At school, she was hoping that it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but even the principal knew about the video. He brought her to his office and called her mom.
"I couldn't even look at my mother because I felt hurt and I also felt that I disrespected her," she says. "I didn't want kids in the school to look at my mother and be like, 'Wow, she raised nothing.' "
A big amplifying factor in these examples seems to be a society and an upbringing that cannot to deal with sexuality in a pragmatic manner, and instead prefers a "everybody's doing it, but nobody is talking about it publicly" approach.
If someone posts intimate pictures or videos of somebody else without their knowledge, it should be the poster that is shamed and that people disrespect for it -- after all he has violated an expectation of privacy and intimacy. Instead it is the victim that is made to feel bad for "being promiscuous".
This battle is about sex, but make no mistake, the war is about bullying.
The people who are doing the "shaming" are almost certainly exploring their sexuality as well (and probably see nothing wrong with it), but that's not the point.
The point is that they are bullies and they will use anything they can to help them bully others. It is just convenient in this case to use society's taboos around sex as a tool to bully this particular person. The bullies are smart. They know what buttons to push. If we lived in a society where everyone was comfortable with sex, bullying would still be going on, but it would just look a little differently.
Remember the Puritans settled in the North. In any case wherever this originates, the US's puritanical tendencies (compared to continental Europe) don't seem to be exclusively a southern thing.
There was just last week a big upheaval in Belgium about a collection of facebook pages where pictures, including names and classes and ... of the girls involved in them were being spread on a number of facebook pages.
Most of them were closed with the help of the police, and the case seems closed now. But in reality it just caused them to hide themselves a bit better, and there's one still open that doesn't hide it at all.
A few weeks before there was a suicide not far from where I live which the guy involved blamed on facebook. There was a similar case in Britain.
I know someone in New York City whose parents nearly kicked her out of the house when they discovered she was having sex with her boyfriend. It is not just the south; there are plenty of idiots in the "liberal northeast" also.
I'm not sure why some cultures, or even sub-sub-cultures, feel like they have the right to trample the values of the rest of the world just because "it's the internet". Why should those people adapt, instead of the internet adapting to respect other values?
I've seen a few other comments to the effect that if US society weren't so prudish about sex, incidents like this wouldn't be so bad. I do not agree. These situations are not about sexual imagery, its about people using that imagery and media to engage in harassment campaigns against others. This harassment is highly misogynist and often is focused on the girl in the photo/video rather than the person who is maliciously spreading that media, even if person doing the spreading appears in said media itself.
Fixing this situation requires many things, but at a minimum school administrators needs clear anti-harassment policies that are enforced against people who are spreading this media as a form of harassment. Sex education that focuses on consent and explores issues of patriarchy and rape culture in the US in addition to basic biology and mechanics of sex is also needed.
Of course, this is a long running issue in US society, so nothing will happen overnight, but we must demand that institutions we trust with the education and oversight of young folks be a force for defeating harassment and sexism.
This is not a sex education problem... this is a harassment/bullying problem.
At the school I am involved with it is termed "Relationship Bullying". It has a range that you would not believe. It typically involves girl peer groups. And it is devastating in its effect. I have seen it turn bright, straight A student athletes into C-D students because of the distraction. This stuff MATTERS to girls that age.
Complicating the issue, a school typically cannot get access to any of these online profiles. (That's generally district policy most places. Having teachers forwarded racy pictures of students opens you up to some liabilities.) Even if you could, a school has no control over what a student does outside of school hours. To top it all off, police generally find that no laws have been broken. One friend let another friend take a picture of her and even smiled for the camera. What can they do?
This problem is MUCH more complicated than most people believe. Simple solutions don't work here. A "...Sex education that focuses on consent and explores issues of patriarchy and rape culture in the US in addition to basic biology and mechanics of sex...", would bore students to tears and do nothing to address the core problems... bullying and harassment.
I agree that when it comes to anti-harassment policies in the digital age, schools have it tough. As you say, a lot of this is happening in spaces that are outside of the school's control and, sometimes, understanding about technology.
When it comes down to talking about sexual harassment, bullying, and how that interacts with someone's daily life, information about sex and culture are hugely important and relevant to young folks. Issues about consent, how you treat current and former partners, slut shaming, perceptions and stereotypes about gender with regards to sexuality, and about sexual agency are all a part of bullying via spreading of explicit pictures/video. These issues are tremendously important because many people do not have any basic information about any of these subjects and these issues shape the way they experience the world. The popularity of sites like Scarleteen show that there is a very real demand for this kind of information and sex education should include this information at a minimum.
I agree that what I mentioned isn't enough and that the situation is more complicated. We need to give people information and tools that empower them to control their lives and not let others control it, and issues of bullying and harassment are big issues in US culture today.
