Sweet Caroline

This is the most bizarre post I think I've written. At no point did it ever cross my mind that I'd be writing about the death of Caroline Flack, The Flack Attack, Strictly Come Dancing Winner 2014 a few months after her 40th birthday.
She's a presenter who's always been in my line of tv sight, with her startling eyes and husky voice. And it's so strange to think she'll never do her slow motion strut into the Love Island villa, squeeze an islander's hand, ask a cheeky question, defend someone on Twitter, have the naughtiest little photos on her Instagram or be singing on a dance floor.
I didn't know her personally, but you can see from the out pour of messages and tributes from the people that did - she was so deeply loved. And she still took her own life.
While we'll never know the why, the breadcrumbs lead us to inevitable conclusions. Social media has changed something in us all. It's not just the tabloid press - who are crying crocodile tears while they delete all the negative stories they had up right up until they published Caroline's death - but us as individuals. I'm not going to plead innocence in how I tweet about reality television - it's tv, come on - but good God, why would anyone put their fingers to a keyboard, or touch their phones to tell another person that they should die?
Love Island has had three suicides (Sophie Gradon, her boyfriend and Mike Thalassitis) and after each one, the same sad faces, the same platitudes wandered around before the same record played again. Only a few days ago, I was listening to the Laid Bare Podcast, and Leanne, a recently dumped islander, revealed how she was receiving death threats. It's a television show. She told a guy she didn't like him. That's it. She didn't beat anyone. She didn't bully anyone. That's all it took for her to get death threats from a bunch of cunts. It's supposed to be entertainment. We're supposed to be watching people form relationships and win a bit of money. Their motives behind going on a show may be monetarily based (the prize money is only £25,000 if you share it in your couple, so the partnerships, the promotions can run into the hundreds of thousands) but these are still human beings. What gives anyone the right to do that to another human being?
Clemmie Hooper, a mummy blogger, who had almost 700,000 Instagram followers created a whole persona to troll herself, other bloggers, to be racist, even to troll her own husband. Because it gave her power - she enjoyed how it made her feel - superior.
People who tweet horrible things about Meghan Markle get likes, traffic, attention - so the trolling works for them. Think of Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins, and the latest troll for hire, Lawrence Fox. It pays to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic - to mock, to ridicule, to undermine. And in that same vein, people thought it was okay to mock and ridicule Caroline Flack. She faced a difficult trial for assaulting her boyfriend and it wasn't a show, because her boyfriend didn't support the case against her.
Listen, I've applied for protective orders. I've sat with clients and reassured them. I've gone to bed worried that I would get a call or an email telling me that client had died at the hands of their partner. I've had arguments with police officers who haven't taken what I've warned them about seriously and they get called back to the same address over and over again. I've also desperately tried to talk clients out of making statements that withdraw their complaints against their partner for fear of worse happening to them. And it does. The worse happens. The law exists for a reason, especially when it's failed survivors of abuse for decades. Even worse for male survivors because they're simply not believed. "How could your five foot two wife burn you like that, sir?"
Caroline needed to have her trial. She needed to be left alone to deal with that. She didn't deserve people laughing at her, tweeting at her daily that she'd lamped her boyfriend, to have the papers reprint a Valentine's card with a mocking cartoon of her on the front with a threat. She didn't deserve to hear that she was an abuser and deserved to go to jail forever.  That she was a paedophile and a nonce for dating Harry Styles when he was seventeen and Caroline was thirty one. That she should kill herself for what she did to her boyfriend.
I've had the barest of negativity from my work. I can't imagine what it would be like to open your Instagram to look at photos of your boyfriend, whom you're not allowed to be with because of your bail conditions, and instead see hundreds of messages telling you that you deserve to die. When you hear something enough, you start to believe it. And she did believe it. Despite all her friends and all her family telling her otherwise; she believed that she deserved to die. That the world would be better without her. That she didn't belong on this earth any more.
That's not fair.
There's a lot that needs to be changed with the media - god look at what the media did to Meghan and all she did was marry a man she loved who happened to be a member of the British Royal Family! Prince Harry and Caroline dated in the past and you know why they broke up? Same media. There needs to be some consequence for their recklessness. But there also needs to be tougher measures on social media and what that needs to be - smarter minds than I need to come up with that.
Most of all, I need people to know that they're not alone. Never alone. It can be a daily, unrelenting battle and the way this has come about can only be triggering when you struggle with your mental health. Please believe me when I say you deserve to be here. You deserve to live. You'd be missed. Please stay.
Please.

https://www.samaritans.org/

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Suicide/