Not long ago Jane Clementi was simply a mom of three sons, a part-time nurse and an active member of her Ridgewood, New Jersey, church.

On Sept. 22, 2010, the life she knew and loved broke apart.

Just before 9 p.m., her 18-year-old son Tyler Clementi went to the George Washington Bridge, a 4,700-foot span of steel and concrete connecting New York City and New Jersey, and updated his Facebook status: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

Thousands of young people die by suicide each year, but Tyler’s story became one of the few to capture the world’s attention.

Days before his death Tyler, then a student at Rutgers University, had an all too common experience: Someone used digital technology to violate and mock him.

Tyler Clementi, center, at his 2010 high school graduation with his parents and brothers. Image: Jane Clementi

The tragedy presented an unbearable truth. Technology can transform young people’s lives, but in the hands of the cruel and callous, it has the power to destroy.

No one wants to envision this fate for their child or loved one. No one wants to imagine a young person scrolling through a barrage of abusive texts, being ridiculed and threatened on social media, or seeing their intimate photos posted online, alongside their phone number and address.

Yet, this does and will happen and Clementi wants to prevent it from happening to someone you love.

The threat of cyberbullying and harassment, including so-called revenge porn, may seem less overwhelming today than it did just a few years ago, but shaming and humiliation still shape our everyday lives. From maliciousness on the presidential campaign trail to threats of violence on social media, young people are defining their identities in a culture that doesn't prize civility and compassion above all else — a reality Clementi knows well.

"If we had just turned away and gone back into our nice quiet space, that would have felt so very wrong.”

“When we started the foundation, one of the reasons was because we had media attention,” she says. “From having no power, we had our voice magnified and amplified. With that comes responsibility. If we had just turned away and gone back into our nice quiet space, that would have felt so very wrong.”

Clementi and her husband Joe are not alone, either. In the five years since their son died and they started the Tyler Clementi Foundation, nonprofits, politicians, academics, advocates and victims have similarly dedicated themselves to preventing digital abuse and aiding casualties. Their combined efforts hint at a cultural shift that refuses to tolerate digital humiliation and insists on holding the perpetrator accountable.

What it means to be an 'upstander'

The perpetrator in Tyler’s case was his roommate Dharun Ravi.

Tyler was a shy but talented young man. As a freshman at Rutgers, he won a spot playing violin with the university’s prestigious symphony. He thought about majoring in biology.

Tyler performing in spring 2010. As a freshman, he won a spot playing violin with Rutgers' prestigious symphony. Image: Jane clementi

The first three weeks of his college experience, in fall 2010, were defined by growing confidence in his sexuality. Just a few days before arriving at Rutgers, Clementi told his parents that he was gay.

Ravi, though, had surreptitiously learned of Clementi’s sexual orientation and spied on him remotely during an intimate encounter with another man.

Ravi then shared his discovery with friends on social media and encouraged them to watch the next time Tyler invited a man to their room. Tyler had been viciously outed, and read his peers’ comments about the incident online. (Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, in 2012.)

"Your life has value and is important, no matter how you feel at the moment and no matter what others say or think."

This is why the Tyler Clementi Foundation’s mission focuses on helping adults clearly communicate their expectations for respectful behavior and turning bystanders into "upstanders” who won't condone bullying, no matter where it takes place.

Since 2011, the foundation’s representatives, including Jane, her husband and their son James, have spoken to thousands of people annually, including adolescents and teens, about not only calling out harassment, but also comforting and helping the victim.

It could be a brave act of compassion that protects or saves a life, and Jane Clementi strongly believes that gesture might have prevented Tyler from turning to suicide.

"So many people saw what was going on and no one spoke up," she says. "No one reached out to Tyler."

An upstander, per the foundation's pledge, does not demean others based on differences like sexuality, size, gender, race, disability, religion, class, or politics. An upstander remains vigilant and vocal. They tell the bullied: "Your life has value and is important, no matter how you feel at the moment and no matter what others say or think."

Young people, though, may lack the confidence to take a stand, or may worry about their own safety and becoming a bully’s target. A Pew Research Center survey of teens ages 12 to 17, conducted in 2011, found that 90% had ignored painful or mean comments directed at others.

Reaching and empowering these adolescents and teens is critical, but not easy.

In October, the Ad Council partnered with Johnson & Johnson, Apple, Google, Facebook, Adobe and Twitter to launch the “I Am A Witness” anti-bullying initiative. The centerpiece of the campaign was an eye emoji meant to help bystanders and victims, via social social media and text message, point out harassment, and support those who are bullied.

AT&T in New York, which has partnered with the Tyler Clementi Foundation, also unveiled an initiative last year called Digital You that explains the risks of using technology, and shares stories like Tyler’s with young people to illustrate the real effects of digital harassment and the importance of cyber safety.

Helping a bullied child

Clementi says the foundation’s public speaking is essential, but she also knows that the problem of cyberbullying requires far more than prevention and education.

“There’s not one piece or way to create a safe, welcoming, supportive, respectful society,” she says. “We want to create and ignite that change in society...and all of these pieces are very important.”

That’s why the foundation partnered with New York Law School to launch the Tyler Clementi Institute for CyberSafety last fall.

The institute is home to the first law school clinic in the country that will offer pro-bono legal assistance to cyber harassment victims and their families. Few lawyers know how to handle those claims, so the clinic will also focus on professional training.

“More and more, parents are realizing harassment is not the norm."

