Glen Canning is angry. It’s been a year and a half since his teenage daughter’s suicide in Nova Scotia, and he isn’t even allowed to write her name. “What are they going to do – arrest me for talking about my daughter who died? Go ahead.”

Canning’s daughter, 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, ended her life after her reported rape was photographed and disseminated on social media, after she was tormented by her classmates and dismissed by the police. “They made her feel like she didn’t matter, like she didn’t count,” Canning told me in an interview from his home in Halifax this week. Now, nearly three years after this too-familiar modern nightmare began at a small house party in their quiet Canadian city, Rehtaeh’s family is battling a judge’s order that bans the nation’s media – and even its citizens – from printing her name. Canning, who runs a blog dedicated to his late daughter, says, “We’re left holding onto the voice of our daughter, who has died, and we hope to keep her voice alive – and they’re not even letting us do that.”

Rehtaeh was one of several young women whose stories of sexual assault have gripped the world over the last few years after their tragic stories went viral. Shunned by peers and wronged by school administrations and law enforcement that did almost nothing to help them, these teenagers became international symbols as social media outrage and a growing movement against rape culture took up their cause. In the US, these places – like Steubenville in Ohio and Maryville in Missouri – aren’t just small towns anymore; they are part of a lurid vocabulary of a nation that has seen so much about teens, rape and consent, yet done too little.

But when the tweets recede and the Facebook shares cease to swell, the families of these young women are still there, fighting for some semblance of justice that doesn’t ever seem to arrive. These mothers and fathers are working to change the culture that so wronged their children, so that maybe, some day soon, they can offer the next victim a wave of hope.

“People say you’re so courageous,” Larry Pott tells me. “But our daughter is dead. We’re the surviving victims.”

Audrie Pott (right) with her grandmother, father, stepmother, brother and younger twin sisters. ‘Daddy,’ one of them recently asked Larry Pott, ‘why don’t girls ever assault anybody?’ Photograph: Courtesy of the Pott family

Almost immediately after Pott’s 15-year-old daughter, Audrie, was sexually assaulted at a party in Silicon Valley, California, her assailants – teenage classmates – spread photos of the attack around school. The California teen had been passed out, and woke up with her shorts off and her body covered in Sharpie pen scribbles. On Facebook, Pott despaired, “The whole school knows ... I have a reputation I can never get rid of ... my life is ruined.” Eight days after the attack, Audrie – a gifted artist and singer who was part of the only middle school band to march at President Obama’s 2008 inauguration – took her own life.

Audrie’s parents – her father Lawrence, her mother Sheila, and her stepmother Lisa – started speaking out even though their grief was still fresh. The first time I saw Larry Pott, he was speaking out, on camera at a press conference, against what he called the “sexual assault and bullying epidemic”. Today, he and the rest of the Pott family seem torn about this week’s signature by California governor Jerry Brown of “Audrie’s Law” – legislation that will increase the punishment for juveniles convicted of sexually assaulting unconscious victims, mandate sex-offender treatment and allow public access to juvenile court hearings in these kind of cases.

“When everything is done in a secret courtroom, there is no accountability,” Pott told me on Wednesday. “There seems to be this unalienable right, that I don’t understand, that if you’re ever assaulted by a juvenile, you can never let anyone know who they are.”

Audrie’s attackers – who pled guilty – were given unimaginably light sentences by the court: Two young men got 30 days in juvenile detention and one was given 45 days. They served some of their time on the weekends.

Sheila Pott, Audrie’s mother, expressed disappointment that California legislators were forced to remove any kind of minimum sentencing from the law. “We’re happy that the current legislation provides more accountability to victims’ rights,” she says. “But we still feel there is more work to be done to implement consequences for this type of criminal behavior.”