"Why aren't these criminal acts being prosecuted?"
1. That would mean throwing a large fraction of teenagers in prison.
2. This is happening among middle and upper class teenagers just as much as it happens among the working class. You are not going to see suburban angels going to prison, at least not if the sheriff wants to keep his job.
3. Prosecuting teenagers for this will solve nothing; they will just get better at hiding their tracks, talking their way out of it, or not getting caught. In the best case, rather than the videos being released you'll just see teenagers threatening to release the videos, and then you'll just have "he said she said situations.
Our heavily armed police force will not solve this problem; as with problems related to drugs, prosecutions will only make things worse.
Because ALL of the people in these videos are normally underage.
Who exactly do you propose we prosecute? And for what? This is a hard problem with no easy solutions. Principals all across the nation have been struggling with it, its just not as simple as people like to make it out to be.
Going after the person distributing the video seems obvious - distributing child porn taken without (one of) the subjects' consent is not a good thing.
You're misunderstanding how this normally develops.
I'll give you an example. Let's take the common version. Don't worry, I'll make it short:
Two 15 year old girls hang out one weekend and decide to take sexy pictures of each other. They share the photos with a few other trusted girl friends over time. Everything's ok, so far. Two months later, the girls are now "enemies". Or some girl in that small peer group, (clique), falls out with some other girl, you get the idea. One of them forwards pictures to a larger social group for the purpose of demeaning the girl or maybe demeaning multiple girls. BAM. Disaster. Photos are being forwarded everywhere. Parents are calling. Fights are breaking out in the halls, because maybe someone's brother is a hot-head. etc.
Now... who exactly do you prosecute for "distributing child pornography". The girl who was victimized by the bullying right? She was the one who INITIALLY forwarded the images. Do you see the problem school administrators face?
You are right; as the school administrator I am not going to wade into that he said/she said mess.
But I would call the DA and tell them there is a child porn "ring" in the school. Have them come in, subpoena phone records, and have a police detective read their rights and interview everyone involved. You probably only have to do that every 3 or 4 years to keep a lid on it.
So instead of one teenager who is embarrassed and emotionally disturbed, you'll have dozens who will go through life as registered sex offenders, constantly harassed by idiots who think they are child molesters, cut off from certain jobs, barred from living in certain neighborhoods, marked with the scarlet letter for something stupid they did when they were kids.
Did the police help solve our drug problems? No, in fact, they made society worse than it had been when drugs were legal; now we have teams of soldiers serving search and arrest warrants, all in the name of prosecuting drug offenses. Do you really want to bring that sort of chaos and mayhem into our nation's middle and high schools? Schools already have many of the characteristics of prisons; let's not make that any worse.
You can take a photo of anyone and distribute it as long as it's not libelous or commercial. Even if it's porn-y, if everyone involved is underage then it's going to be tricky to prosecute.
"I would prosecute the people who posses and distribute the child pornography"
In other words, you'll prosecute half the kids at the school. Just who do you think possesses these videos once they are released? Who do you think is distributing them?
I believe this varies by state and by age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_Ameri...). As I understand it, here in New York, two consenting but unmarried 16-year-olds would technically be engaging in mutual statutory rape, but two 15-year-olds could not be charged with the same crime.
The 16-year-old thing seems like a really strange provision. My guess would be that nobody in the state legislature wants to be the guy that brought up that bill about 16 year olds having sex.
Teenage boys boast about their sexual exploits (with photos, on the internet, because it's 2012). Teenage girls are incredibly cruel to one another.
Media reports it because it fits an existing narrative about "technology and culture."
Back when I was in high school, it didn't take pictures on the internet to ruin a girl's reputation. All it took was some boasting followed by a lot of gossip. It sounds like the "technology" aspect of this is that the standards of evidence have gone up for a boy to defend his boast.
Teenage boys boast about their sexual exploits (with photos, on the internet, because it's 2012). Teenage girls are incredibly cruel to one another.
Exactly; and this is not news, it's been going on for as long as there have been people.
The article doesn't even talk about the real lesson here: be careful who you trust. If you can't trust someone not to secretly record you having sex and then posting the video on Facebook, then you shouldn't be having sex with them. The lesson has always been the same, and there have always been people who don't learn it until it's too late.
Edit: I should make clear that I am not trying to exonerate the teenage boys; quite the contrary. To allow someone to make an explicit video of you without your knowledge and post it on Facebook is naive; but to make and post the video is malicious and cruel. The girls need to be reminded of the lesson; but the boys need to be shamed and punished.
> The article doesn't even talk about the real lesson here: be careful who you trust. If you can't trust someone not to secretly record you having sex and then posting the video on Facebook, then you shouldn't be having sex with them. The lesson has always been the same, and there have always been people who don't learn it until it's too late.
