Riverside Girl, 13, Forced To Hold Vulgar Sign On Street Corner As Punishment For Alleged Sexting
While driving through a neighborhood in Riverside, California, on Wednesday, a woman named Krista Wilson saw something that immediately made her reach for her cellular device, so says NBC Los Angeles.
The scene in question? A young girl, in tears, on the corner of Magnolia and La Sierra Avenues, holding quite the vulgar handwritten sign. It read, “I’m 13 [and] I ask for d**k pics.”
Parenting FAIL:
"Parents in Riverside, California became irate last week after a community Facebook group for… https://t.co/JkQcAtoICo
— BeautyIsInside.com (@_BeautyIsInside) October 27, 2016
After taking some sneaky snaps of the teenager and her placard, Wilson shared them to a Facebook group dedicated to events in the Riverside County area in hopes of finding out more information on the girl’s identity.
“You could see [the] tears running down her face,” Wilson stated along with the image of the teenager and her sign. “Grown men were reading it and laughing [at her].”
Instead of a name or an address, however, she received several responses from other Riverside neighbors who claimed that not only had they also seen the teen standing on the corner, but that she had been there for several hours that day. In fact, when Wilson returned to the spot herself later on, she once again found the girl, still crying, still incredibly embarrassed, and still holding the sexually graphic sign.
Also during her second visit to the Riverside corner, the concerned Wilson caught a glimpse of a woman sitting in a nearby SUV. She ascertained that the individual might have been the young girl’s mother, but refrained from confronting her on what she felt was an issue that had been taken too far.
Meanwhile, the image of the girl and her sign began to blow up in the Riverside Facebook group, with some siding with Wilson’s shaming of the child’s mother, and others feeling that the girl deserved to be shamed for her alleged actions.
“To the people blaming the mother,” started Darwin Williams, Jr., “if she did nothing and something happened to this girl, first thing y’all will say is where was her mother and what she should have did.”
“The line between who they are and what they did is really blurred for teens,” Elizabeth Davis, PhD, a professor of psychology at the Riverside campus of the University of California, counteracted to NBC Los Angeles. “[Shaming is like] heaping self-doubt on something already volatile.”
Following her posting, Wilson and several others contacted the Riverside Police Dept. to implore law officials to look into the matter. After speaking to the girl’s mother at their home, they concluded that no crime had taken place and that her mother had not gone outside of the means of normal parenting to discipline her child. According to Lt. Melissa Bartholomew, a member of the Riverside police squad, the matter has been forwarded to the County Department of Public Social Services, who are said to be launching their own investigation.
Through their own search, NBC Los Angeles were able to uncover the address of the girl and knocked on her door for further comment, but no one answered.
In recent history, several stories regarding the public shaming of sexually active teenagers have been making headlines. As noted by the Inquisitr back in August of this year, a Georgia woman by the name of Shanavia Miller physically disciplined her 16-year-old daughter, Nia Green, during a Facebook live stream after Green supposedly invited her boyfriend into their home for sex.
The video, like the photo of the Riverside girl and her sign, quickly went viral, with viewers of the clip taking separate sides of blame. Additionally, just as with the aforementioned Riverside matter, Miller was not charged with any crime and Green, whose Facebook was temporarily “taken over” by her mother, chose to stay in her family’s home.
What do you think, Inquisitr readers? Was this girl’s punishment justified or just too much?
[Featured Image by Cathy Yeulet/iStock]
