A survey shows some 200 females in any given group of 1,000 teen girls or young women have sent or posted online nude or semi-nude images of themselves during a time when a wide majority of parents don’t even know the term “sexting,” and one major magazine now has taken up the cause of alerting them.
“Porn has gone interactive and your kids are at risk,” warns Reader’s Digest, which estimates it reaches nearly 40 million readers in the United States, in a new report. “From ‘sexting’ to video chats, how to fight back.”
“Sexting” is a technology-facilitated activity that has developed in recent years and on which two WND columnists already have reported.
Martial arts champion, actor and author Chuck Norris reported just days ago that “cases [of ‘sexting’] are bubbling up all over the country. Just last week in Virginia at least two Spotsylvania County students were facing child pornography charges in a sexting case.
“The naked images of three juvenile females (including an elementary student) were discovered on seven phones,” he reported.
He cited other cases that have come up in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida.
“And sexting is not just a male-dominant problem. A new national survey concurred that at least one-fifth of all teenagers have sent via cell, or posted online, nude or explicit photos of themselves,” he reported.
At the same time, Reader’s Digest conducted a poll revealing that almost two out of three responders did not even recognize the term.
The magazine’s article, by Judith Newman, reveals how the author discovered on her cell telephone the juggworld.com web page shortly after her seven-year-old son had had the device.
“Suffice it to say, this site does not involve earthenware,” she wrote. “When I confronted him, he looked at me very seriously and said, ‘Well, Mom, I’m extremely interested in the human body.'”
“What’s not at all funny is what this incident says about the future,” she wrote. “If the ability to spell one palindrome [boob] at his age can get him to one of the most explicit sites imaginable, how blasé will he be about porn by the time he’s a teenager?” she worried.
The report cites two possibly life-changing impacts of the currently popular practice of sending explicit images among teen friends via cell phones and the Internet: the fact that such images remain forever in the public and the possibility that already has become reality for some teens of carrying a lifetime “sex offender” label for sending or having such images.
“Last year, an 18-year-old Orlando, Florida, teen began serving five years’ probation and had to register as a sex offender after forwarding naked photos of his then-16-year-old ex-girlfriend to her friends, teachers and relatives,” the report said.
And it warned: “On the Internet, nothing ever truly vanishes. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that a teen’s knuckleheaded homemade Girls Gone Wild moment sent to her boyfriend stays on his computer or cell phone forever, as precious to him as any 19th-century billet-doux. Then again, it is possible those photos will be sent to everyone she knows (and doesn’t know), will turn up as her first Google hit when she’s looking for a job, or, just maybe, will land her in jail.”
Reader’s Digest cited a fall 2008 study done in conjunction with CosmoGirl that surveyed 1,280 teens and young adults about their “electronic activities.” One in five girls and 18 percent of the teen boys “have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures or videos of themselves,” was the result.
About one in seven of those sending images had forwarded photos to people “they hadn’t actually met but knew only online.”
“It’s pretty appalling,” Pamela Paul, author of “Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families,” told Reader’s Digest. “Among girls and boys, porn has become increasingly accepted, even kind of cool.”
Plugin webcams make it possible in a fraction of a second, as the report said one New York mother discovered.
She heard a thump upstairs while her daughter and a friend were having a sleepover upstairs.
“I go up, and she immediately flips the laptop lid down. The girls – in bed, wearing jammies and cami tops – look guilty. I repossess the laptop and go downstairs. There’s a picture of the ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’ variety, only this is creepier because it’s of the two girls and they’d sent it to some teenage boy.”
Those photos could turn up anywhere now, the report said, but teens sometimes don’t even view that as bad.
A middle school student told Newman: “The girl who had her picture sent around the school was at the low end of the popular set. But once she took off her clothes, it upped her visibility. She got a lot more attention, from boys especially.”
The article suggests that parents approach their teens directly about the issue and set limits. It lists what some parents already are doing: requiring their children include them on their Facebook or other social networking site pages, restricting the use of family computers by outsiders, keeping the computer in highly trafficked area of the home, and yes, periodically checking computer and phone photo caches.
“We haven’t installed spyware – yet,” wrote one parent. “But if we find anything out of line, we will, and she knows it.”
In just the past few weeks, the AP reported Vermont lawmakers actually are considering making “sexting” between teens legal, to prevent prosecutors from facing mandatory prosecutions against children for their activities, and Wired documented the case of a teacher who was tasked with investigating reports of students “sexting” and ended up spending $150,000 in legal fees and narrowly escaping a “sex offender” label.
That came about because during the course of his questioning, a 17-year-old student admitted having an image on his cell phone, and he forwarded it to the teacher. It showed a teen girl wearing underpants with her arms covering her breasts.
The teacher’s wife confirmed children need to be made aware of the dangers of “sexting,” but warned that “a new McCarthy era” could be developing if adults don’t have a reasonable right to investigate and crack down on the activities.
WND columnist Phil Elmore also has written about the problem.
“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,” he wrote.
He cited the possibility of adding software to block content on phones, “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,” he said.
