This week, Cyber-bullying combined with Sexting is making me wonder how my kids got through a day in MS or HS school. The non-stop cycle of texts, Snapchats, and “Facebook likes” interfere with thinking but more importantly put on display one’s private life complete with a rating system determined by the viewers. The sharing of nude or semi-nude photos in this context can exploit or extort “dares” from other students. My work presenting research tools for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids has given me many reasons to warn my kids of the dangers. Local news over the weekend brought the issue to my attention that a national epidemic is alive and well in our schools. National level participation is estimated at 20% of kids participating. We can look the other way because it is more comfortable, but then we need to imagine what the resultant social environment looks like for our kids. In contrast, we can rely on the school committee to enact reasonable policies to direct our schools to conform to our social values and educate parents and kids about the consequences.
(If you are a student experiencing these issues, this article is designed to help you bring up the subject with your parents to get support.)
The status quo of the national and local experience: some kids are sharing sexually explicit photos without intending to go beyond a single person, and unfortunately, the no cost reproduction that cell phones provide make it unlikely that the photo only goes to one person. The accumulation from middle school to high school of the various photos that have gone viral has created a strange phenomena. Each kid can keep the various photos they have given or received as a kind of social validation on the theory that the more I have, the more important I must be. The popular group of every graduating class at every school curates a shared set of released photos. When the social networks allow, some photos cross the school boundaries. Phone apps with innocuous names like “Calculator Photo Lock+” have evolved to hide the photos from parents who routinely review their kids phones.
The result is that some kids walk into school to hear from another student: “Hey, I saw your xxx pict yesterday, it was yyyyy”. Fill in the blank whether good or bad and how revealing the photo was. The kids have a rating system which is why the Note to Self podcast on a Colorado town in 2015 equates the pictures to baseball cards. Privacy is lost, and can feel irretrievably lost because of how long the kids know the others will keep these photos. There is the betrayal of friends snapping an unsuspecting photo or stealing photos for revenge. The exchange of accumulating photos of others to get photos in return is … “yuck”. When the people engaging in the sexting are the most popular kids, as was the case in the 2016 Note to Self podcast about a North Carolina star quarterback, then the behavior infiltrates to the depth of the social structure. If the adults look away then the worst of a few kid’s behavior damages all student's sense of a normal social network for the rest of their lives as Middle School and High School are formative and normative experiences.
**From a criminal perspective, the crime is in having revealing photos; so don’t. Taking these photos can have serious criminal consequences. Minors can be charged as adults for these crimes as the 2016 Note to Self article demonstrates. Charges can include child pornography (taking or encouraging or coercing another to take photos), disseminating obscene materials to a minor (sharing photos), possession of child pornography (receipt of images, even if unwelcome), federal crimes under the Protect Act of 2003 (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today) and could even require registration as a sex offender.
Please join me in wiping out the worst of what technology has brought our kids. Destroy the photo collections.
Parents: Inspect your child's phone for a hidden vault of photos and look on all other devices. Take it to a professional if you don't know enough about how phones, apps and computers share and store data. Insist your child provide you the security passcode for their phone, photo vault, and computer. Consider going back to flip phones without access to photo apps, don't invite this high risk behavior that jeopardizes the future of the children of Wellesley.
**Thanks to a local attorney for this research.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/why-care-about-sexting/
http://www.wnyc.org/story/consensual-sexting-teenagers-laws/