A Wisconsin teenager willingly sent a nude photo of herself to her boyfriend when they were still gooey eyed for each other. But after the romance died, the cad promptly forwarded it to other kids.
This week, police asked parents to check their teen’s cell phones for the illicit photo of the 14-year-old girl, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. Cops are going all out on this investigation — teens’ computers have been seized to see whether the photo was sent over the Internet, and there’s talk of booking the kids on felony possession of child porn.
“We know it’s a hard stance, but how else do we deal with this?” Waukesha police Capt. Mark Stigler told the newspaper.
This isn’t the first sexting scandal at Waukesha West High School. One couple exchanged nude photos to each other last week, police said. They were slapped with disorderly conduct citations, but didn’t face more serious charges because nobody else had the pics.
Read previous Minor Troubles coverage of sexting here.
When will kids finally learn that it’s not a good idea to send X-rated pictures of themselves over the Internet?
Anthony Stancl allegedly pretended he was a girl on Facebook and convinced at least 31 male classmates to send him naked photos of themselves, authorities said. Anthony, 18, then blackmailed some of the boys to perform sex acts on him, prosecutors said. Stancl, from the Milwaukee area, was booked Wednesday on various charges of possession of child porn, child enticement and sexual assault, the Associated Press reported.
The alleged victims thought they were talking with a girl named Emily or Kayla. After they sent her their photos, she apparently told them that she would post them on the Internet if they didn’t meet with a male friend of hers for sex, authorities said. The ruse occurred from spring 2007 through last November.
Anthony’s activities allegedly were not limited to nudie photos. He also has been charged with making bomb threats to New Berlin Eisenhower Middle and High School, which he attended.
Jesse Coltrane of New Jersey had known the California 18-year-old only through MySpace and only for about a month. The two had often discussed music interests, but on Monday night, the teen started talking about suicide.
Coltrane, 21, who runs a modeling and entertainment agency, says he immediately dropped out of an online business meeting and focused on the teen. For seven hours, Coltrane spoke with the teen through instant messenger, email and phone, the Associated Press reported.
Finally, the teen logged off and stopped answering his phone. But Coltrane said that on his webcam, he could see the teen cutting the skin of his arm with a razor blade. Coltrane called police and gave them a first name and a phone number, all that he knew about the teen’s identity. Cops quickly tracked down the young man at his home in Sacramento. He was taken in for a medical evaluation; his family told police they didn’t know about the suicide attempt.
Coltrane said during his conversation with the teen, he kept thinking about the Florida college student who killed himself online last year on a bodybuilding Web site. Some viewers posted insults as Abraham Briggs Jr. overdosed on antidepressants.
It’s a number that the Connecticut attorney general said “provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators.” Richard Blumenthal said the number was double what MySpace had been estimating, and added that a preliminary study had found a “substantial” number of offenders on Facebook.
Several attorneys general brokered agreements last year with MySpace and Facebook to push toward making their sites safer. Both sites instituted safeguards, including finding better ways to verify user’s ages, banning convicted sex offenders and sharply limiting the ability of older users to search for under-age users.
But it’s not enough, North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper told the Associated Press. “Technology moves forward quickly, and it’s important for these companies to stay ahead of the technology,” he said. “And they’re not moving fast enough for us.”
What are sex offenders writing in their emails? In Georgia, police don’t have to guess. They can see for themselves.
A new law in Georgia requires registered sex offenders to turn over the passwords to their email addresses. The only other state with such a requirement is Utah. In other states, sex offenders register their email addresses, user names and other Internet handles, but not the passwords.
Advocates of the requirement says it helps keep the Internet safe for kids. Police, probation officers and other authorities can check if a molester is cyberstalking a child. Georgia legislator Cecil Staton says that the need to protect children “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.” The sex offenders, he told the Associated Press, “have forfeited to some degree, some privacy rights.”
Critics say the law goes too far. Kelly Piercy, who was convicted of child porn charges in 1999, said that he has already paid for his mistake through a jail term. “But now we’re the target of pre-emptive justice — and that concerns me,” he told the AP. “How much further down the road can sex offenders be chased?”
The entertainment company is paying a $1 million fine to settle accusations that it violated children’s online privacy, Wired News reported today.
