Back in December I wrote about the parents of two high school students who were suing their daughters’ school for suspending them from the cheerleading squad after administrators acquired nude cellphone photos of them.

The students say they never distributed the photos. Though the pictures were circulating widely in the school without the students’ knowledge or permission, none of the students who forwarded or received the photos were ever punished.

In their lawsuit, the families say that the school allowed more school officials to view the photos than was necessary, that they did not conduct a proper investigation of the distribution of the photos, and that they failed to report the incident to the police. (The parents themselves filed a police report on the incident after they learned of it.)

That’s the story as it stood in December. I did some follow-up research this week, and here’s what I found:

The school has, incredibly, filed a counter-suit against the two families.

They’re saying that the families’ lawsuit is “frivolous,” and that any harm done to the girls by the incident came about only because their parents publicized it by bringing the lawsuit and “drumming up that lawsuit in the media.” 

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the paper that first broke the story, refutes the allegation that the families sought media attention — their reporter learned of the suit in a routine search of court records.

The school says, however, that if the families “wished to conduct themselves responsibly,” they “would have dealt with the matter privately with their daughter [and] sought the assistance of school administration.” Their counter-suit blames the original lawsuit for harming the school’s reputation, and seeks monetary damages as compensation.

The school’s position, in other words, is that the “responsible” course of action when your daughter’s school punishes her wrongly is to follow the school’s lead. 

These girls and their parents believed that their school mishandled a serious and delicate disciplinary situation. They tried to get the situation resolved internally, and when they couldn’t, they took their case to the courts. 

It’s a school’s job to handle these kinds of situations responsibly, and if a school fails to do that, students and their families have every right to object. To suggest that it’s irresponsible to do so is frankly appalling.

Also appalling is the way the media have responded to this story. I mentioned in December that media outlets were running photographs of cheerleaders from this high school — actual photographs of actual high school cheerleaders, from this school, in uniform — as graphics for their stories on the suit, and the level of coverage has not improved since.

We see this over and over again in these “sexting” cases — condemnation of the girls involved one moment, smutty gawking the next. (The boys who participate are never shamed or objectified in this way.) These media outlets cover a story about teenage girls’ images being used as masturbatory fodder without their consent, and they do it by posting images of other teenage girls for their readers to fantasize over, again without the girls’ consent.

And the school has the gall to blame the girls for this, and to demand compensation from their families. And so the leering gives way to shaming once more, and the cycle begins again.