Professor Ari Ezra Waldman, the institute’s founder and director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at the New York Law School, says he’s noticing a shift in the way parents handle bullying. It’s becoming less acceptable to pass it off as character building or insignificant.

“More and more, parents are realizing harassment is not the norm,” Waldman says.

But there’s a big gap between understanding that and navigating a school system, for example, to advocate for a bullied child.

Many schools want to help, but parents sometimes need legal assistance when their child is bullied and the school either won’t fulfill its federal obligation to investigate reports of sex and gender discrimination, or when administrators think the appropriate response is to punish both the victim and the bully. Parents or caregivers may have exhausted every alternative for a solution, and still the child suffers.

“The effects of cyber harassment leave you feeling you have nowhere to turn,” says Waldman. “You’re feeling the depression and anxiety and it turns very quickly to hopelessness. We’re trying to end this cycle…by providing people with ways to seek redress and reach for help.”

Intimate images that shatter lives

The clinic also serves victims of nonconsensual porn, another term for revenge porn or cyber exploitation. When victims — and they are mostly women — seek legal help, it is prohibitively expensive.

Pursuing a tort claim in court can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, including attorney’s fees, expert witnesses and expenses for technical expenses, and private investigating in cases where the perpetrator is anonymous.

Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer in Brooklyn who focuses on Internet privacy and sexual consent litigation, is directing New York Law School’s upcoming cyber harassment legal clinic. She says her firm has a dozen pending cases representing underage teens whose images were shared without permission and went viral amongst their classmates.

If you are a victim of #revengeporn in need of an attorney, visit CCRLP: https://t.co/4KKRm0Ukm1 — End Revenge Porn (@EndRevengePorn) January 19, 2016

In theory, child pornography laws could provide some protection and legal recourse for those victims, but Goldberg says they were not written with underage offenders and digital distribution in mind.

Since there are no federal laws targeting this behavior, victims are essentially at the mercy of state legislators and law enforcement. Twenty-six states have different laws meant to protect nonconsensual porn victims, but Goldberg says law enforcement often doesn’t know how to implement them or how to investigate these crimes. Officers don't track this behavior on their own, but like with most crimes, wait for victims to make a report. There is also reluctance to prosecute.

“Law enforcers are not people who typically spend as much time online and might not take crimes as seriously when conduct is happening online as opposed to offline,” says Goldberg. “It doesn’t resonate for them the same way it might if somebody had been physically assaulted.”

Yet, the experience can shatter a victim’s life. Young people who are just forming their identity on the Internet now suddenly see intimate photos of themselves in search results — and so can friends, family, potential employers and college admission counselors.

Removing nonconsensual porn has gotten somewhat easier in the last year thanks to Internet and social media companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook adopting streamlined request processes. (In contrast, though, content that merely bullies breaks no laws; the threshold to successfully report and remove such comments is much higher.)

Victim of #revengeporn - we are here for you 24/7: https://t.co/9gXcrxFrK6 — End Revenge Porn (@EndRevengePorn) February 7, 2016

But once an intimate image lives on the Internet, it’s often reposted over and over. Some victims even pay firms to constantly monitor their search results and issue takedown requests.

Outraged by the way nonconsensual porn violates its victims, California Attorney General Kamala Harris has made punishing purveyors of it a priority and has notched some important victories.

Her office was the first in the nation to prosecute someone for operating a cyber exploitation website. Kevin Bollaert allowed users to post private nude and explicit photos without the individual’s permission, and then charged them hundreds of dollars to remove the images. Bollaert was sentenced last April to eight years in prison followed by 10 years of supervised release.

Last year, Harris convened a task force on cyber exploitation that included victims' advocates, law enforcement leaders, and companies such as Facebook, Google and Instagram.

“When we say to a victim 'it's your fault,' you discourage others from coming forward.”

That effort not only persuaded companies to reevaluate their harassment policies, but also led to the creation of an online resource center where victims, law enforcement and tech companies can find information on how to combat nonconsensual porn.

Finally, Harris sponsored two bills designed to enable law enforcement to prosecute cyber exploitation crimes, both of which went into effect Jan. 1.

“As a career prosecutor...one of the things I know is that predators are empowered when they think they can get away with their bad deeds,” says Harris. “When we say to a victim 'it's your fault,' you discourage others from coming forward.”

Building a legacy

Clementi sees a common thread amongst online behavior that effectively dehumanizes its target.

“It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that people still continue not to realize the consequences of their words,” she says, “and think they can damage someone else’s self worth and increase their own.”

Tyler and Jane Clementi enjoying Thanksgiving festivities in 2006. Image: Jane Clementi

It’s particularly painful for her to see that ugliness inflicted on children and young people. When she recently learned about the suicide of David Molak, a San Antonio teenager who’d been relentlessly bullied via text and social media, it unleashed familiar but complicated emotions.

“It’s nice to see Tyler’s name attributed to good.”

“My initial gut response as a mom who lost someone in such a similar way…is wanting to make it stop,” she says. “And then it hits me, ‘Oh I have a foundation, I can change this.’”

The momentum appears to be in Clementi’s favor.

That gives her hope, but it also transforms, little by little, her son’s legacy.

“It’s nice to see Tyler’s name attributed to good,” she says. “Unfortunately, initially, all he was — his name was a headline, a sentence, and it was of his darkest moment…and that’s what the world knew of Tyler, and that’s so not the Tyler that we knew and we loved.”

If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. For international resources, this list is a good place to start.

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