Death shows what we don’t know about sexual assault

This time, the postings on social media about Daisy Coleman are arriving with the respect that she always deserved, that all young girls deserve.

It’s damnable that they’re arriving too late.

There are notes of RIP; for Rest in Power. And messages from people who attest that the Netflix documentary about her life, “Audrie & Daisy,” helped to save theirs’.

Included also are many tributes that note that while 23-year-old Daisy died “technically by suicide, but morally by murder.”

The charge is accurate. And so many could be named as co-conspirators, especially those who viciously attacked her on social media.

Daisy’s mother reported her daughter’s suicide on Facebook in early August, rocking a network of followers who looked to the young woman as a symbol of resilience, an advocate who characterized the term sexual assault survivor, over victim.

Daisy became a household name in the worst way possible for a young girl. She was allegedly sexually assaulted as a 14-yearold in 2012.

The details of the case garnered it national attention. Her story was a drama in a section of the nation that news outlets too often see in stereotypical terms.

A small bucolic town in the Midwest. The pretty young cheerleader, new to the area. A popular football player, with locally significant family members.

The story went that she was lured to the house late at night. Other boys were there and alcohol was served to both her and her even younger friend. The next morning her mother found her on the front lawn, her hair frozen to the ground, disheveled and traumatized.

The local hospital suspected an assault and charges were initially filed. And then dropped.

The town turned against Daisy and shielded the young man, Matthew Barnett, the grandson of a longtime Northwest Missouri legislator. At 14 Daisy was labeled a liar, a slut and blamed for the incident because she was drinking. Eventually, only with public pressure and the appointment of a special prosecutor out of Kansas City, would Barnett plead guilty to a misdemeanor of child endangerment, but not of felony sexual assault.

In the years following her case, Daisy Coleman managed to articulate what sexual assault robs from a person. It’s an innocence and a natural course of a life that should have progressed along a different, now evaporated route.

In a 2018 YouTube video she captured it, discussing her life in terms of before and after with Amanda Knox.

“People don’t understand who I really was before all of this happened to me,” she said. “I was almost like a stereotype. I had blonde hair. I was a cheerleader. I was on the dance team. I did pageants.”

She spoke about how to her the bullying, the taunting, the labeling was almost worse than thoughts of being assaulted. It was what others did in reaction to her coming forward that multiplied the harm.

In announcing her death, Coleman’s mother wrote, “She never recovered from what those boys did to her and it’s just not fair. My baby girl is gone.”

Among Coleman’s legacies is the group she helped found, SafeBAE, which works to teach middle and high school students about consent,

Title IX laws and preventing rape culture. But ultimately, one of Daisy Coleman’s greatest contributions may be a simple reminder. That everyone has trauma, some more than others. And it’s the role of everyone, not to add to that pain.