On April 13 BBC News program Midlands Today aired a segment about an unfortunate young teenage girl with down syndrome who became a victim of Internet abuse after she was turned into a meme intended to make fun of people with mental disabilities.
Heidi Crowter, a 15 year old girl from Coventry was diagnosed with down syndrome soon after her birth. Most people who are not familiar with this condition associate down syndrome with mental retardation but even though most individuals with Down syndrome have intellectual disability the use of IQ tests for individuals with Down syndrome has been criticized on the grounds that the educator's low expectations and the fact that IQ tests do not take into account accompanying physical disabilities, such as hearing and vision impairment that would slow the test-taking performance. Many children with Down syndrome who have received family support, enrichment therapies and tutoring manage to graduate from high school and are able to do paid work, and some participate in post-secondary education as well.
Unfortunately what it's for certain is that those diagnosed with this syndrome don't have it easy at all, as they are predisposed to all kind of diseases with increased risk for cancer, Hirschsprung's disease, congenital heart disease ,epilepsy and the list could go on and on.
It is hard to understand how a teenager struggling everyday to live a normal life and overcome her hardships may end up as a target for humiliating jokes.
Apparently it all started after her picture was copied from a parent support group website designed for helping people with disabilities and posted on facebook in a degrading context, featuring malicious comments.
The most famous subcaption has been "I can count to potato" originating from the movie "Ringer". Memes featuring Heidi appeared on websites like Reddit , Memebase , Memegenerator and 9Gag.
Liz Crowter, Heidi's mother was appalled after finding out that people were mocking her girl on facebook pages and tried to have those photos removed. Unfortunately that may extremely if not impossible.
People share milions of pictures and links via facebook daily and to have a human being moderate every single one of those in order to make sure no offensive material is being distributed would take way too long for a website based on speed and simplicity. And what about those other websites?
Many people have blamed Heidi's parents for coming out in public and creating a "snowball" effect by attracting attention thus making it more appealing for trolls to create even more memes. Many argued that revealing the little girl's identity has made things even more difficult for her.
Are they right and is her mother to blame ? Or could it be that laughing at people with special needs stops being so funny when those people are no longer anonymous faces in funny posts, but real persons with real feelings.
When asked by the reporter what would she tell those who are making fun of her on the internet, Heidi replied with tears in her eyes that she would kindly ask them to stop.
Just a girl trying to live a normal life.
