us: Teens, Nude Photos and the Law

Ask yourself: should the police be involved when tipsy teen girls e-mail their boyfriends naughty Valentine’s Day pictures?Say you’re a middle-school principal who confiscated a cell phone from a 14-year-old boy, only to discover it contains a nude photo of his 13-year-old girlfriend. Do you (a) call the boy’s parents in despair; (b) call the girl’s parents in despair; or (c) call the police? More and more, the answer is (d) all of the above. Which could result in criminal charges for both of your students, and their eventual designation as sex offenders. “Sexting” is the clever new name for the act of sending, receiving or forwarding naked photos via your cell phone, and I wasn’t fully convinced that America was facing a sexting epidemic, as opposed to a journalists-writing-about-sexting epidemic, until I saw a new survey done by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. One teenager in five reported having sent or posted naked photos of themselves. Whether all this reflects a new child-porn epidemic, or just a new iteration of the old teen narcissism epidemic, remains unclear.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/184814