"One click can cause a tragedy." The story of Ema, the teenager who committed suicide after a classmate went viral with an intimate video.
On Friday, August 23rd of last year, Ema debuted a new shirt. She had bought it especially for that day: the school was going to take their annual photo, and she wanted to look her best. As always, she was the last to leave the house. Her mother, Laura Sánchez, used to honk at her from the car to tell her to hurry, and that morning was no exception.
Achieving perfect bangs when you have curls isn't easy, and although Ema tamed hers with keratin, she spent a long time in front of the mirror. She looked happy. Her eyes and hair were bright. Her fresh, 15-year-old beauty was immortalized in what—it was impossible to imagine— would be her last photo .
Twenty-four hours later, at noon on Saturday, Ema committed suicide at her home in Longchamps . On Friday, a 14-year-old boy who attended the same school as her had shared a video of them having sex without her consent. Within hours, the tsunami of viralization had taken its toll, and the intimate images were circulating in countless WhatsApp groups. “One click can cause a tragedy” , Laura summarizes.
Ema's was a tragedy without warning . She was a teenager with plans, full of friends, who had planned a dream vacation to Brazil with her family over dinner that very week. Her mother was paying for her senior trip to Bariloche in installments, and when she finished high school, she wanted to study psychology. Her suicide left those who knew her speechless. "It's not that she was suffering from depression, that she had said something or had any manifestations," her mother explains.
Today, Laura works alongside a group of legislators and social organizations in The Ema Guide, a document for schools with tools to address the prevention of digital sexual violence and how to respond in the event of a case. "Just as a company has protocols for what to do in the event of a fire, this is also essential," adds the woman, who, in addition to Ema, is the mother of a 13-year-old son.
It took 24 hours to snuff out a life. Having trusted the wrong person. The exposure of Ema's privacy and the explosion of attacks that followed. The indifference of a school that minimized what happened. "Later, speaking with other victims of digital sexual violence, several told me they thought about suicide : 'It's like we've been raped. It's the same thing,' one told me. They experience it as an annihilation of the spirit," Laura reconstructs.
Every 20 hours, a child or adolescent between the ages of 10 and 19 commits suicide in Argentina. In many cases, violence (ranging from bullying to sexual violence) is the trigger. As a recent LA NACION investigation revealed, schools are often left adrift in the face of this social tragedy, which has worsened in recent years, navigating uncertainty and a lack of tools to support adolescents at a particularly vulnerable stage.
In Ema's case, the video was shared without her consent during school hours and among classmates. The school's authorities downplayed what happened. It was merely a "challenge" to those responsible. No support for the victim. A call to her mother to tell her what had happened. Nothing more.
That Friday, Laura, who has been an administrative employee at the same location for more than two decades, was working when her phone rang. “The school secretary called me. She told me that a video with intimate images of Ema and a classmate from another class had been shared, that they had already spoken to both of them, and that the principal was available to me. I told her I would stop by the school on Monday,” she recalls.
On Saturday morning, the mother spoke to Ema. “I was angry, but not because of the video. It was really the least of my worries. I was scared, like any mother, and I told her off because she'd been home alone with a guy we didn't know. It's paradoxical… I said, 'What if he rapes and kills you, and when I get home from work I find you dead?' Those were my words. I told her off, and we argued.” , account.
At 12:30, Laura told Ema she was going to do some shopping before the neighborhood stores closed. They would talk calmly that afternoon. “I wanted the foam to subside because she was angry too. I went shopping, and when I came back, it was already late. It was half an hour. Half an hour. I left at 12:30, the girl who helps us at home left at 1:00, and Ema let her in. I came home from shopping at 1:35, and we found ourselves in a complete mess. We don't know exactly what happened in between, what emotional toll it must have taken, all the abuse she must have received from her peers, ” says her mother.
The family had recently moved to that house in Longchamps, in the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires, designed so that Ema and her brother could entertain a group of friends that grew larger every year. After the suicide, Laura, her husband, and their son moved out: the preadolescent didn't want to return to that home where Ema's absence had fallen like a bomb, leaving an immeasurable void. “She loved Longchamps deeply; it was her place in the world. Our idea was to grow old there. But life had other plans for us.” , Laura says.
When Ema's situation happened, Laura couldn't forgive herself for having challenged her. "I thought it was because I had challenged her... And any father challenges, because they do so out of the deepest love. I was terrified something would happen to her. I wouldn't even let her take an Uber. All those things that go through a mother's head... 'Lock the door and she'll take you anywhere.'" This never occurred to me. I was completely unaware of digital violence. Now I understand. Times change, and the forms of aggression change. Because even if they didn't stab her to death in her room, they still killed her. ”.
Little is said about the impact that digital sexual violence can have on a victim's life. This is largely because it is unknown. While there has been recent legislative progress, there is still a long way to go. Since October 2023, the Olimpia Law (No. 27,736) has been in force in Argentina. It seeks to protect women's digital rights, incorporating this assault as another form of gender-based violence. It also provides for a series of protective precautionary measures that the courts can issue, such as ordering digital platforms to remove content that generates violence.
