Rehtaeh’s story a wakeup call: Dad
Youth engaged with issues around consent, sexual assault, bullying
Five agonizing years of what ifs can’t bring Rehtaeh Parsons back.
“I have a million what ifs,” said Glen Canning, Rehtaeh’s father. “What if I called her on the day she took this awful step. I really do wish I had called her.”
The awful and fateful step Rehtaeh Parsons, 17, took was to attempt to take her life in her Dartmouth bedroom on April 4, 2013. She suffered brain damage and was taken off life-support three days later.
Her grieving mother, Leah Parsons, later posted on Facebook, “Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun.”
The incident that Leah Parsons pointed to had taken place at an Eastern Passage house party 17 months earlier when Rehtaeh was just 15. Rehtaeh said she was sexually assaulted and a picture of one of the boys having sex with her as she leaned out a window was widely distributed through her school and peer group. The photo of the boy, 17, giving the thumbs-up is now a sealed court exhibit but its distribution led to Parsons being constantly cyberbullied and harassed on social media.
After a lengthy RCMP investigation into the sexual assault and after consultation with the Crown, it was determined there was insufficient evidence to lay charges.
Eventually, two of the boys involved were charged in relation to the photo. The boy who appeared in the picture with Rehtaeh pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography and was sentenced to a year’s probation. Another received a conditional discharge after pleading guilty to making child pornography by taking the photo.
And the what ifs still haunt Canning.
Canning, now 54, wrote in a recent blog that he had been so proud of the relationship he had with his daughter and how often they spoke.
“But on the day she died, I
thought about calling but put it off. I put it off and I’ll never know what could have been. I could have called and helped her get to a better place, calm her down, get her thoughts back on track. Let her know how much she means to me. How much life she has yet to live.”
Canning uses his regrets to reach out to others.
“That’s just something I have to live with,” he said. “That’s why I tell people all the time, ‘if you know somebody who is in a really bad place, don’t think I’ll call them tomorrow.’ Call them right now.”
In another blog, Canning talks about taking consolation from the last time he did speak with his daughter, the day before her suicide attempt.
“I picked her up from an appointment with a counsellor and drove her home to her mom’s house in Cole Harbour,” he writes.
“I’m so grateful her last words to me were ‘I love you Dad.’ I grateful my last words to her were the same, ‘I love you Rae.’”
Canning has reconciled himself with the fact that there will never be justice for his daughter. He now searches for positives to pull from the tragic situation.
“When I look back at everything that’s happened since her death, I can definitely see that she left an impact on the world, in Canada for sure,” Canning said. “Her legacy is one where people learn to stand up and
speak out and try to be better people in a lot of ways. Her ending her life and everything that happened has definitely resulted in an attitude change for an awful lot of people.
“It’s been a huge wakeup call for a lot of people from parents, to the police, to the courts, to teachers, everybody.
“Rae’s story has been a big wakeup call and I think it’s brought a lot of positive changes, especially when it comes to supporting people who come in and say they were assaulted. I think that’s made a huge difference.”
Canning moved to Toronto two years ago. He dedicates part of his life to getting young men in tune with issues of violence against women and to get more consent education into high schools so that people understand what that actually means.
“It doesn’t mean a great big yelling no, it means a lack of yes is also an issue of consent. In Rae’s case, that definitely rings true.”
The Rehtaeh case spawned a Nova Scotia anti-cyberbullying law, the second incarnation of which is still being fine tuned. An independent 2015 report from Murray Segal, the former deputy attorney general of Ontario, was critical of the justice system, police, the prosecution service and the education system. The report contained 17 recommendations, almost all of which have been implemented, according to a Justice Department spokesperson.