Posted on 12/10/2008 11:26:19 AM PST by Fractal Trader
The high school in Salem, N.H., was abuzz last month as a photograph of a topless 15-year-old girl was sent from cellphone to cellphone.
School staff intervened, and by the time they met with students in assemblies the next day they had discovered another compromising cellphone photo, this one of an eighth-grade girl. They soon found two more photos of naked or nearly naked girls on students' phones. Two weeks later, a similar incident occurred at nearby Sanborn Regional High School. The photograph in question was of a teenage boy.
A report being released today shows that these were not isolated incidents but part of a national trend. One-fifth of teenagers surveyed have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves, usually to a boyfriend or girlfriend, and almost a third have received such images, according to "Sex and Tech," a new study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com.
Among young adults (ages 20-26), the numbers are higher: One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them. TRU, a company that specializes in youth research, conducted the survey online with 1,280 teenagers and young adults selected from its database of research participants.
A spokesman for the National Campaign, a nonprofit group that advocates for sex education and access to contraceptives, said he is concerned about the link between what happens online and what happens in real life.
"What young people report is that this sort of online behavior contributes to a casual hookup culture," said Bill Albert, the group's chief program officer. "The overwhelming majority of teens and young adults don't do this, but when you get numbers like 20 percent and higher for young adults, that passes the threshhold of concern."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
It's been that way forever
Then you are truly clueless as to how common rape and sexual abuse have become in the public Skrules. A better option is to monitor what is on your child's phone.
Cameras available at all times are an outstanding idea for parent's who don't care enough about their children to send them to private school, or home school.
I support litigation to shut down any public school which has so much to hide that it tries to ban camera phones.
Untrue. Mapplethorpe's (questionable IMHO) art book is still available and is legal to purchase, and no end of baby pics are legal (but best kept offline). Generally the law cites porn as something prurient and intended to arouse the viewer. The picture of the young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm strike, for instance, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalism and no one in their right mind would call it porn.
There is technology to block cell phone signals
Realistically, they are. Once moral panic sets in, reason goes out the window of zero tolerance.
You hope. My daughters are below this age, but I'm constantly keeping an eye on them to see what non-scholastic subjects they may be learning.
And if you have kids who receive the pics and did not report them — would you prosecute them to the same level as if it were an adult in posession?
And is one of the receivers is an 18 year old boy or girl?
Fools. They are fools.
Camera phones, so far as I know, are banned from all standardized testing because students can use them to take pictures of the test and distribute them. Phones in general are banned because of the possibility of students texting friends to obtain answers.
One of my children is still in college, and the professors there have very strict policies banning cell phones in class.
In high school, texting is a lot more fun than old fashioned paper note-passing. Your friend doesn't even have to be in the same classroom with you...plus you can send messages to have your friend meet you in the bathroom, etc. If caught, 9 out of 10 students will say the conversation was "with my mother."
By the way, I've attended a couple of seminars on school security post-Columbine, and all of the security experts have said that after a disaster they expect cell phones to be useless because all the students and parents trying to contact each other would jam the circuits, so school officials should have one unlisted landline to contact authorities in such an event.
“This type of stuff is illegal.
I say the schools need to have a strict no cell phone policy.”
“Shooting innocent people is illegal. I say we need to have a strict no guns policy.”
Quiz: which of the above is more idiotic than the other?
A lot of this relies on the DA having some amount of discretion and common sense. Best Buy finds naked teen shots on the computer you sent in to repair? Prosecute. Someone sent an image on a cell that you deleted? Probably not even if they found out.
The law is supposed to get adults who take advantage of kids and the pervs who consume the resulting product (thus providing a market for the kiddie pornographers’ wares). DAs shouldn’t be bothering if no kids were taken advantage of by adults and there was no perv intent on the part of the accidental possessors.
"no" is a bad word, being short and harsh. "zero tolerance" is gentler, and eases the listener into the concept.
It is good to be able to convict the kiddie porn collector who managed to hit delete before the police busted down the door.
You said — “It is good to be able to convict the kiddie porn collector who managed to hit delete before the police busted down the door.”
It also means that you had better be careful about bargain hard drives... :-)
Come to think about it, you had better be careful about the drives that come from the factories, too... I read, one time (even though this isn’t hard drive) that a factory that made the iPhones had an employee that put her picture on the iPhones, in a hidden area. It was discovered after it got out to the public.
Can you imagine what would happen to a bunch of factory hard drives that had a couple of “pictures” loaded in some hidden area of the drive... Hooo-boy!
Not to try to get too far off, but the way people pass on a highway is a safety issue, to be regulated the same as tailgating and other maneuvers that create an immediate danger to everyone on the road. I don't see that as banning something I don't like, but as making sure everyone plays by the same rules, because the one person who doesn't might just kill a lot of people.
I'm sure your shooting range would kick out anyone who starts shooting when the others go down range to change targets, maybe even call the police on him. With potentially deadly devices, you have to play by the rules for everyone to be safe.
not in NH
You betcha!
The cell phones of only one company will work out there. This is one of the five poorest districts in the area. I don’t know what the technology would cost. The problem would be in the limits -only during school hours? After hour parent pickups for sports would possibly be impacted.
I'll wait till I get to work, I'm on a secure government network there, it'll be impossible to trace me.
Owl_Eagle
You know, I'm going to start thanking
the woman who cleans the restroom in
the building I work in. I'm going to start
thinking of her as a human being
Bad example due to horrible logic.
You see, Guns aren’t allowed on school property, either.
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