By Dylan Moran
Sharidyn Svebakk-Bohn has been named as the 14-year-old New Zealand-born girl killed by gunman Anders Breivik on the weekend.
Breivik killed 76 people, eight in a bomb explosion in Oslo, the remainder in a shooting spree on Utoya Island where a group of young left-wing political aspirants were attending a camp.
Svebakk-Bohn is the youngest victim, one who grew up in a world seemingly without borders as she could live her life online. She had a number of blogs, all painting a picture of the sort of person she was, and could have grown to be.
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Sharidyn Svebakk-Bohn was excited for her big trip. Over the past year, things had started looking up for the 14-year-old.
She had started high school almost a year ago, made new friends, and realised other people’s opinions about her are not as important as her own.
She was focused on doing well at school, and like most teenagers, was particularly against her parents’ confusing belief she should be awake before 7am and the irritating tendency of siblings to act as interim alarm clocks.
She bemoaned Norway’s choice of Hans Bollandsas as the winner of the 2010 X-Factor competition, preferring runner-up Atle Pettersen and was excited to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 because she would have her mother all to herself, not having to take her two younger sisters or her dad.
She stayed out of trouble, had never tried alcohol and called herself a “typical teenager. Does not mean I have never done anything wrong.”
She was just a girl rapidly growing toward adulthood.
But that future was cut short on the weekend by Anders Breivik. After Breivik’s rampage on Utoya Island over the weekend, her parents waited for any word from their missing daughter.
This morning, their worst fears were confirmed.
“It is with immense grief and deep sorrow that our family today received the message that we have been dreading since the vicious terrorist attack on the Labour youth organization (AUF) on the island Utoya, outside of Oslo, on Friday 22nd July. Our beloved daughter, Sharidyn Svebakk-Bohn, was confirmed dead earlier today,” they wrote in a statement to media.
‘Sissi’ as she called herself, lived out a lot of her life online. In blogs spread across the internet, she wrote about her life, her loves, and her family. Her blogs were well-followed and she regularly thanked readers by name and met them in person.
These online posts show her character and emotions, as she freely expresses herself in an open forum.
She struggled with teenage emotions, regularly writing about friends who had ‘betrayed’ her, and in one lone post, appears lovelorn.
“Always and forever. Why do we like each other? We know that there will never be the way we think. We promise each other things we really know that we can not keep. You say such promise that I will not be with her more. Two weeks later it happens again. Or you say always and forever (!!). So turn up a month after.” she wrote.
Her mother, stepfather and two sisters were not anything out of the ordinary either, as Svebakk-Bohn recants a tale all teens can relate to.
“In the middle of [it] came Celine and Anette. They wondered if I would be out for a walk. I was allowed to finish, after mother had managed to make me embarrassed and stuff. Great.”
But there were the good moments as well. Working as a babysitter, she had realised what a cushy job it was, the same as hundreds of thousands of teenagers the world over.
“I get £200 to practically sit on your PC and make sure they go to bed on time,” she wrote. She used that money to buy makeup, which she then reviewed and posted about on her blog.
She was compassionate. When a friend’s uncle died, she talked about how sorry she was for their loss. After seeing news of a serious car accident which killed the mothers of some teenagers, she felt “hurt in the heart”.
“Think of those poor girls, they lie in hospital and some of them have even lost their mother. It makes me think about how spoiled and how lucky I am. I [have] almost all I want and I want more. I have parents and sometimes I want my parents to only give a damn,” she wrote.
On the 10th anniversary of the brutal killing of Benjamin Hermansen – a 16-year-old Norwegian-Ghanaian murdered by two Neo-Nazis in Oslo, she appealed for compassion and for people to prevent such a brutal killing ever happening again.
“He was killed because he was brown. Such a stupid reason that he is brown… Let he not [have] died in vain, show that we do not allow people to die because of skin colour, religion, or anything, let us work to stop nazi! Rest in peace, Benjamin! :(“ she wrote.
Breivik accuses Norwegians and ‘indigenous Europeans’ making this kind of statement of betraying their heritage in a manifesto he released before his killings.
Breivik labelled her a traitor, she labelled herself a typical teenager. Her life was taken early, before she had a chance to find her full voice. But her thoughts, shared in the minds of people the world over, live on.
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