Sexting Paranoia Hits Miami
The latest episode in the hysteria over teen "sexting" takes place in Florida. The Miami-Dade school board says that it wants to be a "leader" in the fight against "sexting, " even though there haven't yet been any specific problems with the practice in the schools. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said that "The dangers that lie, virtually, in the fingertips of anyone's cell phone or computer need to be recognized. These are brand new digital dangers."
Carvalho did not specify what the "digital dangers" are, but in order to combat them, the Board adopted a plan that would write a policy against sexting into the Student Code of Conduct and begin a campaign to tell students about the dangers—whatever they are.
Again, for those of you who are raising teenagers: if the most worrying thing that your teen is doing is sending lewd messages or nekkid pictures over their cell phone, you've done a damn good job. In the CarnalNation staff's younger days, American moral guardians flipped out because they thought heavy metal lyrics would drive us all to suicide or that we were going to make drunk driving into a national sport. The former at least provided us with the immortal image of Tipper Gore reading the words "Bend up and smell my anal vapors" into the congressional record, and from the latter we got the Citizen Kane of teen scare movies, Red Asphalt. Anti-sexting campaigns have just given us kids who will be designated as sex offenders for decades to come.
Not only is sexting not fatal, but it turns out that not that many kids are doing it. If the schools in Miami-Dade County want to seek out leadership on something, maybe it should be on something that's actually meaningful—like education.
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Comments
alarmist?
I am mother of 4 teens, the 'townie" mom of at least 20, whose computer has dozens of myspace pages left open through the month, who works in a high school and junior high and whose kids are in 2 different rock bands. I have encountered through this 1) a couple that thought withdrawl would be good birthcontrol 2) confirming my suspicions about an underradar gay 3) 2 descriptions about wreckless driving that curled my very straight hair 4) various parties underage drinking 5) drug use references 6) usual teen angst 7) regular porn which I am against and 8) absolutely no teen sexting of a visual variety. I don't think this could be that widespread a phenomenon yet. I bet it's really strong in pockets. I don't want to see them criminalizing self sent pictures but it would be good to educate EVERYBODY about the inherent social consequences of disseminating information that once sent out can never be called back. People change and what was fun and appropriate when a young, goodlooking student can turn around and bite you in the ass if/when you want to settle down to a nice 9-5 sort of existence 5-10 years later.