Chat at work this morning about sexting.. me HOD brought it up over coffee cos he had spotted a piece in the Independent.. this..http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...g-7676015.html
It goes on.. we all know it goes on and when I was a kid had we had phones like nowadays it is quite possible I would have done just the same.. but I was never quite so daft and have never been one for allowing naughty pics to be taken.. u just never know where they will end up.
But we have had a few instances of parents getting hot under the collar about sexting... and a couple of times phones have been confiscated with very revealing pics on them of young girls in various states of undress and/or suggestive poses, some remarkably young... one ( I am told) taken in one of the art classes... big hoohah that caused.. we may not be able to open up a phone and quite rightly too but sometimes kids are stupid enough to stand their ground and argue with sext still on screen.. and not bright or quick enough to switch it off before someone pops up behind them and snatch it...but really while we know it happens we don't see a great deal of it.. I have never seen the worst of it and do not care to... but what we are sure of is that it is but the tip of the iceberg. It is one thing an adult doing it but kids as young as 13 and 14 (and maybe even younger) is beyond the pale.. God knows I am no prude, but I know just how such silliness can blight a child's life.. not only pics but video sexting goes on and some of that is really raunchy... and not just raunchy.. pretty explicit and lads cant say they've not done the deed when they are filmed on someone's phone doing it!!! At my daughter's school one girl was hoiked out of school by her parents because they found a vid of her giving oral to one of the older boys.. she was 13...
When we are young we think we know better.. we just don't think of consequences too often... modern media make it instant, graphic and permanent..once on the web it is on the web.. it is almost impossible to get it off.. as my best friend found out some years back.. and who knows when something a child did without thinking or as a result of peer pressure, or just the pressure of first love will in later life get up and bite them hard! Many people are very hard on the indiscretions of youth but most let it pass with time and live with it, and even forgive as long as it doesn't keep rearing its ugly head to (from their point of view) humiliate them.. sexting potentially stores up a lifetime of humiliation and difficulty for those in any sext and all those around them... mostly for those who were so daft when they were so young and thoughtless..
So it is education we need, but I am not sure that will do the trick.. it will help keep it down but it will never eliminate it completely...it is something at home we bang on about to our own kids.. and schools should certainly do more to make our children more aware that as with child and teen pregnancy, sexting is something that can follow them round until the day they die... it also has the potential to lead to tragedy.. yet even allowing for the fact that I and people like me explain in the greatest of detail the dangers and conseuquences, and kids know them and accept them..it still goes on and is still on the increase... what we see is only a miniscule part of the reality.. it is a problem to which there is no easy answer... discipline, education and use of the law are answers but they aren't the whole answer.. tbh I am not absolutely sure there is any answer... short of closing down the web, and making phones with cams illegal and locking the young up until they reach maturity... but no doubt they would find a way around that.. and such measures are far too draconian in any liberal society
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