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 ...
You said — “However, if someone sends them such a picture unsolicited and they immediately delete it, then they haven’t comitted a crime.”
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Well, I’ve heard of some law enforcement agencies scouring drives (or virtual drives) to scavenge up deleted items. If they find something that was there and deleted, I’ve heard they can charge the person. That seems sort of crazy, actually...
Thanks for opining about my kid, but frankly, I want my kid to have the cell phone on her person whenever she is not under my roof.
My kid. My call. You go ahead and do whatever you want for yours.
You said — “Back in the day, so I would occasionally hear, there would be a girl or two that would expose herself if the boys begged hard enough. Then the stories and rumors would fly but no proof of course just imaginations filling in the blanks.”
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Yeah, I remember some crotchety old man that I used to mow a lawn for... talking to me one day (he was sort of weird...) telling me about some neighborhood kids and what “they were doing” in an old garage across the street, taking off their clothes and stuff (you know..., like real young kids like 10 or so...). I never did figure out if he was making it up or not.
I was just about that age, too, myself, going around mowing neighborhood lawns... LOL...
The cheerleaders parents must be so proud.....
In reality what has happened is that legislators assumed that underage teenagers would be moral enough not to send naked pictures of themselves to others. I probably would have made the same assumption. In hindsight that is a mistake and there is now a gap in the law. The problem is, how do you update the law to change the situation? If an underage teen with a grudge can send her teacher an email with a naked picture and get him put away, that doesn't seem right, but if he is in possession of the picture, it doesn't seem right either. Underage kids possessing naked pictures of their peers doesn't seem so bad until fathers get a hold of them (realistically, women can probably get away with possessing any amount of child porn).
So what is the answer? Let things continue on a case-by-case basis until our populace is used to the idea of underage teens media-messaging nudie-photos of themselves to each other? Trying to stamp out the practice by prosecuting those who do?
They'd have to be looking at a person's hard drive for a specific reason and with a warrant, like If the person was on the e-mail distribution list of a child pornographer.
Prosecutors who do this stuff are good at it- a poker buddy of mine is a Federal prosecutor who goes after child pornographers. The point he made to me is that they never find someone with just one picture or video- when they find this type of stuff after executing a search warrant, they find hundreds, if not thousands, of videos and pictures. It's tough to argue that you did not receive the stuff intentionally.
The worst is that they'll see the same child victim in pictures and videos over the course of years from a very young age to their teen years, in some cases. They just don't have any way to track the kid down. They can arrest the guys with pictures of the kids, but they can't find the victims.
Back in my day it was not uncommon to take nude pictures of girls on an old black & white Polaroid instant camera, I remember seeing shoe boxes filled with them. Nothing has changed but the technology people have been gazing at nudes since caveman drawings and I don’t see any thing to impede progress in the future.
Personally I can’t wait for the invention of holodecks, no guilt,t disease or commitments whatsoever, truly zip-less sex.
You said — “The only real power govt has is to prosecute criminals. This is just one more step in making everyone criminals.”
In general the overzealous prosecution of way too many laws makes everyone lose respect for the law and makes the entire society become more lawless. So, being too aggressive can work against the authorities, because many figure once they’ve broken a stupid law here and there, then what does it matter to break a few more — and then..., so it goes... everyone starts to become “lawless.”
I would think you'd just teach your daughter not to take nude pictures of herself and send them to the boys...
so who would you want her to send them to???????
You speak a mouthful, sir.
This thread is ample demonstration for just how easy it is to get to a place where you ban the ‘thing’ because people use it in a bad way. As you say, the logic here is just as easily applied to guns, cars, food, phones, etc., etc.
I saw this in the left-lane passing thread. Apparently even conservatives are not immune to wanting their pet-peeves made illegal. I actually like the kids' cell-phone that has a mommy-button and a daddy-button and that's it. No cameras, no texting, no calling friends while at school or out. If it's an emergency, they can call mommy or daddy and that's it.
I was making a more general point. The fact that kids did not have cell phones in schools in the past doesn't really answer the question of whether they should have them now.
Don't you think other people have had similar situations where their cars were stalled...after all, cars in the 90's were much more reliable than in the 60's...but we somehow managed to make it.
I suppose. But, there is simply no downside to kids have access to cell phones at all times. You never know when emergencies are going to pop up.
Jeez, are we going to split hairs all day to try to get to a freakin' point. I know it's illegal, but I said SHOULD BE.
Why? Because you don't like cell phones?
Because you wouldn't want 300 different cellphones with 300 different ringtones going off all day in the hallway...THINK!
So, just have a rule that all cell phones have to be on silent or vibrate and give detention to any kid who violates the rule. Kids and parents stay in contact, and your delicate ears don't get offended.
If a guy is in the practice of collecting those kinds of pictures, then I can see that he would have a whole bunch of them. But, in some Free Republic articles (I don’t know..., around a month or two ago...) there was mentioned some guy who had a computer in for repair and the technician spotted a picture on his hard drive. The police were called and they looked through the drive and found something like six or seven of them. So, the guy was prosecuted.
I guess someone could say he didn’t have time to collect as many as he wanted to... LOL... but, at the same time, perhaps there are those who have one or two or five or six, etc.
Then again, there is the issue about family pictures (that I mentioned in an earlier posting). I’m not sure where they draw the line, because certain pictures are okay, while others are not. I guess it would be easy enough to prove whether someone was in the family (for family pictures), but..., it’s okay for people to even have strangers’ pictures of things like family nudist places or even some printed material by certain professional photographers that put it out for art.
I don’t think there should be problems for families and their own personal photos, as I remember the day, a long many years ago, when people did have photos of little kids running around without anything on, and they would all laugh about it... :-)
Nowadays, it seems to be very dangerous for even stupid little things like that.
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