What started out as an innocent crush at a California high school has resulted in a 14-year-old girl named Arika being home schooled because of potentially damaging video footage of her “hooking up” with a boy from her school.
The whereabouts of that video are unknown, and the girl’s mother, Shannon, feels the punishment imposed by the school on her daughter’s bully does not fit the crime.
Shannon referred to the incident as “bullying on another level… It’s above that,” according to local Fox News affiliate in Sacramento, KTXL. The boy Arika had a crush on reportedly asked her to follow him to a “private location” on the campus of Bear Creek High School in Stockton where the two could be alone and “hook up.”
Arika, who sighted the decision as being a poor one, told Fox, “He said it was going to be private, exclusive, that nobody was going to be there.” However, the encounter was anything but private.
In the process of their “hook up,” Erika heard noise. When she looked up, she saw at least five boys running away. They had been taking pictures and videos of the exchange. “At that moment, I just wanted to, like, crawl into a ball and cry,” she said.
Bear Creek High School punished the boy with a five-day suspension, but Erika’s mom says that is not enough. “There is this video out there somewhere , lingering, of my child like this, and it’s never going to go away,” Shannon said.
Even if the activity was consensual between the two parties, the documentation of that act was not. California is a two party consent state, which means that, under federal law, both parties involved must give approved consent to the recording of phone calls, in-person conversations, and even videos that capture sound.
The Stockton Police Department will reportedly be investigating the case.
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