Last week, Nick Lacroce, a member of Susquenita High School in Pennsylvania, wrote an op-ed about a controversy at his school in which a form of sexting was carried out involving videotaping or photographing multiple people doing inappropriate things. It was one of the largest sexting incidents in the state.
Ultimately, Lacroce addresses how authorities should handle such controversies.
The big question for society is what type of punishment should someone involved in this receive? The law states that if the person possessing the text is convicted, they are accussed of the same type of crime as any pedophile caught possessing child pornography.
While most can agree that sexting is wrong and doubly wrong for a minor, the punishment does not fit the crime.
A minor convicted of sexting should not receive similar treatment as a pedophile with child porn. Yet the minor could be registered as a sex offender for a period of at least 10 years. It is akin to taking a person with a moving violation and giving him the same sentence as a person convicted of drunken driving.
Not long afterward it was reported that Pennsylvania legislators were drafting a bill to address the issue, stating that there currently is no “sexting” offense. Though there is no word yet to the extent of the punishment, there will reportedly be an “educational” component for those who engage in such acts.
Pennsylvania is not the only state dealing with these issues. In Milwaukee, a 14-year-old is facing child porn charges after he threatened to spread rumors about about a group of girls unless they sent him nude pictures of themselves. The case is currently being debated in that area over the extent of the punishment.
Other incidents include:
A teenager in Indiana faces felony obscenity charges for sending a picture of his genitals to female classmates. A 15-year-old girl in Ohio and a 14-year-old girl in Michigan were charged with felonies for sending along nude images of themselves to classmates. These seem to be cases where the natural response is, “What were you thinking!?” not, “This person is a child pornographer!”
Of course there are other ways to police the issue. A new cell phone software application called Mobile Nanny was just released, which allows “parents to see everything their child does and block any disallowed activities. Complete text
messages, call histories and GPS logs are viewable to parents online or inside an interface on the device itself.”
The software allows parents to filter out activities they don’t want to happen. The parent can block their child from communicating with specific phone numbers. Any phone number can be blocked from SMS and call communication. Specific websites and applications on the phone can also be blocked. The child can additionally be restricted from using the phone at certain hours the parent specifies, such as during school hours.
Though clever, applications like these won’t likely serve as a longtime solution to the sexting problem. Given that it almost always involves minors, it’s a problem that authorities will have to address in the future, lest teenagers face criminal charges based on outdated laws that don’t directly address the issue.
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