Gah! We still hate the term “sexting.” Anyway, a U.S. judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania prosecutor can’t charge three teen girls with child porn for sending nude photos of themselves with their cell phones. Because that would be just lame. On a side note, this stat gave us pause: 20% of all teens have sent sexually suggestive nude photos of themselves with their cell phones or online. WHOA. *jaw drop* source
It started with Facebook High school student Anthony Stancl of New Berlin, Wisc. (outside of Milwaukee) was arrested recently for a disturbing scheme where he pretended to be a girl on Facebook. Know how they tell you to watch out for sexual predators on MySpace and Facebook? Well, it’s kinda like that, but worse. “She” would allegedly talk to the boys in his class and convince them to send the “girl” naked photos of themselves …
It ended with blackmail … which “she” would then use to blackmail the students in question into giving him (not “her”) sexual favors. “She” would threaten to distribute the photos to friends or put them online. He apparently did this a number of times between February 2007 and November of last year, and faces up to 300 years in prison. And now we need to take a shower, because we feel very dirty for writing about this. source
Sexting leads to child porn charges. Sexting, as you might guess, is people taking naked photos of themselves on their cell phones and sharing them with their friends. It’s led to charges in Pennsylvania for both the three teenage girls charged with sending the photos and the, er, um, three lucky teenage boys who got the photos. Note to press: Please stop inventing terms. :( source