for the sake of argument. He may or may not be. The punishment strikes me as cruel, but there's a lot I don't know and his motives may be exactly as you speculate.
"Never, never romanticize or celebrate suicide to a teen. NEVER."
Agreed, in the strongest terms.
"For the family, I have compassion."
So, if the occasion offered, would you look them in the eye and tell them as you've told us that their dead 13-year-old daughter was on the path to being a LOSER? And that all teen suicides should be derided as such? Or would you relent a little and explain that you just want to dissuade those who can yet be dissuaded?
I want the same end you do but do I have to adopt your means? What if we just shake our heads at what a goddamn stupid waste this was; wish we could stop her at the edge, shake her by the shoulders and say IT WILL GROW BACK! And anyone who saw that video? All you have to do is not care what they think!"
When did shame become abuse?
So,
If your daughter is abusing drugs what are your options?
You can't beat her, child protective services would be at your door.
Apparently you can't shame her.
Put her on time out? How long until this is considered abuse?
I hope Dr. Spock is roasting in hell.
It seems the father posted the video to someone, since the released video is of a camera phone recording as it plays on a computer screen. But that's beside the point. The point of the punishment was to cause her continued long-term embarrassment as she had to walk around with a jagged, deliberately screwed up hair cut (the dad left a long random bit, which the driver mistook for a ponytail) and answer friends and teachers when they inevitably asked "why did you cut your hair?! It was so pretty!"
The dad probably thought he was doing the right thing. It's a very sad mistake, and would be whether she had committed suicide or not.
I hope YouTube, Facebook, and other such sites will decide to stop allowing shaming videos of minors. Not because of this suicide, which may not have been directly caused by the shaming punishment, but because such things are cruel and exploitative.
I think we can all agree that things should have been done much, much differently.
OK..Every animal that raises its young uses negative stimulus to teach them how to behave.
We can't use physical pain anymore. We can't use emotional pain anymore.
What negative stimulus is appropriate anymore?
Cutting off the hair seems excessive. Still he's not beating her.
"You are grounded. no internet for a week!"
Son kills himself. Either for being grounded or because his life sucks.
father is the worst person in the world for grounding his son. How DARE you ground your son, you heartless abuser?
Shaving your child's head seems surprisingly tame to me. Aid rather for example have my head shaved than get beaten. And who would kill themselves because their friends saw their dad shave their head. If she went to school the next day the kids would all see she had a shaved head. And probably ask about it. And she'd probably tell them what a bastard her dad was. So, they'd know about the incident anyway.
People seem to have this idea that the best consequence to give a misbehaving child is the one that will make him/her most miserable, rather than the one that actually demonstrates why the behavior is to be avoided, rights the wrong the child has done and/or keeps the child safe.
If Izabel was using drugs or alcohol, that's wrong, and it's wrong precisely because Izabel was a valuable person who deserved to be protected from the effects of those substances on her immature brain and body. Attempting to make her look ugly and trashy, and therefore be treated like trash, for a long period of time (six months is a century when you're 13) sends the opposite message. If she was using drugs or alcohol, the way to deal with that is to buckle down on supervision, walking her to and from class if need be (or hiring someone to do it, essentially a babysitter). That would be embarrassing, sure, but in a different way. It sends the message that "you're not ready to protect yourself, so I will do it for you until you can, because you are worth protecting." Deliberating setting out to make her an object of ridicule sends the message "Yep, you're a fuck up, and I'll make sure you can never keep your fuck ups hidden from anyone who lays eyes on you, whether it's their business or not", which is basically "abandon all hope".
Of course, someone had to show up and call a 13 year old a loser. Grousing about a 13 year old's inability to focus on the future and put others' desires ahead of her own is like grousing about a toddler's clumsiness.
Gahrie
You can still use physical pain, legally, in the US. You just can't use injury.
Physical pain really only works when it's a logical consequence, and then only on fairly young kids. 13 is well past the age where a spanking does much good, but it works pretty well on kids between 2 and 7.
What you should use most with teens is supervision and loss of material possessions. They usually hate it, and it actually works.
r565 said... [hush][hide comment]
Shaving your child's head seems surprisingly tame to me. Aid rather for example have my head shaved than get beaten. And who would kill themselves because their friends saw their dad shave their head. If she went to school the next day the kids would all see she had a shaved head. And probably ask about it. And she'd probably tell them what a bastard her dad was. So, they'd know about the incident anyway.
