AZ- Seduced by 'sexting'

8-29-2009 Arizona:

Carol Crimmins of Tempe couldn't believe her eyes when she saw a picture of a topless female on her teenage son's cellphone, not after all the talks they'd had about that sort of thing.

Her son didn't know who had sent the picture, and he had the good sense not to forward it to anyone else.

This teenage foolishness of sending sexually explicit photos and racy messages, or "sexting," can have serious consequences. Across the country, lawmakers and law-enforcement agencies are grappling with what to do with kids who take naughty pictures of other teens with their cellphone cameras and send them to friends.

Technically, if the pictures are of minors that constitutes child pornography, even if they are taken by a minor. But clearly, a teenager with a cellphone camera isn't the same as an adult shooting frames of kids involved in sex acts.

The law is trying to catch up with the technology. Lawmakers in Vermont, Utah and Ohio are making sexting a misdemeanor instead of a felony when the cases involve teenagers, and as long as the sender voluntarily transmitted the image. That way, children caught up in this youthful fad don't wind up registered as sexual offenders.

Still, sexting is illegal and can get a child into a lot of trouble. In Arizona, there's no law specifically dealing with sexting, but Officer Luis Samudio, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department, says youngsters could face charges of child pornography, lewd and lascivious conduct and disseminating indecent materials to a minor.

A teenager in Allen County, Ind., is facing felony obscenity charges for allegedly sending a photo of his genitals to several female classmates. He's expected to receive probation and be ordered to get counseling.

In Ohio, a 15-year-old high-school girl who faced charges for sending racy cellphone photos of herself to classmates agreed to a curfew, loss of her cellphone and supervised Internet usage.

And in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a judge ordered eight teens, ages 14 to 17, who were trading nude cellphone pictures of themselves to perform community service and to ask peers whether they knew sexting was a crime. The eight teens surveyed 225 teens; just 31 knew.

Young people have been taking sexually provocative pictures since the Polaroid. What's different now is that the images can be transmitted at lightning speed via cellphones and e-mail, leaving youngsters vulnerable to humiliation on a huge scale.

The pictures can fall into the hands of pedophiles, Samudio says, turning an unwitting 14-year-old into an Internet child-pornography star. Of the 2,100 children the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has identified as victims of online porn, one-fourth sent the initial images themselves.

One in five teens has sent or received sexually suggestive, nude or nearly nude photos through cellphone text messages or e-mail, according to an April survey of 655 teens ages 13 to 18 by the market research firm Harris Interactive for the center for missing children and Cox Communications.

Most of the teens surveyed sent the photos to girlfriends or boyfriends, but 11 percent sent them to people they didn't know personally.

Some question whether there really are that many instances or if the teens surveyed online were more likely to engage in that behavior because they spent so much time using the technology. Even if the numbers are a bit inflated, it's still enough to make parents wonder what's coming across their children's cellphones every time they hear that familiar ding.


Communication key

In January, a Gilbert mom learned from a school police officer that her 13-year-old daughter's cellphone contained a nude photo of a boy she liked. School officials had confiscated the girl's phone after she used it in class.

"I was horrified. My stomach was in knots," says the mom, who asked that her name not be published. Then she saw text messages from the boy asking her daughter to send him nude pictures of herself. She had refused, but he was persistent: "I sent you one. Don't you like me?"

"How long before she would have caved in?" her mother asks. "So many girls just want to be liked and accepted."

She encourages parents to talk with their children early on about sexting.

"If your child is old enough to have a phone, your child is old enough to have this conversation," agrees Gina Durbin, director of student-support services in the Cave Creek Unified School District. She conducts a workshop for parents each year about ways to use technology safely.

Durbin reminds parents why they got their kids cellphones in the first place: so they can reach their parents at any time or in emergencies, not so they can text their friends or take pictures.

Monitor your children's cellphones by regularly checking messages, pictures and games, Durbin recommends. The phone belongs to the parents, and if anything inappropriate is transmitted on it, it will be the grown-ups the police come looking for if it becomes a criminal matter.

Let your kids blame you for not being able to send or receive inappropriate material. They can tell their friends, "My parents are crazy. They read my text messages because their own lives are so boring."

For a small fee, Durbin says, parents can get an e-mail from most phone carriers of the text messages sent and received. If your kids know you will be randomly checking, they'll keep their conversations in check.

To stave off problems, Durbin suggests buying kids phones with no camera or asking your carrier to turn off the camera function. Besides sending inappropriate pictures, students also have used cellphone cameras to cheat on tests and take unflattering pictures of classmates.


When to worry

Crimmins, the Tempe mother, had talked about appropriate use of cellphones to the point that her boys, ages 12, 14 and 16, were rolling their eyes. They knew not to respond if they got a call or message from someone they didn't know. And they knew their mother would randomly ask for their phones and scan their text messages, pictures and games.

Sure, they could delete messages, but Crimmins told them, "Guys, if you're deleting them, it implies to me that something is going on you don't want me to know."

There are a lot of things a guy doesn't want his mom to know, like how many times he text-messages his girlfriend just to say "I love you."

When Crimmins came across the topless photo, she talked to all of her boys, telling them, "This is basically porn through texting" and is degrading to women.

The shot was a dark and unclear photo of a female's breasts. It could have been a picture of a picture. It was sent from a restricted number. Her sons said they didn't know who sent it. She explained that it meant that they had no idea who the person was, her age, who took the photo and whether it had been taken with that person's knowledge.

"The point was, they have to recognize that it is inappropriate material, and their moral values have to say, 'This is not OK,' " says Crimmins, who teaches at Scottsdale Community College.

She tells parents not to freak out if they find a picture or two on their kids' phones. This generation's digital pictures may be akin to previous generations' girlie magazines.

"It's like finding the Playboy under the bed. One picture is not damning," Crimmins says. But parents should worry if their kids have a collection of photos or are taking or sending them.

Often, the pictures are taken as pranks. Durbin says parents should tell their children to lock their phones when not in use and not to loan them to anyone. In 2007, a 12-year-old girl at Sonoran Trails Middle School in Cave Creek faced criminal charges after she snapped a lewd photo of herself using a classmate's cellphone and sent the image to other students as a prank. She was not prosecuted, but she was suspended from school.

Why do kids do it? It's hard to know for sure, Durbin says: "Is it because they want to fit in? Do they do it because they want someone to like them?"

Kids don't think about long-term consequences, says Monica Vila, a Westchester, N.Y., mom behind TheOnlineMom.com, a resource for parents about technology and kids: "We need to talk to kids about the use of images and how long-lasting, far-reaching and permanent they are online."

Even more important, parents need to talk to their children about respecting their bodies and their privacy, because kids send out these intimate pictures with utter faith.

"They're so trusting," Durbin says. "They think, 'He won't show anyone. He loves me.' " ..Source.. by Karina Bland