On July 6th, I attended a virtual press conference where Aarti spoke about the ongoing harassment, grief and injustices she’s experienced after Arvey’s death.

When the students who bullied and assaulted Arvey saw that there were no consequences for their actions, they claimed an autonomy to harass him further, knowing that they would get away with it. The students cited their income privilege to threaten Arvey, saying that they would start being violent against his parent.

“Arvey didn’t share his struggles. He wanted to protect me from any additional stress from my being a single parent,” Aarti said. “Before he could understand his sexuality, he was shamed to view it through a lens of disgust that he could never come out.”

While Aarti repeatedly offered to describe her wounds, I was struck by the detachment of journalism: the focus on the nitty gritties of how Arvey was sexually assaulted; questions about pursuing invasive medical tests, as if violence is determined in a petri dish, not by the child and their loved ones living through it.

“Most news reports focus on the high level details without understanding and writing about the larger complex issues here like the complete lack of staff and administration sensitisation, redressal mechanisms for students and parents, sensitisation for students,” Aarti wrote.

When will we stop accepting the boundaries of so-called objectivity and neutrality as the vocabulary lists used to construct our stories? When will we stop normalizing the gender essentialist violence of a binary as a facade for ‘bias’ when we cover gender nonconforming narratives? When will we learn to follow the lead of a story rather than allowing our implicit biases to bury the facts — that Arvey was made to internalize a violence of isolation so deep, that he was made to believe that death was the only form of self-preservation?

How can we brush over the fact that places like schools, which are portrayed as a source of learning, are the source of poisoning for too many of us?

Continued: https://www.pixstory.com/story/justiceforarvey-higher-authorities-dont-consider-the-humanity-of-a-teachers-child1659017499/119708