When kids surfed Sony’s music-related Web sites, the company collected info from them such as their names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail address, dates of birth and zip codes, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission. Sony had data from more than 30,000 children under age 13 — even though the company said on its sites that youngsters wouldn’t be allowed to register. Kids would put in dates of birth showing they were under age 13, and the company would collect the data anyway.
“Sony Music publicly posted and made available for viewing on the Internet certain items of information submitted by children in creating their user profile, including any photos they may have uploaded, as well as their gender, age, city and country,” according to the lawsuit.
Privacy advocates say that such violations allow kids to be preyed upon by marketers and in worst-case scenarios, by identity thieves or child molesters. Sony did not respond immediately to requests for comment from several media organizations.
So that’s why they’re on the phone all day.
The new report also found that nearly a third of teens have received X-rated images or videos. Most are sent to a boyfriend or girlfriend, but inevitably get around to other kids. The survey of 1,280 young people confirmed what police and Minor Troubles readers already know: Sexting is hot.
“What young people report is that this sort of online behavior contributes to a casual hookup culture,” said Bill Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy, told the Boston Globe. The campaign and CosmoGirl.com sponsored the survey.
Sometimes, sexting leads to school discipline, arrests and lawsuits. Two Seattle cheerleaders were suspended from the team this fall after their nude photos circulated around their school. Last month, a Wisconsin teen was arrested for showing off photos of his now ex-girlfriend. Read more about those and other cases here.
Police warn that such photos can do more harm than mere embarassment. Child predators are known to seek out and circulate such images.
Many teens are just looking for attention. Two-thirds of the girls surveyed who sent sexually suggestive photos said they did it to be “fun” or “flirtatious.” Half also wanted to give their boyfriends a “sexy present.” Many don’t think the photos are a big deal.
After all, teen celebs have been embroiled in sexting scandals, too. Last month, naughty images of Adrienne Bailon of the Disney pop group Cheetah Girls circulated on the Internet. Pornographic self-portraits that Vanessa Hudgens of “High School Musical” e-mailed to a fellow actor last year are all over the Web, too. Their careers haven’t suffer.
The 23-year-old man used the toddler he was hired to babysit to make a porn film, police said.
Aaron Jay Lemon of Little Canada, Minn., pleaded guilty on Wednesday to producing the video and coercing a minor to engaging in sexually explicit conduct, the Associated Press reported. He had answered an ad for a babysitter on Craigslist and was hired to care for a 2-year-old girl in St. Paul.
Lemon, who faces up to 30 years in prison, remains free on bond. His arrest was part of an investigation by St. Paul police and federal officials working to fight the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. Further details on the case were not reported.
Last month, San Francisco-based Craigslist announced that it was installing new software in an agreement with 40 states to help authorities prosecute human trafficking and sex crimes, although it’s not clear the technology would have been of help here.
The girl said she was 17. On her webcam Friday, she held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill herself.
After a viewer called the sheriff’s office in Naples, Fla., where the girl said she lived, an investigator got online, the Associated Press reported. The detective pretended he was a young girl and started talking to her via instant message.
Deputies were then able to track down where the girl lived with her grandparents. The girl, who was actually 12, was taken to a mental health center.
Just two weeks ago, a 19-year-old community college student overdosed on antidepressants as a live audience watched on a bodybuilding Web site. Some viewers posted insults and egged him on as a webcam recorded Abraham Biggs Jr. dying in his Broward County, Fla., bedroom.
During his campaign, President-elect Barack Obama ran an ad on TV asking parents to “Turn it Off.” Now a new study underlines his point. If your kid is fat, smoking, sexually active and gets bad grades, chances are, they’re spending way too much time in front of the boob tube.
The study analyzed all the research done on TV, video games and other media since 1980 and concluded that there’s plenty of evidence that it’s all bad for your kids. “Coach potato does, unfortunately, sum it up pretty well,” Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, of the National Institutes of Health’s clinical center, one of the study’s five reviewers, told the New York Times. Emanuel, by the way, is the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff.
Because health factors and socioeconomic status can also contribute to obesity and other bad habits, researchers said they looked at studies that controlled for those variables. The only major health ailment not strongly connected with TV overdose is attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the report said.
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on kids and media that helped finance the study, is hoping that the report will spur lawmakers to pay for more media education efforts. It also wants the entertainment industry to be more responsible, however naive that might be. Read the report here.