This is nice in theory, but no one really knows who to trust - adults and teenagers alike. Additionally, girls are often guilt-tripped into sending these types of photos lest they want to be told they don't really "care" about the person. I've been hit with that one a few times, even by guys that were otherwise very respectful. There's also the "come on, everyone does it" pitch, which is true, but doesn't mean anything when push comes to shove.
Girls (and boys) are often manipulated into acting foolishly. To generalize the above lesson, be careful how you allow your behavior to be influenced. Be careful how much power you give others over you.
(Note that this doesn't absolve others of wrongdoing -- it's just an observation of a way people can protect themselves from victimization.)
I've seen this argument before, and I don't buy it. First of all, you're mis-stating the rule: the rule is not "don't have sex", it's "don't have sex until you know enough about the other person's character to be reasonably sure you can trust them with something that intimate". Second, if people are that bad at assessing risk, that's all the more reason to err on the side of safety. But most importantly, choices have consequences, including the choice to have sex with someone who isn't worth that kind of trust; you can say it's not practical to avoid that (I don't agree, but that's another argument), but saying that doesn't change the consequences of the choice. If you trust someone who doesn't deserve it, you're going to get hurt: that's a fact of life. No amount of social engineering is going to "fix" this fact of life.
> The article doesn't even talk about the real lesson here: be careful who you trust. If you can't trust someone not to secretly record you having sex and then posting the video on Facebook, then you shouldn't be having sex with them. The lesson has always been the same, and there have always been people who don't learn it until it's too late.
The issue here is that trust is impossible to judge in this context. Sexual violence and intimidation is has deep cultural roots in the US, changing that culture is key to reducing incidents of that violence and bullying. Most sexual assault is committed by someone the victim already knew and 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, so trust is not enough.
The issue here is that trust is impossible to judge in this context.
No, it isn't. It may be difficult, but it isn't impossible. And it would be easier if people were taught that trust is something important that should not be given lightly. It would also help, as has been commented already in this thread, if the people who abuse trust were publicly shamed, instead of the people whose trust they abuse.
Photos on the internet tend to have a long life. I think it is the permanence of these photos and videos that make it worse. In the old days you could just go to college and leave your high school life behind. Now Google is forever.
This is the problem I think; you simply don't want your new employer to find pics of you passed out naked or worse. One of my friends from highschool was very promiscuis then; she slept with just about everyone and was always drunk / naked at parties. She had sex in public places. She would've been on the internet these days in pics/vids. Now she is a very highly paid manager and has a family; I don't think that would work that way if her boss found pics and videos of her smeared all over the web, not to mention her boy friend whom she met years after this when she cleaned up her act. Sure everyone knew who she was and what she did, but taking picture? You needed some kind of big machine for that and, worse, you needed to find some photographer outlet to develop it who did NOT know her, her parents, you, your parents. That was not that simple in my town. And polaroid? We never heard of that until much later; I never saw one unless it was in US tv shows.
"if there are any photos on the internet that will go away it's these, if for no other reason, because they're illegal."
I doubt it; the existence of an FBI database of known child abuse photos suggests that long after these images are identified, they continue to be shared online. Given how many amateur porn websites there are, and how older teenagers can easily pass for adults (thus reducing the likelihood that whatever moderators such websites have will reject the photos), it is almost certain that such photos will continue to be available online long after the girls/boys are adults and have forgotten the whole episode.
I think this argument is a red herring, though. The problem as I see it is not what happens when the photos are out there, the problem is that our notion of sex ed still comes out of the 1950s. We teach children about sex when they are old enough that there is a non-trivial probability they already started having sex. We limit sex ed to information about STIs and a reminder to use a condom (but in New York City, we were not actually shown how to apply one).
We need to update our approach to sex ed to reflect the realities of this century. First of all, children should start receiving some amount of sex ed long before they start having sex; clearly it will need to be explained in a way that is age-appropriate, but we cannot continue to put it off. Second, we must include a discussion about modern technology as it relates to sex -- that includes cameras, computers, and the Internet; if we know that teenagers are doing this, we need to explain to them how to be responsible (in the same way that we say, "use a condom because some STIs last forever," we should be saying, "don't let photos or videos be taken, because they last on the Internet forever"). We need to be frank with kids about these issues, or else they are just going to run wild and "learn" from their friends (who will almost always give them bad advice, betray them, or otherwise "do it wrong").
Yes, technology changes things. That is not a surprise. That is not shocking. If we fail to adapt to those changes, we'll just wind up in the same position as the RIAA and MPAA: crying, whining, and pushing for destructive laws.
