IN- McDONALD: Reprecussions of "sexting"

3-19-2009 Indiana:

In high school, how many friends could you trust? Reflecting after a few decades have passed, we can easily recognize how few there were.

I wonder how many young women of high-school age place unlimited trust in their boyfriends or young men whom they hope will be their boyfriends?

The reason that I ask this question relates to an incident from a couple of weeks ago. A teenage girl shared a nude photo of herself with a boyfriend. After they broke up, the boyfriend in turn shared it with the football team who in turn shared it with the entire senior class.

Unbeknownst to her parents, girls and boys at school began to form their sordid opinions of her and harassed her relentlessly at school. She was many other names that cannot be mentioned in a family newspaper. Ultimately, it reached a point that the young girl hanged herself.

Technology can be a wonderful thing when used properly. Teenagers sometimes don’t always think through the potential ramifications of their actions. In this case, the ramification was a young lady was so distraught that she took her own life. However, in many states, sending a nude photo of yourself if you are less than 18 or forwarding sent photo to others constitutes the distribution of child pornography.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger advises, “Don’t worry so much about your self-esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.” It is particularly difficult to navigate socially through middle school and high school. As a person who was on the outside looking in socially in high school, I can attest to the feeling of alienation.

I know that I have done things that I would be ashamed to have in print that were silly things in high school. But those things were done in a sad attempt to belong to a group and gain acceptance.

Cell phones and the Internet provide an opportunity to belong in ways that are not healthy and can be, as we have seen, potentially fatal. Friends of a teenager who took her own life after a nude photo of her was sent around her school have come forward to discuss the events that led to the girl’s suicide.

“She more like kept to herself, [and] would like hide in the bathroom and cry,” said Lauren Taylor, who was best friends with Jessie Logan. “She’d always call me crying.”

Logan was an 18-year-old senior at Sycamore High School in Cincinnati when a nude picture she sent to her boyfriend was sent to hundreds of students at schools across the area.

Her grades plummeted, and she began skipping school or hiding out in the bathroom to avoid other students.

“They’d say she that she was just trying to be a porn star,” said Taylor.

But friends said technology allowed the harassment to follow her home or anywhere else she went.

“When she would leave school, she would get on her MySpace or her Facebook, and then kids would be messaging her on that or texting her phone, people she didn’t even know,” Taylor said.

This one decision led to a depression so great and shame and humiliation so deep that to Jessica there was no other way out.

“Sexting” is a growing and serious problem. It’s when young people take nude pictures or images of themselves engaging in real or simulated sex acts on their cell phones or Web cams and then send them to others by cell phone or Web cams. About 20 percent of the teenage girls polled by Cyberlawyer Parry Aftab said they had taken a nude or sexually explicit cell phone picture or Web cam shot of them and shared it with others (most often their boyfriends). Fourteen percent of the boys share these “private” images with others when they break up with their girlfriends. And 44 percent of the boys polled admitted to having seen at least one of these sexual images of a classmate.

Twenty-two percent of the girls polled said that they regretted whatever they had recorded on their Web cam and 71 percent use them in their bedroom. And older teenagers and young adults are even more at risk, with almost 40 percent of the teenagers older than 18 and college students we polled said they had shared a nude or sexual image with their boyfriend or girlfriend online or by cell phone.

What strikes me in all of this is what young girls must think of themselves to share such intimate images with boyfriends. The unfortunate thing about this new phenomenon is that once that image is out there, it is extremely hard to retrieve and remove. Fathers and mothers should take great care to instill confidence in their daughters.

Young women should know that they should be able to achieve on their own and that the attraction of a young man is secondary.

Young men only rarely display a level of maturity commensurate with appreciating a young woman for who she is rather than an object of desire. ..News Source.. by TIM MCDONALD, Local Columnist