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According to the boy, after Rehtaeh had collected herself somewhat and purportedly invited them to pick up where they’d left off.

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But more often than not, says 18-year-old Erin Dixon, it’s just the way teens are “communicating their sexuality.” It’s certainly not an invitation for intercourse.

Nor is it rare for cavalier attitudes about sex to prevail, says the Toronto teen — a point proven in the disturbingly candid interview given to Postmedia this week by the young man sentenced to probation for distributing a photo of himself having sex at a liquor-soaked Halifax gathering with Rehtaeh Parsons, a young woman who killed herself in 2013 after years of bullying linked to the indelible image snapped that night.

The Halifax man said he believed the sex was consensual, despite her being drunk and vomiting out a window.

“We were kind of laughing about the night, she was like, ‘You guys can keep going,’ and me and [the other boy], we’re like pointing at each other,” said the now-20-year-old, who can’t be identified by law because he was tried as a youth. “Like, ‘You go ahead’ and [the other boy present] said ‘You go ahead,’ so I was like whatever.”

Ms. Dixon and Andy Villanueva, who make up two-thirds of the activist group Project Slut, which they started in their Toronto high school, said that attitude is prevalent in the halls of their high school and likely those across the country.

“I don’t see them as alien to the people I know,” Ms. Villanueva said. “The sad thing is I genuinely believe they don’t identify themselves as aggressors or rapists.”