The Royal Canadian Mounties re-opened an investigation after what they described as new and credible information. By the time evidence was sufficient to prosecute, Rehtaeh Parsons was already gone. Photograph: Aaron McKenzie Fraser for Guardian US Opinion

In Canada, Canning tells me that when Rehtaeh decided to come forward and report her attack, he was incredibly proud. “She did the right thing,” he says, “and I’m telling her: Let the police do their job.” Rehtaeh alleged that she was assaulted by four boys at a party, where one took a picture of the assault. Canning thought that was all the evidence they needed: a photograph of Rehtaeh, naked from the waist-down, hanging out of a window vomiting up while a boy, also undressed, presses into her. He is giving the camera a thumbs-up. But after a year-long “investigation”, in which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police didn’t even bother to interview the boys accused or seize their phones, Rehtaeh was told there simply wasn’t enough evidence.

“It’s like saying someone wasn’t murdered when you have their body and a bullet right in front of you,” her father tells me.

“We asked the police to do something when it really mattered, and they did nothing,” says Canning. Only after his daughter’s death did the evidence seem to be sufficient enough to move forward. Now, one young man has pled guilty to child porn charges for sending around a picture of the attack, as another awaits trial.

But Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott are still gone. And for both girls’ parents, questions remain as to how something so horrible could have happened, and what they can do to ensure it never happens again.

Larry Pott tells me that his nine-year-old daughter recently asked him, “Daddy, why don’t girls ever assault anybody?” He told her it wasn’t that girls don’t ever rape, just that they don’t do it often. But the simple question from his grade-schooler has left Pott thinking a lot about “what the heck has happened to men and boys?”

Larry and Lisa Pott testified before the California state senate in April. This week, anti-bullying legislation named after his daughter went into effect. ‘There is more work to be done,’ says Audrie’s mother, Sheila. Photograph: Courtesy of the Pott family

“It’s not a college problem. It’s not a high-school problem. It’s a gender and societal problem,” he says. Lisa Pott, Audrie’s stepmom, adds that while they’re happy to see the White House initiative to end rape on college campuses, she’d like to see more done “at the high school level” to educate teenagers about sexual violence.

“The shame needs to be put on the attackers, and we want to see a general change in attitude that makes it unacceptable to blame the victim at any level.”

In Glen Canning’s house, Rehtaeh’s glasses and a Jane Goodall book still sit idly on bedroom shelves. “As a man, you don’t run into victim-blaming culture,” he tells me. “But now I see it like the sun in the sky.” These days, when he’s not working as a freelance photographer and writer, Canning keeps busy giving speeches about consent and sexual assault at high schools. “I guess it’s similar to Rehtaeh – she always wanted to be a veterinarian. After she was raped, she wanted to be a lawyer and help people who were wronged,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rehtaeh Parsons’ parents wore t-shirts with her name to court late last month, but her father still can’t print it on his blog devoted to her memory. Photograph: Aaron McKenzie Fraser for Guardian US Opinion

Despite the work being done by activists and victims’ families, despite the social media outcry that follows, young women continue to be wronged as if we have learned nothing. Just a few months ago, a 16-year-old girl from Houston, named Jada, was passed out and allegedly assaulted – photos of her started to spread on social media using a cruel hashtag and with users mimicking her unconscious pose. Instead of being shamed, Jada decided to speak out. She told a local television station: “There’s no point in hiding. Everybody has already seen my face and my body, but that’s not what I am and who I am.”

Audrie’s parents talk about their daughter as kind, beautiful, loyal. Her mother says her daughter had a passion for the arts – part of the reason the Audrie Pott Foundation, an organization founded in her memory – offers art and music scholarships. “She was always singing and working on art projects,” Sheila Pott says.

When Rehtaeh was three years old, she watched Babe: Pig in the City. There’s a scene where a fish is knocked out of its bowl. Rehtaeh stood on her seat in the theater and screamed for someone to help the fish. When Canning wrote on his blog about this memory of his daughter, whom he still could not call by name, he added: “Sometimes her heart was too big, sometimes it scared me.”

These young women are not just sad stories, or pictures gone viral. They were incredible young people, girls who were loved and cherished. And these loved and cherished children were treated like they were less than human – not only by their attackers, but by a system meant to protect them.

Their families have dedicated their lives to their children’s memories – to making sure that the same tragedy doesn’t play out over and over, again and again. These moms and dads simply can’t imagine doing anything else. And if we want to honor the lives ruined, the justice not yet done, it’s time to stop treating these young women’s lives like stories or memes and start thinking – like their families – what we can do to end the horror.