Risky moves: On Bazelon

I really admire what Emily Bazelon is doing in this article. She is looking deeply into this case and making risky moves as a writer to come to what, in the end, I find to not be such a risky point of view: Is it at all reasonable to prosecute these teenagers and essentially ruin their futures all for the sake of teaching them a lesson which they've probably already learned. "They have been the focus of intense, public rage. They've been blamed for the suicide of a vulnerable, troubled girl. They will live with this always. Maybe that is already enough," Bazelon finishes her article with. It was interesting to skim over the comments section (I can't really bear to read most comments in depth)--clearly many readers were outraged wither the articles; in particular commentators seemed to attack Bazelon's reputation as a journalist. But I think those commentators failed to realize that Bazelon wasn't simply "taking a side" and attempting to further victimize Phoebe Prince, she was turning our attention to how complicated the situation really is and highlighting potential motives behind the DA's and the school board's decisions. In a sense, she's doing what previous writers had failed to do (or hadn't done yet) as outlined by her extensive link-works-cited throughout the articles--digging deeper into the story.

This article reminded me of Janet Malcolm's May 2010 article, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills", where Malcolm openly involves herself with the case she has been assigned to write about and proceeds to write about how her own involvement may/may not have affected the case. (On a side note, this article ended up being in the Best Articles of the 2010s, a fascinating list that takes on the typical pattern manmanmanmanmanmanwomanmanmanmanmanmanwomanmanmanmanman...   I loved this article before I came across that list, and it's still a favorite within that list.) Part of the reason I love it is Malcolm's blatant involvement. I'm not sure what it says about man writing courtroom drama vs. woman writing courtroom drama, if I'm drawn to these articles because the women are taking sides and somehow coming to a defense. It would be too easy to say that I love these articles because I can identify with a woman becoming emotionally involved with her subject material, yet it might not be too easy to say that people reacted strongly to these articles, at least Bazelon's, because she was a woman, and therefore prompted comments like: "i sincerely hope that you, as a journalist, feel the slightest bit of guilt knowing that you gave a voice to kids who already seemed to speak too much," and "you should learn how to write a story," and "this is one of the coldest reactions to case I have ever seen," and "Shame on you!"and, finally, "You're saying that Phoebe Prince ASKED for what she got? And you're a woman?"

Okay, I went back and read those comments more thoroughly. 


Anyway, I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate to compare Malcolm's article with Bazelon's three-part series, but each do something risky, likely knowing that people are bound to react. 


It was an interesting move on Bazelon's part to compare this story with that of Max and Martin. A similar case where the teen faced potential jail time layers the way we read Phoebe Prince's case. I appreciated the broader scope of her research and the ways we are allowed to draw comparisons between the two cases. If she were writing more about this case, I wonder if she would have gotten into the issues surrounding sex offender registration, how even urinating in public can warrant such registration in some states. 


Similarly, I wanted her to delve more into why Carl Walker-Hoover's case didn't receive the same amount of attention Prince's did. What was the motivation behind choosing a case that has already garnered so much attention? (I tried to read the Bergman article she linked to, but it's no longer available.) But then, her point seemed more to be about looking at how Phoebe's pre-existing mental state really should have been taken into consideration. I think in Walker-Hoover's case, his bullies' anti-gay hate (whether or not Carl was gay, or whether he was even old enough to know it) seemed much more odious. I wonder if she would feel the same way though if his perpetrators were sentenced to prison sentences, or time in juvenile hall. She does get herself into tricky territory by suggesting these bullies needn't be punished so harshly. 


In terms of digital formatting: this article does bring up a frustration--namely that when there are dead links that I really want to read and I can't I get annoyed. (How to keep up with this? Whose responsibility is it to go through a bijillion articles and make sure links are actually linking to something? If the article's a year old, is it okay to let those links sit dead?) In terms of the little plus signs for footnotes, I liked that. What a great idea. I hate scrolling to the end of something, and even when it's the kind you click that brings you to the footnote, there's always a moment of discombobulation when returning to the article. I don't know why, but the little plus sign was more attractive than a footnote--Oh, there's more, it seemed to say, and I was always curious, whereas footnotes sometimes seem pesky or distracting. 


On a related note, here's a recent case about a teen suicide related to bullying.