True, they may not disappear completely, but they definitely get filtered out over time. And imagine you're 25 years old and someone wants to bring up old, explicit photos of you at age 15...they would immediately open themselves up to some very serious criminal charges. So I would agree that these are likely to more or less fade away into the recesses of the internet.
This is true, it's the modern form of these old behaviors. But that doesn't mean that their amplification effect isn't worse.
Now videos and photos are actually seen by people, without your permission, by your friends, teachers, principals, parents, etc. It would seem to me to only increase the level of trauma. It's one thing to tell your parents that the kids at school said X, it's another to have your parents called and shown a photo or told a video exists.
My girlfriend and I were video tapped in high school, this was around 2003 I want to say, so luckily it wasn't super easily broadcast, but still made the rounds in her high school. Thankfully the acts committed weren't completely revelatory for either of us, but it definitely hurt her greatly. I can only imagine what would have happened had the video shown more, or the audience distribution wider.
What ended up happening was the video destroyed, the student reprimanded. In our case it was friends playing a prank too far, but in many others its done with malicious intent and broadcasted to the greatest number of people to enhance that harm.
I think his point is more that the phenomenon we're seeing here is something that's happened forever, and we've really never "solved". The cause is exactly the same, and the effects are similar in nature. They're just dramatically amplified now by technology.
Thank you, that was my point. I admit that I wasn't thinking about the potential for the photos to live forever but also feel that 1) in all probability they won't live forever, at least not on the public, searchable internet given that they're illegal 2) If the article's purpose was to highlight that aspect then it did a poor job.
My reaction to this article is that it comes across as a continuation of a lazy, facile media narrative about technology and culture and kids that began with Geraldo Rivera, BBSes and Dungeons and Dragons.
A thousand years ago, angry aggressive teenagers beat each other up with sticks. Today, they join gangs and shoot each other. But that doesn't mean the increased destructive power yielded technology doesn't make the problem more worrisome than it was before.
From the comments on npr: Where is the "and then the boys were arrested for illegal wiretapping and dissemination of child pornography" part of the story? "After their convictions, their friends didn't think it was so funny, and the boys didn't hold their heads up when they had to register as a sex offender" would stop this from happening quick.
Could you see some measures being enforced to minors?
Exactly, why is the principal of the school calling the girls mother? He should be cooperating with the DA in bringing a host of felonies against the boys; and then letting everyone know how a felony will affect their lives.
> Exactly, why is the principal of the school calling the girls mother?
Perhaps because the girl is going to be the target of a lot of cruel taunting at school from her peers, which could make her depressed or even suicidal. How is that not something the mother should be told about?
It sounds like the possession and distribution of child pornography took place on school grounds. I would call the boys parents after I called the police.
I was thinking the same thing ! why the hell would the principal have to make things all that much worse for the girl ? If I was the principal, id call the boys mother and punish him badly so he never ever dares to attempt this sort of thing again !
In a situation like a sex tape: marking them as sex offenders for a recording of themselves is a horrible idea. The worst kind of abuse of selective enforcement. Even if it's technically illegal. They should be punished but that is NOT the law to use.
> Could you see some measures being enforced to minors?
The US is the only country giving mandatory life sentences to minors. There are over 70,000 juveniles in detention.
Having someone sign a sex offenders registry, even if it's for a limited time, would be a powerful message from society that distributing nude photographs of minors is not acceptable.
Heard this on NPR last night on the commute home. The piece is a powerful and very coherent analogy relating modern "slut shaming" to the classic The Scarlet Letter.
It's heartbreaking to hear about kids making bad decisions in an effort to fit in, but it's even worse to think that these mistakes can follow them forever due to the nature of digital content.
I couldn't believe how cruel even the girls were to young women that were victimized. Some of them were quoted as saying it wasn't even the guys' fault, that we can't help it. That's so offensive to me on so many levels.
The piece is a powerful and very coherent analogy relating modern "slut shaming" to the classic The Scarlet Letter.
I'm not sure this comparison holds. AFAIK the girl in question in this case was not cheating on anyone; she simply made a bad choice of which boy to have sex with. Hester Prynne committed adultery (and with a minister to boot), and it was the adultery that got her the scarlet letter. Not at all the same thing.
Wow, I really want to ad hom here because you obviously didn't read the article or listen to the original (and excellent) WNYC Radio Rookie piece, but I'll resist.
This isn't about a girl or a case. It's about many girls (and boys) and how public "slut shaming" in the modern age affects their lives. Yes, Hester was forced to wear a scarlet "A" as her public shaming. But in today's world the scarlet letter is a digital record that follows you, potentially for the rest of your life because of a bad choice as a teenager.
Can you now understand Temitayo Fagbenle's allusion?
