ATLANTIC REHTAEH’S STORY
Glen Canning co-writing book about daughter’s journey
The father of Rehtaeh Parsons is co-writing a book about her life, her death and the realizations he’s come to in the years since the tragedy.
Glen Canning and author Susan McClelland are teaming up for the book, which will be published by Fredericton-based Goose Lane Editions in the spring of 2020.
“It’s going to be a book that’s really, is a way for me, I guess, to memorialize Rehtaeh’s story and her life,” Canning said in a telephone conversation with The Chronicle Herald. “But it’s also a book that tries to put into context everything that happened to her and why everything happened to her.”
Rehtaeh died in 2013 at 17 after she was taken off life support following an attempt at suicide. That attempt came in the wake of bullying and harassment following a sexual assault at a party and the subsequent social media sharing of photos of her assault. Two of the four teens involved eventually pleaded guilty to child pornography-related offences.
“It’s a book where I guess I’m trying to explain how I’ve come to be awakened to a bit of a journey through my life,” Canning said. “Where I was abused by a family member when I was a little boy. How dysfunctional it made me and how everything that happened with Rehtaeh and everything that I saw, it just kind of led me to believe that it just seems like a lot of people are broken. A lot of people grow up in a lot of dysfunctional families, a lot of dysfunctional environments, and that’s why what happened to her happened to her.”
Canning described the six years since his daughter’s death as a kind of awakening. He believed all along, and even more so now, that what happened was preventable.
HEALING AFTER RAGE
“Knowing what I know about the boys who assaulted Reh and their lives and things like that, it just seems like we’re not doing enough to address dysfunction in our society,” Canning said. “The rape culture and victim blaming and everything that went along with it, it’s a book about that. It’s a book about how I’ve come to realize that even in my own life, I’ve done things that have hurt people, that I regret very much.”
It’s also about how be began to understand that he had carried things forward from his childhood into adulthood that he did not perceive until after his daughter’s death.
But the book will also offer a way forward for people to get something meaningful out of her story, he said.
“I would describe it as a healing journey,” he said. “Because I know after Reh died, I was so mad and so angry and I just wanted to unleash on everybody, and through time just started to calm down and start to look at my own self. And start to realize that I’ve been the same as everybody else in my life.”
McClelland, an award-winning author and journalist, said she had been wanting to do a book like this.
“I have teen daughters myself, and have seen that the culture around us of the sexualization of girls, the slut-shaming, the complete sort of separateness, how girls are targeted, that this isn’t just a case of Rehtaeh and Amanda Todd,” McClelland said on Friday.
The problem is systemic in youth culture today, she said. The story needs to be told and to spark a national conversation.
McClelland said her own daughter went through some bad experiences in Grade 8 and later, as a musician, she put on concerts for various organizations involved in gender violence. She contacted Kevin Vowles, who was with the White Ribbon campaign working to end violence against women and girls. It was Vowles who told McClelland that Canning was ready to tell the story.
“Mostly, I feel very grateful that Glen has trusted me so much with this and been so honest through the whole process — and the whole family, as well,” she said.
“Knowing what I know about the boys who assaulted Reh and their lives and things like that, it just seems like we’re not doing enough to address dysfunction in our society.”
Glen Canning Father of Rehtaeh Parsons