However, the viralization of material without consent is not a crime today. It's a debt that the bill known as the Belén Law seeks to settle. In honor of Belén San Román (who committed suicide in 2020 after an ex-partner shared an intimate video), the proposal is to criminalize the non-consensual acquisition and dissemination of intimate content, sextortion, and digital editing of pornographic videos.
But what happens when the perpetrators are minors? The cases go unnoticed. Schools have no protocols. No one knows what to do. For Laura, education is the answer. That's why she's working on the guide, which will bear her daughter's name, together with the organizations Gentic, Ley Olimpia Argentina, Faro Digital, and Fundación Encuentro, and with the offices of the president of the Women and Diversity Commission of the National Chamber of Deputies, Mónica Macha, and provincial senator Laura Clark. The goal is to launch it as soon as possible.
"It's terrible what's happening with adolescents and digital environments. You can talk at home for a thousand hours, you can try to raise awareness, but then your child is challenged by a lot of things." . That is why we must educate the entire society and the educational community: a child spends most of his time in school. , says Laura.
Barely eight months have passed since Ema's death. Laura lives one day at a time. She's been in psychological treatment since the very beginning and has "a tremendous support network" that keeps her afloat: her husband ("we christened him the soldier of love"), her friends, the Renacer mutual support group, where she shares with other parents of children who died, and especially Ema's younger brother: “It's my driving force, and in the beginning, it was the only thing that kept me alive. It's a tragedy that pushes you to the limit of your existence, and all you want is to die. You fall asleep thinking, 'I hope I never wake up again.' Because your life loses all meaning.”
Before that Saturday, August 24th, Laura was “like any other mom.” She got up at 6:15, took the kids to school, trained, went to work, and returned in the air to help them with their homework. Skating, the dentist, the math tutoring, laundry, and dinner. “And then, in five minutes, you lost all reason for your existence. All of it. You can't find anything. Renacer's motto is 'despite everything, yes to life.' There I met parents who had gone through the same thing, and I said, 'Well, there's a light in this darkness,'” Laura says. “You also enter into a relentless search for a lot of things. This whole thing of finding meaning again so you don't die with it.”
Shortly after Ema's suicide, Mexican activist Olimpia Coral Melo visited Buenos Aires and asked to meet her. Like the teenager, she was also a victim of the dissemination of intimate content and spearheaded a movement to raise awareness and penalize digital sexual violence that now transcends borders. She and Laura hugged and cried. But they were also together in Congress, where Olimpia announced they would work on the Ema Guide and dedicated a poem to her.
In the newspaper articles she gave, Laura read comments like, “I talk about everything with my daughter”: “Before what happened to Ema happened to me, I would have thought the same thing. The reality is that our children grow up and are challenged by a lot of things that we don't know about. "At home, we talked about everything. Ema told me everything that was happening to her, she told me about her boyfriend, her heartbreaks. It's a split second, when... It's a trigger. Because no one who knew Ema thought she was capable of doing that at some point. It was unthinkable," Laura says.
Laura says that the private school Ema attended didn't know how to react at any point, either during or after the video went viral. To this day, she still hasn't met her principal.
“I'll give you an example. On Saturday afternoon, because of Ema's death, my house was full of police. No one could get in. The door was packed with people. All my friends were waiting for me to come out, dismayed, unable to believe what was happening. It was already dark. My phone rang. An unknown number. I answered. It was the secretary from Ema's school. She said, 'Laura, I'm calling to confirm the rumor.' That's what she told me. It's not like I live in the middle of the countryside: we're all from Longchamps. The school is five or six blocks from my house.”
On the day of Ema's funeral, her mother estimates there were more than 100 people. “There were a lot of people from my work, from the schools Ema had attended, lifelong friends, even from the school she used to go to as a child on vacation. The owner and director of the kindergarten she attended until she was five was there. But from the school Ema attended at the time, only parents and the secretary came. There was no principal ,” Laura says.
She says it's not just about institutions having the tools. "Because beyond the fact that this school didn't know how to act, at no point did they show empathy . They were light years away, for example, from the school my son attends, where the principal immediately called me to see how they could support us," Laura shares.
And he continues: "If you look around, there are more and more cases related to digital environments. Some don't lead to death, but the psychological damage, once done, is difficult to repair. That's why we need to raise awareness and educate with a broader perspective, looking beyond our own navel, thinking that this can happen to anyone, that it doesn't just happen on Netflix but also here at Longchamps. . Educate. Prevent and raise awareness. Raise awareness among our adolescents so they can also look out for others."
She wants everyone to know that Ema was "much more than her last act." A girl who attacked, strong-willed, and with the stamp of a vigilante, "always defending lost causes." She had a sweet tooth. She liked to bake brownies or shortcrust pastry on the weekends. When she was a girl, going to a bakery in Adrogué with her mother for a snack was a great plan, which in her adolescence she would trade for the movies and shopping with friends. She was caring and empathetic. Detached from material things.
One of their last Sundays, Laura and her husband proudly looked at the long table, filled with family and friends. There was Ema, smiling. The girl they loved. The teenager who took a thousand subjects to February. Come on, Ema, please study. Come on, you have to go to private school. Always with painted nails. Messy. Very messy. A companion. A very companion. “I miss her so much,” Laura whispers.
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