The thing to know about being a 12-year-old girl is this: You live with the aware­ness that oth­er peo­ple’s eyes are always trained on you. The moment you pass from child­hood into young wom­an­hood, some­one is always look­ing. You are sub­ject to a mas­sive amount of con­flict­ing social pres­sure — you know you must sex­u­al­ize your­self to be deemed worth­while, but the bur­den is also on you avoid unwant­ed atten­tion from the creeps who are sud­den­ly cat-call­ing you, the nasty kids who sit atop the social hier­ar­chy or, worse yet, the preda­tors who may be trolling your social media pro­files. And you know that if those gazes fix on you, sin­gle you out, your whole exis­tence will become a bar­rage of insults and a dai­ly gaunt­let of intense emo­tion­al pain.

If you're a girl and you have a sexuality, it's going to be debated in Congress, shamed for being too much, shamed for not being enough, shamed for being the wrong kind, maybe picketed by Fred Phelps a couple of times, and then loudly debated on talk radio for the rest of your life.

What I’m try­ing to con­vey here is that, although the Face­book page for ​“12-Year Old Slut Meme’s” has recent­ly been tagged ​“Con­tro­ver­sial Humor” in lieu of tak­ing it down, the chil­dren whose names and images are culled for mock­ery are very, very unlike­ly to see it as a joke. Instead, it’s like­ly their worst night­mares come to life.

The posts are from var­i­ous sources around the Inter­net, includ­ing Face­book; the ​“humor” is entire­ly based on the idea that child abuse is hilar­i­ous. Under the pic­ture of a 15-year-old who said she had sex for a can of soda, for exam­ple, we get knee-slap­pers such as ​“she is soooooooooooo FUCK­ING UGLY HIDEOUS BITCH,” from Joules Bryce of New York Mills, New York. Or there’s the high road, tak­en by Damien Arvid­son: ​“Do peo­ple real­ly have so few morals as to pros­ti­tute them­selves for a drink? Bitch needs a bul­let.” You know what your moth­er always told you; sex is for some­one you love, but death threats are a sweet ges­ture on any occasion.

Vio­lence is an under­pin­ning of the page — and its per­verse stance as an arbiter of pub­lic moral­i­ty. James Sil­ver­wood and Dom Ter­ry, the men who run the page, have a very clear idea of parental respon­si­bil­i­ty: ​“Hon­est­ly, ask your­self, if you had a daugh­ter and she was dressed like a 2 cent, cock thir­ty whore, would it make an ounce of dif­fer­ence whether or not she was 12 or 14? No, you’d be ashamed to the point of beat­ing her regard­less,” reads one post. Shawn Smith, a sup­port­er of the page, notes in a Buz­zFeed com­ment that ​“until the peo­ple as par­ents step up and smack the shit out of their slut­ty daugh­ters instead of let­ting them get away with whor­eish [sic] ​‘Jer­sey Shore’ behav­ior then things ike [sic] this will nev­er go away.”

So, you know, there you have it. You can either beat your daugh­ter if you think she looks too sexy — a def­i­nite mark of good par­ent­ing, which is not at all like­ly to result in your pay­ing mas­sive ther­a­py bills lat­er — or a gang of sev­er­al thou­sand strangers can ver­bal­ly beat her for you. Sim­ple enough!

But it’s not so sim­ple for the 12-year-old girls. On the one hand, they’ve grown up play­ing with Bratz dolls and are now expect­ed to look like mod­els. On the oth­er hand, if they do their sex­u­al­i­ty ​“wrong” or awk­ward­ly (in the way pret­ty much any­one is bound to, their first few years out of the gate), grown men will now show up to pum­mel them into sub­mis­sion — not to men­tion their peers, who have the option of doing it in the flesh. If you’re sex­less, you’re FUCK­ING UGLY; if you’re sex­u­al, you’re a ​“cock thir­ty whore.” Nobody gets out unscathed.

The only thing this does is to fur­ther the basic, trau­mat­ic mech­a­nism of tran­si­tion­ing from child­hood to wom­an­hood: If you’re a girl and you have a sex­u­al­i­ty, it’s going to be debat­ed in Con­gress, shamed for being too much, shamed for not being enough, shamed for being the wrong kind, maybe pick­et­ed by Fred Phelps a cou­ple of times, and then loud­ly debat­ed on talk radio for the rest of your life. The mes­sage this page sends girls isn’t just that they’re ​“sluts;” it’s that they’re pub­lic prop­er­ty, that what they do with their bod­ies is not essen­tial­ly their busi­ness or their deci­sion. Which is the same mes­sage they’re get­ting from the rest of the cul­ture; Ter­ry, Sil­ver­wood and their fol­low­ers may be send­ing the mes­sage in a more crass, loud­er, more poor­ly spelled form than, say, Pope Bene­dict. But it’s hard to ignore the feel­ing that, when you get down to it, Dom and James are emis­saries of the world these girls will be encoun­ter­ing for the rest of their lives, unless some­thing changes.