Ok, s/girl/girls/ and s/case/cases/ in my post. How does that change the point? AFAIK, all of the girls involved did not cheat on anyone. Hester Prynne did. My point is that the "scarlet letter" analogy is unfair to the girls, because it implies that they have done something worse than just make a bad choice of who to trust.
Facebook needs to get involved in policing this sort of thing. They're not a neutral medium here--they make a lot of money selling 13-18 year old eyeballs to advertisers, and given the unique nature of the demographic (below the age of majority) I think they bear a certain responsibility in how these kids abuse their service.
What exactly should facebook police? Morality? Ethics? What if some group of friends always ragged on each other and got tripped up in this policing?
I don't necessarily agree that Facebook should be the responsible party. That really should fall under society and parents/children. A company isn't going to be able to enforce politeness or dissuade bullies from bullying. This is another aspect of the human condition. And if it is one we as a society of humans want to change, we need to do that. Facebook isn't the responsible party here in my humble opinion.
> "What exactly should facebook police? Morality? Ethics?"
You're suggesting a slippery slope where there is none. The authenticity of bullying is easy to verify because there is at least one party able to testify to its undesiredness. We're not talking about policing morality, we're talking about behavior that, in the vast majority of cases, is quite unambiguous.
> "That really should fall under society and parents/children"
There's a false dichotomy here. While we can expect and hope that people are self-policing of their children and peers, there is room for additional governance. Why can't we have both? After all, if you ran a convenience store and noticed that bullies were beating up kids outside and using their lunch money to buy goods at your business, why wouldn't it fall upon you, where it occurs, to stop the behavior?
Nobody says Facebook has to become the grand authority on cyberbullying, but it is within their capability - and IMO there is at least a slight tinge of moral responsibility - to put a substantial dent in the problem.
> The authenticity of bullying is easy to verify because there is at least one party able to testify to its undesiredness.
And that one party ought to be able to unilaterally force me to take down content?
I understand that this is ok if I'm making a facebook page mocking a 13 year old girl, but what if I'm making a site that parodies a company, or a CEO, or a politician, or Justin Bieber?
Despite his fame, Bieber is a minor who probably suffers from many of the same problems we all did at his age. If he is being bullied to the point where he is compelled to challenge it on Facebook, I have no problem curbing it.
I do not believe our basic treatment of children should change just because they're famous. Fame is, after all, not a cure for bullying.
Sorry if that came off as slippery slopish, not the intention exactly.
My worry with holding Facebook responsible or culpable for the actions of its users in this specific regard is that we're creating and or granting a degree of control over interation to Facebook. I don't understand why now, with Facebook, we decide this needs action. The same stuff went on before computers, all Facebook is doing is making this visible to a wider population.
I'm not trying to say Facebook should do nothing. By all means they should just as that convenience store owner report the matter to the proper authorities. Our justice systems are a much better way to punish offenders than a for profit corporation. They may not be perfect but I do not trust Facebook or any corporation to deal with this in a decent way.
The underlying problem here however is society and its views on sex for women. That and how men act and treat women in general. Both of those should be at the top of our list to fix and equalize.
> "By all means they should just as that convenience store owner report the matter to the proper authorities."
Who are the proper authorities? The legal/justice system is not meant to be a first-line against all disputes and problems. There's a reason that if your neighbor puts up an offensive sign on his lawn, you try to resolve it yourself before involving the city.
> "They may not be perfect but I do not trust Facebook or any corporation to deal with this in a decent way."
As someone who grew up under (probably not as bad as most others) bullying: hogwash. Facebook is a valid party to deal with this behavior.
Who would deal with this? The police don't give a shit. School administrators have had decades of teen suicides and school shootings to deal with it, but all they have done is further marginalize the bullied, giving them less recourse than they ever had before.
The default "proper authorities" have abdicated their responsibility and proven more than amply that they are either too incompetent or too apathetic to do anything about it. Sadly, the onus does fall upon private parties, and Facebook is one of them.
I for one resist the notion that we should bureaucratize very basic (and very old) human behavior. Just as the shop owner would just go outside and break up the bullies, so should Facebook break up this behavior, referring to the police only in exceptional cases.
> "The underlying problem here however is society and its views on sex for women."
I don't think this is it. Children, both male and female, are bullied harshly for a myriad of reasons, sex being only a large one of many. The core issue is bullying, not bullying re: sex.
I think as a general rule, it lies with users of the service to take responsibility for ethical behavior. However, by social consensus, teenagers are incapable of taking full responsibility for their actions. I think an exception exists, thus, when a service provider intentionally avails itself of servicing a demographic that is incapable of assuming all the responsibilities that might be expected of normal adults.
