I CONFESS TO A MAJOR WRITING BLOCK. For a number of days now, no matter how urgent are several of the national issues that engage me and upon which I have begun writing, my mind takes me back to a story that haunts me. I doubt that I am alone in this. The story, which for many of you was equally traumatic, is of the last days in the life of 15-year-old Audrie Pott.

By now the story has spread widely throughout the land. I quote from a CBS/AP article: “According to her family’s attorney, Robert Allard, California teen Audrie Pott awoke in a friend’s bedroom after drinking too much at a sleepover, looked down and realized she had been sexually assaulted. Her attackers also had written and drawn on intimate parts of her body, Allard said on Monday.

“Over the next week, Pott, 15, pieced together one horrifying detail after another. She went online and tried to confront the three boys she had known since junior high who she believed had done it.

“At school, she saw a group of students huddled around a cellphone and realized that at least one humiliating photo of her was circulating.” (It is not clear how widely the photos had spread, it might have been initially limited to a small group; what is clear is that she perceived this and almost certain that word of the event and of the photos had and would continue to spread.)

“‘I have a reputation for a night I don’t even remember and the whole school knows,’ she wrote in one Facebook message to a friend.

“‘I cried when I found out what they did,’ she wrote in another.”

Eight days after the alleged assault Audrie Pott hanged herself.

Sadly, it is not that Audrie’s story is singular. And that is precisely the point and its vital importance. In various ways, the elements of the story are repeated in many settings, many circumstances — most not ending so tragically.

But the heartbreak of Audrie’s experience, the shattering of her life — a life so rich with promise for this vibrant, talented young girl — highlights this issue dramatically.

While I don’t propose an academic analysis in this column, there is a large body of literature on bullying in schools and on sexual exploitation of girls. In short, the basic elements have a universality that is widely understood as a major issue in our society. To these, our ubiquitous cell phone cameras have added another dimension to the rapidly developing phenomenon of cyber-bullying.

Adolescence is a difficult time. There are the physical changes. And sexual maturity becomes a major component of existence. As boys mature, some faster than others, dominance patterns and behaviors — sometimes from childhood, sometimes new — become more significant and carry greater weight and, occasionally, threat. Peer group membership with its structures and tacit or explicit demands assumes greater significance. And often, very often, subsequent inclusion in a peer group includes a potential for a psychological toughening and desensitization.

If the group is into bullying in its various forms, from verbal to physical, the boy involved comes to see acceptance of this as the price of inclusion. That desensitization, along with growing sexual drive, also includes the potential tendency — very commonly more than potential — to objectify and exploit the female.

It is not that bullying is limited to boys. However, with girls bullying girls, while physical domination is occasionally involved, far more frequently the undercutting of others is verbal. It is the slash of the tongue, the joke of which the victim is the target; it is the moment when there is a low comment, laughter and a silence as she walks by. This can be deeply hurtful.

With full realization of the existence of these processes in teen culture, what responsibility, if any, has the school in shaping the behavior and interaction of adolescents in their treatment of each other — and in whether others become subjects to whom they can relate or objects to be exploited?

I would suggest a great deal; considerably more than is generally acted upon in schools. (I commend the laudable exceptions!) I believe schools are a setting and opportunity to raise all of these questions, and to explore ways in which the impulses and the peer pressures of adolescence can be raised for students to the conscious level — the level at which the individual can recognize, perhaps even identify with, the pain being caused.

I believe that in a part of some course taken by every student in high school, the issues of bullying and of sexual exploitation and sexual violence should command a central role and attention. Clearly a discussion and participation — not a lecture format! I think it is without doubt that the attention of the class would not wander; interesting the students in the material would present absolutely no problem. Those students are often living this stuff in one or more of the roles involved. And those students are often considerably confused about how they should be playing their roles.

We can be very certain that for the boys, cues about the latter are being given by the behaviors and jokes they have learned from older boys or the young men they often admire as models, however limited or sexually exploitative those models’ views might be. One is not touching on a subject foreign to their intense interest. As for parental concern, I believe it vital that parents understand that this is not a rerun of the old tapes or lectures about adolescence and sex that they may have experienced. This is about how people treat each other. It is about respect for other human beings. It is about avoiding exploitation in the service of self-gratification.

To bring these questions to the conscious level available for open discussion is, I believe, absolutely essential to real maturation, to strengthening the self.

I close by returning to the heartbreaking and searing words of the sweet and gifted young girl who wrote the following just before her suicide: “My life is ruined … I am in hell … The whole school knows … My life is over …”

Reading about Audrie Pott, we realize that her case is not unique; that in various forms, from the verbal to the physical, the potential is there for exploitation, and the potential is also there for open, positive, mutually supportive relationships. In the service of the latter, and in the service of a far healthier society, I believe it is imperative that we open this discussion for — and with — the young.

Jerome Page is a Benicia resident.