“There’s this boy who’s been harassed and tortured all his life until he was at the brink of insanity…” These are the introductory words to Twisted, the now infamous horror story written by a Cornwall-area boy.
Arrested and detained in a juvenile facility for a month, he is awaiting trial for uttering death threats. His case sparked an intense national debate about freedom of expression.
Did the authorities overreact to the story or was it appropriate punishment for a very real threat?
Twisted was written as a final piece for the boy’s drama class. He claims that classmates constantly bullied him. The boy chose to write a horror story from among four categories. “I chose horror because I love Stephen King and because he is the master of producing instantaneous reaction, which is what I was also expected to do with this project.”
Stephen King also claims to have been bullied by his high school classmates. In fact, King wrote a short story, The Thing at the Bottom of the Well, at the age of 16, when he claims to have been bullied. The story is about a boy who pulls the wings off insects, and is eventually mutilated himself.
Being bullied is a traumatic experience. How victims react to being bullied can vary widely. It seems the authorities thought the boy was writing a personal narrative of something he was going to carry out, while the boy contends that it was simply a horror story.
Ever since the tragic school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, and the copycat school shooting in Taber, Alberta, authorities have been extremely heavy- handed when enforcing zero-tolerance policies in an effort to protect their students.
In Ontario, the Tories introduced a strict code of conduct policy when they came to power in 1995. The policy aimed to combat school violence and neutralize serious threats to students.
Twisted, if viewed within the parameters of threatening student safety, could be construed as a threat.
“Show proper care and regard for school property and the property of others” and “All school members must not inflict or encourage others to inflict bodily harm on another person.” These clauses of the Ontario Schools Code of Conduct could be seen as pertinent to the Cornwall boy’s case. But do his words pose a real threat?
Words have forever been used to express frustration and to vent anger against injustice and persecution. Words are often inflammatory. But using prose is, in most cases, a non-violent reaction to oppression, and not a guidepost to violent activity.
It is a sign of the times — and a sign of increasing paranoia — when a Cornwall boy or any teenager is arrested for writing an inflammatory story, when 30 years ago Stephen King was writing similar stories and would emerge later as the king of horror.
—Hafeez Janmohamed