Facebook is a platform. It doesn't have to neccesarily police things, it can open up tools to allow parents to police their kids. What about a way of marking/removing pictures somebody else tags of you? Something that allows parents to help with this stuff spreading maliciously.
> What exactly should facebook police? Morality? Ethics?
Facebook have banned images of breastfeeding mothers. Facebook have shown they are happy to police their morality and ethics. Asking them to have some kind of anti-bullying clause, and report button, (which, I think, they have) isn't too much.
You're right the the responsibility is not Facebook's. But they could do a bit more to help.
There is a lot of stuff going on at Facebook to deal with this sort of thing [1]. They definitely don't have a passive approach to bullying, but you have to realize that the scale of use makes it a difficult problem to approach.
"Facebook needs to get involved in policing this sort of thing"
I am guessing you were an angel when you were in school. Well, I was not an angel, so I can tell you what effect Facebook policing this would have: it would move somewhere else, where it will not be policed. Even if every website on the Internet were policing this, there are enough hackers and geeks at every high school that you would see teenagers setting up their own bulletin boards, email systems, etc. -- and don't think for a moment that a geeky kid would turn down the popularity points they would gain by running such a thing. If you took the Internet and the cell phones away, then teenagers would pass thumb drives around.
Basically, you would need to erase computers entirely to prevent this from happening. Good luck with that one.
I was an angel in school, but I'm not naive. Sure Facebook cracking down on this sort of thing won't eliminate it entirely. But the whole point of shaming someone on Facebook versus passing it around in a locker room is the visibility. But it's that same visibility that also makes it a convenient point of policing. Policing might push that stuff off Facebook, but those alternate venues are going to reach fewer eyeballs (causing less reputation harm), and be more ephemeral.
Moreover, I'd argue that Facebook has a responsibility, as a company that makes a ton of money off these teenagers, that they don't when those teenagers share the same pictures via sneakernet.
There are plenty of high-visibility websites on the Internet; it would not take long for the students to find one that is equally visible and not policed. Kids manage to smoke pot in school, they manage to cheat on exams, they manage to leave before they are supposed to -- they will find somewhere that is not policed on the Internet, or else they will set up such a thing for themselves. I would not be surprised if some high school students used steganography to share explicit photos without the moderators catching them (consider the way teenagers use proxy servers and Tor to evade school firewalls).
"Moreover, I'd argue that Facebook has a responsibility, as a company that makes a ton of money off these teenagers, that they don't when those teenagers share the same pictures via sneakernet."
Slippery slope: ISPs also make money off teenagers, possibly even more than Facebook (cell services certainly make more than Facebook -- teenagers basically demand SMS and 3G/4G from their parents these days, which has turned enormous profits for the telecom industry). Do you think it is acceptable for ISPs to be policing this sort of thing too? Facebook is a communications service; they should not be in the business of filtering the communications of their users, any more than Comcast or T-Mobile.
Really, there is a bigger picture here. Yes, bullying is a problem, but if the communications systems that teenagers use were to be filtered as a matter of course, that would just train teenagers to believe that they live in a world where communications are always being watched. Is that really what we want the next generation to grow up thinking? Do we really want the next generation of leaders to believe that one of the things people in authority are supposed do is to monitor the communications of those they govern? Do we want to create adults who shrug at the warrantless wiretapping program?
> There are plenty of high-visibility websites on the Internet; it would not take long for the students to find one that is equally visible and not policed. Kids manage to smoke pot in school, they manage to cheat on exams, they manage to leave before they are supposed to -- they will find somewhere that is not policed on the Internet, or else they will set up such a thing for themselves. I would not be surprised if some high school students used steganography to share explicit photos without the moderators catching them (consider the way teenagers use proxy servers and Tor to evade school firewalls).
If your rush to reductionism makes you fail to perceive the difference between Tor and Facebook, I'm not sure what I can do to help you. There are lots of ways to share pictures, and lots of high profile websites, but only a tiny handful, and possibly just one, where you can easily reach everyone in town with a single post.
> Slippery slope: ISPs also make money off teenagers, possibly even more than Facebook (cell services certainly make more than Facebook -- teenagers basically demand SMS and 3G/4G from their parents these days, which has turned enormous profits for the telecom industry). Do you think it is acceptable for ISPs to be policing this sort of thing too? Facebook is a communications service; they should not be in the business of filtering the communications of their users, any more than Comcast or T-Mobile.
I strongly disagree. Comcast and T-mobile are dumb pipes. Facebook is a social networking company that takes advantage of teenage social networks to serve advertisements specifically to teenagers. Comcast sells bandwidth to anyone with the money to pay. Facebook profiles and targets and intentionally sells 13-18 year old eyeballs to advertisers.
