14 DAY TRIAL // Amanda Todd caught YouTube users' attention after posting a series of videos entitled My Story: Struggling, bullying, suicide and self-harm. Five weeks later, this Wednesday, at 6 p.m, she was found dead in her home in Port Coquitlam, Canada, the Vancouver Sun reports.
Amanda's anti-cyber-bullying video consisted of her putting up notes documenting her story. “Every day I think why am I still here? … I have nobody. I need someone,” the girl wrote, while struggling with depression brought on by bullying and isolation.
Amanda Todd was a very brave young girl. She found the courage to expose teenagers' practices, some of which ruin lives. She wanted “to be an inspiration and to show that [she] can be strong.”
Her ordeal started in 8th grade, when she and a group of friends approached strangers online and engaged in video conversations. One of the men they talked to convinced her to take her top off and flash the camera.
The following year, he blackmailed her into “putting on a show,” on webcam. He knew intimate details about her life, including where she lived, where she went to school, who her friends were and names of members of her family.
The man spread the photos around, causing the girl to be ridiculed by her classmates. According to Amanda's mother, Carol Todd, the girl developed depression, anxiety and started dabbling with alcohol and drugs.
She changed schools, only to find the man had posted a Facebook page with her name and her naked photos plastered as profile pics.
“I can never get that photo back,” Amanda had wrote, in a desperate plea to get her life back. Classmates at the new school started harassing her, until, one day beating her up in front of the school. Amanda ran home and attempted to kill herself, drinking bleach. That didn't stop the bullies however. They posted on her Facebook page that they wished she was dead.
The girl's parents are distraught. Amanda's mother wishes for this to be a lesson, and for the teenager's cry for help to help stop bullying everywhere.
“I think the video should be shared and used as an anti-bullying tool. That is what my daughter would have wanted,” Carol Todd said.