The Cyber Effect by Mary Aiken

Author:Mary Aiken
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Sext + Sensibility

There are loads of scary stories about sexting, but I’ll start with a relatively unscary one. The story dates way, way back to the summer of 2007, a million years ago in the sexting debate time line. But it marks a turning point.

Two thirteen-year-old girls from northeastern Pennsylvania, Marissa Miller and Grace Kelly, were hanging out together and goofing around on a hot muggy night when they decided to strip down to their white sports bras and underwear.

They hammed it up—Kelly flashing a peace sign—while a third friend took a photograph of the two girls.

This photo was shared and shared again. Eventually it traveled all the way to the administrator’s office of Tunkhannock Area High School, where the girls were both students. It was found when school officials confiscated five cellphones of other students. Boys at the school had been trading photos of semi-dressed, semi-nude, or totally nude teenage girls. When a local prosecutor threatened to charge Miller and Kelly effectively with the generation and distribution of child pornography unless they agreed to attend a five-week after-school program, the girls and their families protested—saying the picture was taken in innocent fun, and was never meant to be distributed. The intention behind the act of taking the photograph was hardly the same as the intention behind the generation of child abuse material, but the law does not yet make this distinction.

“There was absolutely nothing wrong with that photograph,” said Marissa’s mother, MaryJo. “I certainly don’t want pedophiles looking at my daughter in her bra, but I don’t think that was the intention to begin with. This is absolutely wrong….It’s abuse of his authority.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal judge to block the D.A. from filing charges—stating that the teens didn’t consent to having the picture distributed and that the image was not pornography, in any event.

While some may consider sexting to be only a social concern, the legal implications are clear. According to U.S. legal scholar Mary Graw Leary, “the production and dissemination of self-produced child pornography is, under the law, the production and dissemination of illegal child pornography.” Attempts at prosecution for sexting haven’t been confined to the United States. In Australia, child pornography laws have been enforced in connection with sexting, and between 2009 and 2011 more than 450 teenagers were arrested and charged with circulation of indecent images of minors.

Prosecution is not a deterrent. The incidence of sexting has only risen. In 2008, the same year that Miller and Kelly were threatened with charges, a U.S. study reported that 39 percent of teens had taken a sexually charged or explicit image of themselves with their mobile phones and sent it via text message. Six years later, the numbers had grown to include half of all teenagers having sent a sext, according to a survey of undergraduates at Drexel University. Can we really try to outlaw—and describe as immoral and indecent—a practice that now involves half the population of teenagers in the United States?

Sexual curiosity is a natural part of being a teen.

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