> Do we really want the next generation of leaders to believe that one of the things people in authority are supposed do is to monitor the communications of those they govern?
Facebook already monitors your communications. What we're debating here is what how they use the information.
Anyone who heard the audio of this piece found out that the boy interviewed toward the end is a special kind of bad. Technology amplifies but this kid definitely has a problem.
For anyone who doesn't have the time to listen - the author interviews a boy in her school who had emailed a half-naked picture of his girlfriend to his friends, and the photo had then spread around the entire school. The author asks the boy "Did she transfer out of the school after this?" and he responds "No, she stayed and continued to be the same smut/smitty/skipscapscalleywag/whore she was". The author then asks "Did you intend it to be malicious?" and he responds with no hint of remorse "I guess I thought it would be cool or something".
This is an extremely difficult problem, and it goes a lot deeper than "prosecute teh boys!!".
They're able to shame sluts because _we_ shame sluts, as a culture. The roots of it are way social and way deep.
The actual thing that's happening, though, is frightening and damned-near unfightable.
It's classic and shitty adolescent behavior through a nation-wide megaphone.
We have to prevent kids from using hard drugs because it's literally not possible for them to adequately weigh the trade-offs and make an informed decision.
I'd say that posing in a picture smiling next to a penis (like a girl did in this story) is a similar problem. They are not equipped to make that decision.
As a parent of a daughter, it's terrifying to think that this decision might ever be one that's hers to make. I'd like to think she'd never do it, but it's not even a decision that will be made like you or I would make it.
Children don't think like adults. That's why we protect them. Apples go in and stupid square oranges come out. As much as possible, they should avoid the position, and as much as possible, we should avoid the consequences having to follow them for a lifetime.
I agree with you about a culture of slut shaming in the US, but I don't agree with the idea of protecting young folks for their own sexuality. The issue here isn't that young people have or enjoy sex, but rather about a culture that promotes harassment against women for being sexual and uses that as a way to keep those women invisible.
consciously posing in a photo next to a penis for posterity (which is, after all, what a photo is) has consequences that extend _far_ beyond your sexuality. This isn't about getting sheepish about teen sex, it's about long-term destructive decisions that aren't even necessary for pleasure.
"The author asks the boy "Did she transfer out of the school after this?" and he responds "No, she stayed and continued to be the same smut/smitty/skipscapscalleywag/whore she was". The author then asks "Did you intend it to be malicious?" and he responds with no hint of remorse "I guess I thought it would be cool or something".
From the comments on npr: Where is the "and then the boys were arrested for illegal wiretapping and dissemination of child pornography" part of the story? "After their convictions, their friends didn't think it was so funny, and the boys didn't hold their heads up when they had to register as a sex offender" would stop this from happening quick.
To sum that up : What will be the consequences for the guy who leaked the video? None. So why exactly do you expect a different behaviour ??
Make sure the consequence will be harsh and horrible and maybe the video won't be leaked but protected and well guarded, ie incentivize
TDLR: if you want to fix a problem, expose people to the consequences of their acts.
Just try to picture what the situation would be without it. And the sentences doesn't seem quite harsh.
OTOH, look at what Singapore did - it seems to have fixed their problem. The "mixed message" in the west about not prosecuting casual users in some place is certainly also not helping.
(and I'm saying that as someone who believe there is no point in restricting what someone may or may not inject in its own body, but if one was seriously against drugs, the current situation would seem like a feeble response to a real threat)
"Just try to picture what the situation would be without it"
It is not hard to picture, because drug prohibition began a century ago in the USA. Back when drugs were legal here, things like the Industrial Revolution happened. Society was not some kind of pit of despair when drugs were legal; we had problems, sure, but we still have problems today and the drug war has not solved any of the problems we had previously (but it did introduce many of the current ones).
"the sentences doesn't seem quite harsh"
Jail time is a harsh sentence. America is so far to the right these days that we tend to think that putting someone in prison for "only" five years is not harsh.
It is not just about the sentencing. Right now, we have tens of thousands of paramilitary raids on civilian homes each year; property is damaged, dogs are shot, and people are killed. These raids are not reserved for the most dangerous criminals; they are routinely used to serve search and arrest warrants against people who are either unarmed or only lightly armed. Many thousands of innocent bystanders have been killed by the paramilitary teams that carry out these raids, as have many thousands of innocent people whose homes were incorrectly targeted.
Worse still, the very paramilitary forces that carry out these raids are allowed to keep the proceeds from the sales of property seized in the course of their duties for their own department budget. Some police forces have become "self funded" as a result. It is a case-study in slippery slopes.