Younger brother and I got regular beatings from step-father. Hell, we got beat in advance for shit we had not yet done.
Shave our heads once. Guarantee you, the beatings were like unicorns and rainbows compared to humiliation of going to school and being teased everyday. Cannot begin to imagine how terrible it would be for a girl.BTW, step-dad was doing what he thought best, "toughing us up".
What you should use most with teens is supervision and loss of material possessions.
So if she had committed suicide because she was embarrassed that her Dad hired somebody to follow her around that would be OK?
If she committed suicide because her Dad took her phone away from her that would be OK?
I don't think she necessarily committed suicide because her dad deliberately humiliated her, as I said above.
And of course it's not like suicide is ok in any circumstance.
But, yeah, I do kind of think it'd be better if she's had an adult walking her from class to class making sure she stayed safe. I do think that that would've been a more suitable, less harmful consequence for using drugs (or whatever "getting messed up" meant) than deliberately humiliating her.
JPS - If I were condoling with a family member, I'd speak the obvious truth that this seems to have been the work of an imbalanced moment, a deeply impulsive act that can in no way comprise the whole of their daughter's/granddaughter's/sister's personality, and mourn with them at the grievous loss.
If, however, there were a young person standing around, I would also add that suicide is the one sure way to make your worst moment a permanent one.
I have seen teen suicide strings sparked before by stuff like this. It is not compassionate to so behave over one tragedy so as to spark the next. It's a terrible, terrible mistake.
I cannot believe that a family gripped by such a hideous event would care very much what most feel about it, but trying to blame the father for it seems both wrong and likely to induce other tragedies.
This was a caring father. You may not like his methods, but he CARED what happened to his daughter. The evidence is that he was right. Not that he was wrong. That's a deplorable, awful truth, but it is the TRUTH. Should he have called the cops? Got his thirteen year old in the justice system? I haven't seen that work at all.
I've seen what happened when parents didn't care enough to try to intervene more than feebly, and I've seen the results (including suicide, jail, institutionalization, and success) when parents moved heaven and hell to try to help, and I can't blame the parents in my heart for this at all. You try, because you must. Sometimes you are doomed to fail.
It's an awful story but it is not our story, and we should not condemn where we do not know the facts or behave so as to generate another one. That's our role. To behave so as to minimize such events.
One of my uncles succeeded. He spoke to the cops, he got a detective to back him up. He locked his son in the basement for three years, after building bars on the windows so he couldn't get out. He drove his son to school, he picked his son up from school, and he instructed the school to contact him the moment the boy turned up missing. The boy claimed child abuse, and my uncle and the detective talked to the investigators together. I am sure you would feel that incarcerating your son in your own home for three years was cruel. It worked. I don't agree with your concept of abuse at all. When the kid is abusing him- or herself, the situation changes.
My other uncle did the more normal route, with treatment programs, special schools, etc. It did not work. End result, tragedy. I condemn neither.
It's worth pointing out that my bit about reacting in the way that actually helps, not that makes the offender most miserable ought to apply to parents, too. It should go without saying that the people who seek to make Mr. Laxamana more miserable than he already is, just ought of some twisted revenge thing, need to step off. What we need is better education about child development, what actually works as deterrent and correction for different age groups and situations, not cyber-shame lobbed at parents who make mistakes. But, the former takes work, time spent with families in your church or community or within your extended family, offering to mentor or even just be there with the too-old-for-daycare kid who needs supervision. Shaming Mr. Laxamana is accomplished in forty seconds.
Having raised a teenager as a single father, I can say the only legal thing you can do when they are totally out of control, is have them locked up in a residential rehab facility. This requires good insurance or independent resources. After they get out, threaten to send them back if they get out of line again. This will work until they are old enough to join the Navy. Then it's the Navy's problem.
I'm still flummoxed by the hair being cut yet the pony-tail being her most recognizable feature to the witness. Just how many days passed between incidents?
The local paper says the triggering incident for the shaming was the girl sending some risque/cheesecake quality photos (i.e. not-quite-nude) to a male classmate.
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