RACHEL JOHNSON: We MUST defeat the sexting bullies (... and I don't mean the guys who've been swapping snaps of my cleavage)

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Surprised, but not outraged: On December 27, I received the first of several emails from men saying they had been sent a photograph of my breasts

Last month, I went to a corporate lunch and sat between two suits. At some point between the main course and pud the one on my left picked up his BlackBerry and snapped a picture of me.

He seemed to be angling the camera-phone oddly, but I sucked in my  cheeks and gave him my best photograph face anyway.

On December 27, I received the first of several emails from men saying they had been sent  a photograph of my breasts. When I took part in a debate last week, the first thing a fellow panellist said – and I’d never met him before – was that he’d also seen the picture.

I’m slightly surprised, but I can’t pretend I’m outraged. In fact, I find the new diktat that we all take umbrage at  the slightest whiff of insult  or intrusion somewhat tiresome, whether we are members of minority groups, celebrities, hacks or just touchy and on Twitter.

Last week was taken up with one such spat. It kicked off when my forebear here, Suzanne Moore, referred to Brazilian transsexuals.

If you actually read her article, she was complimenting Brazilian transsexuals on their attractiveness, but Twitter missed the point, and in the ensuing unpleasantness she quit the site, at which point her mates waded in, among them Julie Burchill.

I thought that Burchill’s piece attacking the transgender community was a bit strong, but I’d never call for her sacking, as one Minister did – Julie’s always the Turk at a Christening when it comes to  controversial issues.

She once sent me a long, scabrous Philippic she’d written about the Royal Family and the Spencers that I was tempted to publish in The Lady for all of two seconds until I realised it would give genteel readers (average age then 78) a collective coronary.

But the fact remains some people, and many journalists, are put on this Earth (and paid) not to placate, but provoke.

  More... LIZ JONES: Sorry but I've got to hate you, luv... it's on the job sheet

The point here is that, similar to Julie and Suzanne, I’m a reasonably hard-bitten old trout. The fact that a group of middle-aged men have been trading  (I can’t use the word ‘sexting’ in this case) a picture of my clothed headless torso is fine. I’m an adult. What is not fine  is when children are bullied. When the adults responsible for them let them down. And  it ends in death. That is not fine at all.

Last week, we read the terrible story of a 13-year-old girl, Chevonea Kendall-Bryan, who’d been forced to perform sex  acts on two older boys. She didn’t realise one of the acts had been filmed on a mobile phone. She only later discovered a recording had been made, and passed around school.

Research has shown that two-thirds of high school girls in the US (though it happens everywhere) have been ‘slutshamed’

In desperation, she urged the boy who had the video on his phone to delete it. She climbed on to the window ledge of her fourth-floor home and threatened to jump.

‘How much more can I handle? HONESTLY. I beg you, delete that,’ she texted to the boy, who was standing on the pavement below. Then she fell to her death.

Only months before, her mother had written to the school. ‘Will it take a tragedy  to happen before the school actively stops bullying?’

Well, a tragedy did happen, the authorities issued their damp responses, and it goes on. While all teenagers have camera phones and use social media sites, we have to accept that Chevonea was just one of the millions of children being bullied, or bullying, and the ‘responsible adults’ are all too often ignorant and unable to stop it.

Research has shown that two-thirds of high school girls in the US (though it happens everywhere) have been ‘slutshamed’  – where someone’s sexuality is advertised as trampish, deviant or perverse in pictures or messages posted online.

What this horrible practice also tends to reveal is a double standard: girls who perform sex acts are branded sluts, while boys are players.

There are also ‘memes’ – a concept that circulates from person to person on the internet – where teenagers post spiteful pictures and slogans. These are often passed on tens of thousands of times.

As we saw last week, we are in danger of mistaking fair comment for offensive insults, while neglecting the real victims of actual bullying.

So let’s pay less attention to grown women who can take care of themselves, and more to the children who can’t.

  Leggy: Sophie Dahl didn't stick to the 'love rule' when she fell for the diminutive Jamie Cullum

Striking Sophie, a leggy exception to the 'love rule'

STOP press: men pick women shorter than themselves, and women pick taller men.

The only exceptions are, 1. Sophie Dahl, left (who picked the diminutive Jamie Cullum), and, 2. Any woman who stoops to marry Bernie Ecclestone.

Short women have the pick of the crop as, in theory, all men are dateable. Oh, how I (5ft 4in) wish I’d known this 20 years ago, when I could have used these revelations to more advantage!

My father unveiled a 12ft sculpture of a polar bear called Boris in Sloane Square last week – but this wasn’t a case of a Johnson on a hunt for self-publicity, or even a tie-in with TV’s The Polar Bear Family & Me. Rather it was to highlight the plight of another shaggy, dangerous, white-pelted big beast in the wilderness. There are only 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears left, and we will lose a third of them by 2050 unless we stop the trade in their skin, teeth, claws and skulls.

A vote to ban the trade is coming up at a conference in Bangkok in March. In the balance is the survival of a species threatened with extinction not just by global warming but also by human greed. The UK, as part of the EU voting bloc (at time of writing anyway!), could help bring in a ban on the slaughter of bears, whose body parts are flogged for tens of thousands of dollars to idiots.

One of David Cameron’s first acts as a vote-blue, go-green Tory leader was to nip off to the Arctic and hug a husky. Now it’s time to show you’re red in tooth and claw too, Dave.

 

COCO, the former First Dog at The Lady magazine, is too upset to tweet about the death in a revolving door of Alan, her counterpart at Tatler. Even though she was once crushed by a collapsing bookshelf in the editor’s boudoir, Coco tells me she hopes to meet her maker in her own bed, at home or, as we say, ‘at Dognitas’. At the last count, there were still five dogs at Vogue House, the HQ of publisher Conde Nast. ‘As long as they sit quietly in their baskets, it is tolerated,’ says Conde Nast’s MD Nicholas Coleridge. I presume he was referring to the pets, rather than his pedigree editors.