How did texting go straight to sexting?

I’ll never forget the first time I encountered the word sexting and truly learned what this word meant from my 6^th grade best friend at the time. She had to explain to my other friends and myself that her cellphone had been taken away by her parents due to the fact that they had been checking her text messages and found that she was sexting her boyfriend. I quickly asked her what this term meant, as it was not a prevalent term used within my innocent life, and she explained that it was a term to describe when you send nudes to another individual. Although Angela’s parents thought that something was wrong with Angela for finding these pictures and wanted to send her to a private school, what Angela and her parents did not know is that in the nationally representative study of sexting that just was released, it was found that within the United States 19% of adolescents between the ages of 13-19 years old admit to having sent a nude or semi nude pictures to someone else.

When watching CBS news, a couple of weeks ago, an article immediately captured my attention as the article was labeled “Sexting is the new flirting, as teens turn to secretive apps.” As I chuckled and remembered my 6^th grade memory of Angela, I decided to read on and discover what this article truly had to say.  It was both shocking and alarming to watch these interviews of 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders, as they touched upon how prevalent sexting has become in their worlds that they live in and how they search for new applications that allow them to hide these pictures from their parents. The news clip is attached below:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sexting-modern-day-america-photo-vault-apps/

This clip focuses on the overall idea that adolescents are more technological savvy then their parents and with no longer having the consequences or fear of their parents finding their pictures, these adolescents aren’t afraid to send scandalous pictures that they wouldn’t have sent before, this is a problem. This clip also shares the scary idea that these vaults that adolescents use to hide their pictures are not protected and could be leaked to the greater public. So although, I agree that sexting is a way for adolescents to grow up and consider themselves “independent actors” as Julia R. Lippman and Scott W. Campbell mention in their article “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t…If you’re a girl: Relational and normative contexts of adolescents sexting in the United States” I do see this normative as a problem. As touched upon in the clip, adolescents are going through a stage in their lives when they don’t understand the harm that these sexting decisions can put them in and unlike Angela who was blessed to have her parents catch her mistake at an early stage, these adolescents will not have a parent to stop them. Instead, they will be stopped when their pictures are released through these applications and naked pictures are plastered all over the school walls and ruin their lives.

This is a large problem in society as Julia R. Lippman and Scott W. Campbell mention in their article that a wide group of adolescents strongly believe that sexting is not a big deal and everyone is participating in it. I think that CBS did a great job with showing parents of ways that they can help avoid these situations with their adolescents through receiving notifications on their phones of when their kids download apps and to pay attention to this terrible sexting epidemic.

                                        References

• Lippman, J. R. & Campbell. S. W. (2014) Damned if you do, damned if you don’t...if you’re a girl: Relational and normative contexts of adolescent sexting in the United States. Journal of Children and Media, 8:4, 371-386, doi: 10.1080/17482798.2014.923009