Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

A kinder, gentler response to adolescent “sexting”

A small army of educators and telecom reps met in DC to get America's …

They came from pretty much every sector—nonprofits, government, wireless executives, and think tanks—to a day-long conference in Washington D.C. on how to respond to the panic du jour over kids, mobile phones, and sex. "Sexting," declared one panel moderator, "we might as well just get that big, giant elephant in the room. Parents are absolutely freaking every five minutes, because there's some new technology worry to have to deal with."

The tensest moments at the conference took place during conversations between law enforcement officials and mobile industry representatives. The latter group don't want to be clobbered either. They don't want to be blamed for sexting, and they don't want to be hit with a slew of new data retention laws or regulations.

The Family Online Safety Institute gathered them together on Wednesday for a wireless industry backed conference titled "Wireless Online Safety: Keeping Kids Safe in a Mobile Environment." And while the talk on and off podiums often centered around the "sexting" problem—tweens and teens taking cell phone shots of each other in various states of undress—the bigger focus was on how to move the public from freak-out to problem-solving mode on this phenomenon and its categorical twin: "cyber-bullying."

"My question is why we keep putting so much of this discussion in the context of crime and victimization?" asked Anne Collier of "The vast majority of the behavior we're talking about is adolescent behavior and risk taking. It's not criminal behavior."

The conference took place at a law office on Pennsylvania Avenue, but much of the discussion focused on the state Pennsylvania, where a state DA threatened to prosecute a pair of girl sexters for distributing child pornography (images of themselves being the alleged porn); or other states where kids caught with this stuff are being classified as sex offenders.

Plenty of dialogue focused on how to dial down this sort of legal goose-stepping. The events' organizers even managed to find a politician who agreed that things were getting out of hand. "We have to be very careful about criminalizing these things," Georgia State Senator Don Balfour warned the gathering. "Let's not clobber these kids." It was a message that this audience of educators and child advocates wanted to hear.

Back to square one

Ars sat down with Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, during the conference lunch break, for a sense of what he hoped to see the Institute's first conference on mobile safety accomplish. A big part of the answer is educating the public, again.

"For years we've been telling parents to put the computer in the living room, keep and eye on what your children are doing, go and hit the history button and review where they've been," Balkam explained. "Well all that advice holds true but it gets completely upended by mobile phones, PDAs, and anything that can walk around."

Given how small many devices have become, it's sometimes a challenge for parents to figure out whether they have an Internet-connected device, Balkam noted. "I'm in the business. It took me two weeks of research to work out the kind of phone to buy for my daughter and then what to switch off in it."

What did he switch off?, we asked.

"Web access," Balkam disclosed. At the time, the service didn't have adequate filters. But "I stupidly restricted her to 250 text messages a month. She blew past that in the first week. So she now has an unlimited plan but she pays me five bucks a month for that." Plus she's got to honor school night restrictions on texting.

You decide

So a lot of the conference was about sharing intel on the latest resources. Advocates came with websites, among them Look Both Ways, a collaborative clearing house for online safety, and's new interactive game "It's Your Call." The game poses various cell phone temptations to teens, like discovering the mobile of a classmate you don't like—plus it's packed with compromising photos. "Do you send the pictures to everyone you know?" the program asks. Players then get a taste of the consequences. "It's Your Call is your chance to show that you have what it takes," the demo video says. "You choose. You decide. It's your call."

A lot of kids are going to have to make these calls. Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet & American Life Project came armed with a slew of stats on kids and cell phone use. A recent survey indicates that as of last year, 71 percent of teens 12 to 17 own a mobile phone (that's up from 45% in 2004). Eighty-seven percent of 17-year-olds and over half of children 12-13 years of age have one.

And they're talking and texting like crazy. More than half of them talk with their friends on cell phones every day, and over 40 percent of them send messages to online social networks daily. But only 29% of them reported that they actually spend time with friends in person on a day-to-day basis.

Grabbing on to laws


"I think the hope is that conversations can help the industry move towards what law enforcement needs," a representative from Sprint suggested during a panel discussion, "things like following up to provide more guidelines about what we have available, without necessarily regulating or being prescriptive and saying everyone must do it this way."

He got sympathy up to a point from Monique Roth of the Department of Justices' Child Exploitation and Obscenity section. "I would not take laws off the table," she noted. "Sometimes they serve a very useful purpose. Certainly sometimes the threat of legislation is one motivating factor for industry."

And the impetus for legislation is not something she can always control, Roth suggested. "This is the one issue that [Congressional representatives] always tend to grab onto. And I know this because I have to review all this legislation, and there's a lot of it that comes through. This is the one place where people are very motivated to try to make a difference by passing new laws."

The wireless industry is all too aware of this enthusiasm, and that's clearly one big reason why this conference was launched. But listening to the participants talk about their new applications, websites, and educational programs, it was hard to see the event as just about that.

"We need to change the discussion from safety 'from' bad stuff to safety 'for'," Collier emphasized. "We live in a participatory culture and democracy. And we want kids to have full, healthy participation. We need to have them safe so they can fully participate in an active global society."

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42 Reader Comments

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  1. I was pretty stupid as a teenager (which was before cell phones were common) but I can honestly say that neither I, nor my friends, ever thought it would have been normal to take a nude picture of ourselves and send it to anyone. Hell, once you got past 8th grade, having even written a LOVE NOTE to someone and stuffing it in their locker was generally-accepted grounds for public display and embarrassment.

    Are kids just magnitudes more stupid these days?
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  2. Here's a thought, how about parents actually DO THE PARENTING and we let law enforcement go after murderers and burglars? Yes, I know, its a radical thought in this world of helicopter parents and soccer moms to think parents can actually handle these things on their own

    If a kid sends racy pics to another kid the MOST law enforcement should be involved is telling the parents and letting them deal with it. If an adult receives or solicits the picture, THEN you get the law involved and go after the adult. Simple as that.

    But what cell phone carriers need to do is allow parents to OPT INTO getting a copy of every picture their kid sends at the moment its sent, with the info of who its sent to. And copies of all the pics they receive too. That way, if your precious daughter sends a boy pictures of her ta-tas, you can call her up and chew her ear off before she gets her shirt back on. And how about going one step further and give parents an approval prompt so they can approve each picture being sent on to the intended recipient or not.

    Just think, not only will parents be able to stop their kids sending pics of their junk to their friends, but they can also see those pumps their daughter saw at the mall, while skipping school, and thought their friends would die for. And suddenly they're busted for skipping school.

    My main point is, parents should raise children and be responsible for their discipline. And cops should be responsible for adult infractions.
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  3. It's my personal opinion that as long as the citizens of the U.S. continue to allow themselves to be controlled by the remnants of the puritanical settlers of this country, we will continue to have significant difficulties dealing with anything of a sexual nature. I noticed someone mentioned they haven't heard anything in Europe about this issue, perhaps because they gave up much of what we as Americans still continue to cling to. The basic belief that if you like sex, you're some kind of unclean monster and you're going to hell.

    As far as restricting kids from sending other kids pics of themselves, I find that to be ludicrous. Seriously people, how many of you that read this site daily like myself remember all the things we did in our youth that adults had no idea was even possible for the most part? I suppose you could have all been good kids, but I remember setting up EBBS's and trading all sorts of things between friends and certainly not paying for any of it, because the "adults" running things like phone companies and what not didn't have a clue we were even there most of the time.

    If you think you're going to stop kids from having a better grasp of technology than anyone else, you've totally lost any connection with reality. Face it people, kids these days are growing up with technology we could only dream of as kids, and they have a general tendency to use it more effectively, and more intuitively than any adult will.
    82 posts | registered
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