Newest Teen Trend: “Sexting”
Posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Parents are urged to monitor the computer activity of their teens because of a new teen trend, “sexting,” where teens exchange nude photos of themselves with their friends via cell-phone text messaging.
“Thanks to a few kids who have recently been caught, this new and dangerous phenomenon has come to light for parents,” says Jamie Leasure, co-founder of Pandora Corp., makers of PC Pandora
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released results of a study that of 653 teens surveyed, 20 percent admitted to “sexting” or posting online images of nude photos of themselves.
The Pandora Corp. points out that once nude images are involved and on one’s computer, in the eyes of the law, it becomes a form of child pornography, which should make parents very concerned.
“There is something to be said for the way that sex is portrayed in mainstream media and pop culture,” explains Leasure. “We are a society that makes the idea ’sex sells’ possible. At the same time, we are enjoying this explosion of new technology that makes high levels of communication between individuals possible with a few presses of just a couple of buttons. When we give our kids this new technology, we sometimes forget that teens are teens and they are going to do a lot of questionable things as they grow up.”
