‘Sexting’ has been an issue with the likes of various schools & parents lately. Sexting is the act of sending an explicit or sexual text & often containing a self-shot nude picture of the sender. So what happens with the picture when the receiver (whether the fella or flirtatious partner) keeps the picture or lets it surface to another mate, school member, parent or other person of interest.
Statistics are currently showing that the images are often shared between friends & finally finish up on the net with a site that hosts the nude images after they are either accidentally or intentionally uploaded or placed in the wrong hands.
Obviously there’s all sorts of ways to send a picture of your nude self or to receive such content with the ever constant use of Facebook, E-Mail & Mobile Phones but the alarming statistics are showing that most of the participants sending & receiving are under the age that most nations legally permit sexual activity & kids as young as 9 years of age have been engaging in such things.
We often ask why a 9 year old would have the use of a personal mobile phone without supervision or the necessity for using it in the case of safety but in such changing & technology-dependent times the only way to solve something like this is to educate these people & find some kind of way to report to them that sending a nude picture to another person can often mean you are sending it to lots of persons.
On top of this it is true that kids & teenagers sometimes do not understand that images of their sexual poses are the best way to gain a bad reputation & possibly cause dire consequences legally, emotionally & harm your future relationships.
So in the legal sense in most nations – the act of sending an picture of oneself without clothes on to another person can consequently lead to the sender being placed on the countries sex offenders list & be charged with the distribution of kid
pornography.
At a co-ed school in Australia, we interviewed around 100 students & surprisingly the average age of females admitting to being flirtatious & without caution, sending pics of themselves performing sexual acts with themselves & even being sexually
active within school grounds was 11 years of age.
It got moderately worse when a student admitted to stripping in front of her web camera & being – quote “sensible by hiding my face” – her school uniform & various things surrounding her released her identity to the school & peers.
My closing thoughts are that these shocking events in which a female as young as age 9 would expose herself ‘publically’ would even know what sexting is and actually have sexual feelings. Is it the pressure of a male contact or is it the early development of a desire to feel mature?
