My mother once called me in high school. I was sitting in class when the phone mounted on the wall rang; the office was transferring the call to my classroom. The teacher pointed to me and told me I had a call; I took the phone out into the hallway, awkwardly closing the door over the long cord, and told my mother where to find her car keys.
As a high-school student, if I had to make an outgoing call, there was a single payphone located in the hallway near the cafeteria. In emergencies, one could go to the office and ask to make a local call. It may even be the case that the phones were still rotary dial models, but I’m not convinced of that; they may have been push-button phones.
It’s amazing to think that today’s children grow up in a world so much more connected and so much more convenient than ever we, their parents and grandparents, could possibly have imagined. How did I, as a preteen and a teenager, ever manage to cope with day-to-day existence without a wireless phone? How did I ever live my life without the ability to access the Internet at any moment of the day, or to update my Twitter account while traveling 80 miles an hour down the New York State Thruway?
Kids spend the majority of their waking hours in school. Increasingly, news of school emergencies, and notifications to and from students, are coming from text messages sent by and to wireless phones. Kids talk to and text each other on those phones and are thus thoroughly connected to each other, just as they are to the rest of the world and to their parents. The benefits of this – despite the issues of distraction in class – are obvious.
Those wireless phones parents put into their children’s hands are points of vulnerability, however. Specifically, every phone is a potential pornography portal. Your child could, even now, be accessing adult content using his wireless phone’s Internet browser. Worse, your children could be sending and receiving naked pictures and video of themselves – and uploading this content to the Internet.
What of access to simple adult Web content? Every phone’s browser is essentially an unsupervised computer. While most savvy parents try to monitor their children’s online activity, often placing computers in public areas of the home (rather than in a child’s bedroom), the wireless phone travels with the child during the day and could be used anywhere, without such oversight. Content blocking software for certain phones and browsers is now available to help parents deal with this issue, but unless the phones of all children everywhere are equipped with such software, your child is still at risk when interacting with his or her friends.
Of greater concern are pay services to which your child might knowingly or unknowingly subscribe. Various schemes involving ring tones, themes and music already exist and can lead to numerous extra charges on your wireless phone bill. Right now, you or your child can text a message to a certain number and receive monthly (or weekly, or daily) multimedia messages to the tune of dizzying service charges.
Now imagine that the messages you’re receiving at a fee aren’t just wallpaper and ring tones, but sexually explicit pictures and video. The monetary cost incurred is compounded, if not eclipsed, by your child’s exposure to adult content. The problem is worldwide. For example, it is deemed serious enough in Australia that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is cracking down on such scams.
The hyper-sexualization of our society, and of our children does not come without a direct cost to their psyches. In a previous column, we discussed the term “SMiShing,” a combination of “phishing” and the term for text messaging. Now, you as a parent must contend with the notion of “sexting” – the act of sending naked pictures of yourself to another wireless phone user, to an e-mail account, or even to the Internet.
According to one survey, 36 percent of teenage girls have taken and sent nude or partially nude pictures of themselves to other technology users (not to mention 31 percent of teenage boys). Insidiously, 38 percent of teens think this will make it easier to get a date, while more than half of teenage girls think naked pictures of themselves are an alluring gift for a boyfriend. Our children have been taught by popular culture that they are sexual objects and that their participation in that objectification will get them what (and who) they desire.
The dangers that your daughter’s naked camera phone pictures will end up on a website for all to see aren’t the only risk. Some teenagers – specifically, children in a dozen U.S. states – have been charged with possession of kiddie porn for sending and receiving explicit pictures of their peers. The “sexting craze” is an internationally known phenomenon, too. The Times Online reported back in January of this year that high-school age kids lost jobs or college scholarships after their naked pictures or video appeared online. While consequences of this type are clearly not the intent of anti-child-porn laws, the legal ramifications are there, and they are real, compounding the damage already done by this societal trend.
Our children live their lives inundated with sexual imagery and messages in the media, from their peers and even from their schools. When we place in their hands the technology to act on these messages, or to react to them, we can hardly be surprised when they choose to do so. Be keenly aware of the potential for misuse – and the emotional and legal implications thereof – of a wireless, Internet-ready camera phone in the hands of a young person. You cannot afford to ignore this point of vulnerability, or to dismiss the danger of porn on your phone. Your sons and daughters may be exposed to this pornography … or they may become its stars.