This has not helped to solve our drug problems. Not only are people still using drugs, but the drugs they are using are causing unnecessary harm. Methamphetamine is not necessarily a destructive drug; it actually has medical uses (as a treatment for narcolepsy, ADHD, and for appetite control), and is sold by the pharmaceutical industry under the name Desoxyn. Yet people who want to use this drug recreationally cannot buy it legally (it is a felony to transfer it to someone who lacks a prescription and a felony to prescribe it unnecessarily) and wind up buying it from black-market sources, receiving a product that was produced under poorly controlled circumstances and which is frequently adulterated with the byproducts and waste from the production process (these cause far more harm than the drug itself; it is these adulterants that give methamphetamine abusers their "sickly" look). Likewise with opiates: heroine is often "cut" in ways that are poorly controlled, and on at least one occasion a black-market opiate dealer sold MPTP, a drug that permanently induces Parkinson's disease, after failing to properly manufacture the opiate MPPP.
So if someone were not on some moral crusade and actually wanted to address the problems society has with drugs -- someone like me -- they would support a complete repeal of the war on drugs and an entirely different approach. We manage to produce and distribute alcohol in a regulated manner. We don't need to throw people in prison, we just need to ensure that people don't kill themselves or anyone else and that if a person needs help, they can get it.
Some teenagers these days are complete idiots, especially boys, in how they treat their fellow female colleagues/partners.
They think they look cool by hurting the girl's reputation and her feelings in this horrible way, but in fact they bring to light their real character/intentions and this should give a BIG WARNING to anyone who interacts with such fools to depart from them and distrust them.
On the same par, another tragedy in the story is that there are other retarded cretins like this that support such disrespectful acts, which makes me really angry and sad about the character of some of the young people of today's society.
There's still often a culture where guys can sleep around, brag it out and the female party gets the stick for it, it's just become accelerated by technology and the fact it's always going to be there, pretty much as long as its ever referenced anywhere.
There's no technology solution that's easy, and no solution in tackling social motivations either. It's one of those seemingly intractable problems.
This has been going on for as long as high school has existed. Hell even way before that. The only difference is social media has amplified it. When I was in highschool it wasn't naked pictures being posted or anything like that, but more just gossip by a guy saying he had sex with some girl or a girl saying a dude has a small dick. etc. People are shitty to one another. Social media helps their shitiness get broadcast in new and exciting ways.
Racist comments, comments about skin, color, weight as well as nationality amounts to bullying and these bullies are
nothing but psychos who need medical help. At home, I use a free app called Qustodio to monitor who my girl talks to on facebook as the app allows me to watch the profile pictures of accounts she interacts with. My way of ensuring that she stays safe. Just Google for it.
Its the production of pornography by a minor, which is probably illegal. Its using Facebook against its terms of use which should result in a ban. Plus anybody liking or commenting on something which is banned should also receive a temporary ban from Facebook.
What if that someone is the underage child themselves? There are several instances of children being arrested and charged with CP for sending their own pictures to each other.
IMO, the proper solution is to involve both sets of parents.
Is this just a united statues problem, or in other countries of the world is it not ok for women to have sex? I want to blame religion, but I doubt that's the entire reason ...
hmm, I suppose the people that think I have no value to add to this discussion are focusing on that jab at religion.
But to clarify, I'm not looking for "the answer" and my question still stands unanswered: what is the socially accepted view of women's sexuality in other cultures?
My only experience is with the US where there is a huge demarcation, generally based on the gender of the belief holder, and generally advertisements etc are weighted towards a masculine point of view for women's role.
Perhaps it would help to explain I've never taken any "gender studies" classes or similar, so this is a question of mere curiosity.
I think one issue is that if in these situations, the guy is high-fived, and the girl is shamed. Why can't they both be high-fived? Sex-negative culture SUCKS.
At school, she was hoping that it wouldn't be too big of a deal, but even the principal knew about the video. He brought her to his office and called her mom.
So the principal was involved in the slut shaming? Some activist group needs to sue this principal to show the world that this isn't the correct approach to handle this type of situation. Her mother should not have been brought in.
The correct thing to do is to arrest the boy for creating and distributing child pornography and leaving the girl hell alone.
"I couldn't even look at my mother because I felt hurt and I also felt that I disrespected her," she says. "I didn't want kids in the school to look at my mother and be like, 'Wow, she raised nothing.' "
A big amplifying factor in these examples seems to be a society and an upbringing that cannot to deal with sexuality in a pragmatic manner, and instead prefers a "everybody's doing it, but nobody is talking about it publicly" approach.
If someone posts intimate pictures or videos of somebody else without their knowledge, it should be the poster that is shamed and that people disrespect for it -- after all he has violated an expectation of privacy and intimacy. Instead it is the victim that is made to feel bad for "being promiscuous".