October 7, 2010
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

After fielding phone calls from anxious parents and talking to students since Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi left a suicide note on his Facebook page and killed himself after his sexual encounter with another man was broadcast online, the campus' Episcopal Church chaplain went to see "The Social Network," the movie about Facebook's origins.

"I'm still learning and my task as a chaplain in part is to continue to engage people long after this is in the headlines and try to constructively engage them in quieter times," the Rev. Greg Bezilla, chaplain of the Rutgers Episcopal Campus Ministry, told Episcopal News Service in a recent interview.

Bezilla is not alone in his desire to learn more about the causes and implications of the tragedy. Episcopal Church chaplains and clergy, among others, have been among those trying to understand and learn from the Ridgewood, New Jersey man's suicide in hopes of preventing similar deaths in the future. It is not an easy task.

In late September, the news emerged that Clementi, 18, jumped off the George Washington Bridge between New Jersey and New York after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, and Ravi's friend, Molly Wei, both 18, allegedly set up a camera in a dorm room and used it to watch and transmit a live sexual encounter between Clementi and another man. Ravi and Wei are each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy.

"People who are far removed from it are analyzing it, reflecting on it, discerning what the issues are in the incident, taking positions, calling people out to accountability," Bezilla said of the days since the story broke. "It is something of a media circus …then us well-meaning folks making our pronouncements."

The pronouncements of people trying to make sense of Clementi's death have been varied. Some observers have said the tragedy is about the documented high incidences of both cyberbullying and suicide among youth in general and young lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender people in particular. Others call it an object lesson in the dangers of the internet, or an example of society's current lack of inhibitions around privacy, or a variety of combinations of those observations and more. And then there is the question of what, if anything, can be done with any insight that is gained.

In Ridgewood, word of Clementi's death hit home with more than the usual force. The affluent suburb 20 miles west of New York has experienced clusters of teen suicides since at least the late 1970s.

The Rev. Canon John Hartnett, rector of St. Elizabeth's Episcopal Church in Ridgewood, told ENS that the parish does not normally host secular town-hall type meetings but that he agreed when the LGBT-advocacy organization Garden State Equality approached him for space for one of two such gatherings held in the wake of Clementi's death. Hartnett said that efforts to reduce teen suicide and eliminate bullying of any young person "deserve the full support and welcome of the church."

The gathering at St. Elizabeth's on Oct. 7 was preceded by one at Rutgers the prior evening during which Democratic New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg called for legislation requiring colleges receiving federal aid to adopt codes of conduct that prohibits bullying and harassment. The law also would give schools money to establish harassment-prevention programs.

At Rutgers, there were protests and vigils, but Bezilla noted that they were attended by a few hundred from among the 38,000 students on its main campus that sprawls across the New Jersey cities of New Brunswick and Piscataway.

If the incident was "not registering very deeply" for some Rutgers students far removed from the dormitory from which Clementi was harassed, parents have been a different matter, Bezilla said.

"Parents, I can tell you, are very anxious, especially those who have just sent off their young person to college," he said. "I've had to deal with several calls and communications with anxious parents."

While the news of Clementi's death was shocking, the issues of cyberbullying and youth suicide were already on Rutgers' radar, Bezilla said, noting that the week before the story broke he'd been asked to be part of a campus suicide-prevention task force. In addition, the Rutgers Project Civility, which had been in the planning stages for months, was launched as planned on the day that Clementi's death became widely known.

"It anticipated some of the issues that have been churned up by this," Bezilla said of the project, "namely issues around appropriate communication on the internet and through these social media technologies."

Hartnett said he's hearing "some pushback" on the idea that Clementi's death is only cyberbullying. People also are remarking on how the incident symbolizes the "coarsening of our general culture," he said.

"I'm hearing people saying [Ravi and Wei] were only imitating what they had seen" in a culture titillated by "reality television" shows such as "Big Brother," which pits a group of young housemates against each other while cameras are rolling, Hartnett said.

The Rev. Winnie Varghese, priest-in-charge of St. Mark's Church in the Bowery and a former chaplain at both Columbia University in Manhattan and University of California Los Angeles, told ENS that the incident might be "quite simply about voyeurism and sexual humiliation, which is a different thing that is happening all over the place."

"It happens that webcams are left on and there is now the sex act that you have participated in that is now someone's property," she said.

"What's very sad is that I can imagine these kids thinking that they're pulling the great prank and that it was a college student kind of stupid prank," she said.

"It's not that kids weren't treating each other horribly 20 years ago," Varghese added, noting that available technology today allows that behavior to be broadcast far and wide.

The Rev. Allison Reed, chaplain at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, said in an interview that "a role of a chaplain might be to raise the level of awareness that students have of the implications of their presence online and the consequences of putting information or content related to another individual online."

Finding meaning in the Clementi incident is also complicated by the knowledge that young people often find a freedom in being away at school that allows them to explore themselves in new ways. Varghese called it "space for identity development" and said that students don't always understand the impact of their explorations on the people around them. "It's rare to be 18 and to have really developed a strong sense of being intentional about the impact of your actions on other people," she said.

Understanding "yourself as an agent in the world [not just] in the large sense of how your vocation can be for the good, but also in how your daily interactions support or don't support the dignity of the people around you and that you're responsible for those actions" is "news for students," she said.

It's also a challenge when students recognize clashes between what they thought they knew about themselves and what they have discovered, said the Rev. Joanne Sanders, an Episcopal priest and the associate dean for religious life at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. This is especially true, she said, when it comes to religious teachings.

"Most of us know that there's also so much oppression coming from religious communities toward LGBT people," Sanders said, adding that the question for some students becomes "how do you flourish when you are in the midst of people who consider that something that's a part of you or who you are somehow still has this darkness associated with it?"

The role of a chaplain in those cases is to help a student "negotiate or re-negotiate" his or her religious identity and find a supportive faith community, she said.

Varghese noted what she called "this odd moment in the culture where there is this incredible freedom and also still incredible shame." She recalled being a representative of the church and meeting with students who are "terrified to actually say something to me … because they know what people like me say and believe about them."

She called it "humiliating" to be a priest and experience how deeply some young people have been wounded by churches.

"It says a lot about what it means to be a church and what cost there is to have all this anti-gay rhetoric floating around in our political life and in our church life, and the cost of not speaking up in our congregations because it causes too much turmoil," she said.

Back in Ridgewood, Hartnett said confirmation class teachers used the promises in the Baptismal Covenant to talk about the incident involving Clementi, a promising musician and a 2010 graduate of the local high school. When the students were asked how many of the promises were honored in the incident, the young people were clear.

"Let's see. Seek and serve Christ in all people? Not done. Strive for justice and peace? Not done. Respect the dignity of every human being? Absolutely not done," Hartnett recalled from their discussion.

The rector said he told the confirmation class that their responses made it clear that when Episcopalians renew their promises in the Baptismal Covenant "we're not talking about some quaint little ritual; we're talking about life and death."

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service and editor of Episcopal News Monthly/Quarterly.