Watching over East Leyden

Time to Face Facts

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 71% of teen girls and 67% of teen boys have sent or posted sexually suggestive photos.

Lately, the sexting stories out there have been multiplying. From massive school sexting scandals to prevent getting caught to multiple suspensions and arrests for leaking photos and videos.

Just this past month, a “young victim had sent sexts to a boyfriend at his urging, but after they broke up, the boy shared the images with others, escalating into bullying and sexual harassment,” said District Attorney Thomas Hogan.

If these messages do become public then they can become embarrassing and painful for the original sender. No Bullying explains how senders can experience long term effects such as depression and loss of self-esteem. They explained that “The only defense that parents have against sexting is informing. When parents inform their children of what can happen, teens may be less likely to send these types of messages.”

Parents try their best. All of these stories go viral for a couple of days, and adults everywhere spend a few days upset. The parents and critics ask “why the school [hasn’t] done more to educate students about sexting,” says Jonathan Zimmerman of The New York Times. Zimmerman goes on to explain that while schools are an easy target, it’s the wrong one.

Here’s the reality that adults are going to have to face: this generation is going to sext. As one Leyden student put it, “It’s going to happen either way, so just let it happen.” School and parent intervention will not help.  Sexting has become the norm for most teenagers, and it might be time to consider a different approach when talking about it.

Amy Hassinof, a professor at University of Colorado- Denver, explains that we really need to face statistics because “studies have shown that about 30 percent of teenagers sext.” Although sexting is classified as child pornography in many places, Hassinof argues that it “seems illogical… that the child pornography laws don’t make a distinction about whether the sexting was consensual or not.”

While my generation still perceives one-sided sexting as offensive or criminal, we don’t see consensual sexts as taboo. We joke about it more than anything else. Zimmerman even compares it to “necking in the car…for earlier generations” and calls it a form of “courtship.” We almost never even report it to our parents or teachers. In Colorado, a recent sexting scandal found that over 100 students were using an app and sharing nude photos and this was kept a secret for quite some time.

Twenty states have even changed their sexting laws to accommodate to the common place practice of sexting. They’ve stopped enforcing long-term consequences, like a life time presence on the child sex offender registry, and instead favor immediate consequences like installing monitoring softwares into phones.

None of this makes sexting right. We need to realize that if we choose to sext, we still risk ridicule, bullying, harassment, and legal consequences.It’s bad behavior.

But when a bad behavior is so common, trying to stop it by just saying “don’t do it” might not be as helpful as teaching students how to work with it. If schools and parents  already provide safe sex education for teens when they’re minors, then why shouldn’t they provide safe sexting tips as well? Wouldn’t it make things a whole lot easier and possibly prevent damage to people’s relationships?

Author Kylie Singh offers interesting advice in her article “7 Crucial Tips to Practice Safe Sexting.” She cites Dr. Scot Conway’s suggestion to send implied nudes instead of explicit nudes. Some good examples, according to Conway are “an arm draped across the breasts, a topless photo from behind, a side shot, a towel or sheet held in front of the body are all options.” These aren’t as “scandalous,” but they get a similar point across. Even then, before you consider pressing that send button, Kyli Singh believes you should “take a second to think about how much you really trust the recipient,” because there’s always a chance that they might not be the only person seeing that photo.

Practical suggestions such as these should be a part of our sexting conversation with young people. Adults should reconsider their zero tolerance stance, especially with older teens.

A world with zero sexting, and a world where teenagers listened to everything their parents told them, would be ideal. But since teenagers don’t work like that it’s better to add the safe sexting conversation alongside all the other awkward family conversations.

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