Picture Show
Teens Circulate Explicit Photos
By Daniel Muniz

In the era of “Girls Gone Wild” it is has become fairly commonplace for young adult women to plaster half naked or completely naked pictures of themselves on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. And it doesn’t take long for these explicit images to find their way to adult photo sharing sites. In fact, plenty of young women revel at their cyberspace notoriety and they don’t mind increasing their exposure (figuratively as well as literally) even more.

For a popular culture heavily influenced by the likes of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsey Lohan, maybe it is of no surprise that millions of ordinary women enjoy taking their clothes off and having their pictures taken or flashing their private parts for a destination on the Internet. Digital cameras are cheap and plentiful and we now live in an information age that makes widespread transmission of these images a snap.

But in all truthfulness, people are going to do whatever they want to do because we live in a free society. However, a dilemma arises when minors choose to imitate adults.

Teenage girls have already flooded lots of web sites with vividly graphic pictures of themselves only wearing their bra and panties although in some cases, they are wearing a lot less than that. And some minors also enjoy having their photograph taken or being videotaped while performing a sex act. Young girls simply want to be a part of a national craze that so many adult women are already partaking in. And since kids like to imitate their young adult counterparts, this behavior is simply a natural extension of that.

But what should the local community do if photos and video clips of naked minors begin circulating?

In Parkland High School of Allentown Pennsylvania, a sex video and photos of two underage girls hit the campus like wildfire. And since so many kids have cell phones with the capability of receiving digital images, students who were sent these lewd pictures simply forwarded a copy of them to everyone in their phonebook. As a result, it didn’t take long for quite a few students of that school to view them.

In addition to disseminating the photos and the video clip among the student body, the images quickly found their way to people and to web sites outside of the high school.

Law enforcement was notified and they made a futile attempt to stop the distribution of the explicit pictures.

The police asked all students to erase the files from their cell phone as well as any other copies that they may have stored elsewhere. In addition, local prosecutors gave parents a consent form to sign with a deadline for their children to completely remove whatever images they still had. And to demonstrate the severity of the situation, prosecutors explained that any student who refused to comply will be charged for possession of child pornography in a juvenile court.

But the harsh reality is that in a student body of about 3200 teenagers, it is really pointless to expect that all the photos were completely purged. Also, transmitting the pictures to outside destinations assured their indefinite survival in cyberspace. However, the authorities were expected to do their job and at least try.

Teachers did try to explain the potential harm that an incident like this could have caused. However, such adolescent behavior is what some kids voluntarily seek out for the thrill of it. In fact, events like this could become fairly common in the near future. Plenty of young adults have almost no inhibition of taking their clothes off for home videos and for snapshots so minors want to be able to do the same thing.

Of course one problem could be the kids who thought that such images would remain confidential among close friends and their significant other instead of being shared with the entire world. Unfortunately, the malicious release of digital pictures and video clips happens all the time in adult relationships so it is inevitable for it to occur with minors.

Also, there are teenagers who may have been unaware that their sex acts were being recorded, especially if they were intoxicated when it happened. Again, that happens in adult situations so that too is inevitable with minors particularly since digital cameras have become so cheap and miniaturized.

The local community has a natural inclination to not tolerate underage sexual images. This country already has enough problems with sex predators preying on minors and this kind of environment makes a bad situation even worse. Nevertheless, our free society and the information age that we live in makes enforcing this standard increasingly difficult as demonstrated by the incident at Parkland High School.

But with every social problem involving kids, the problem starts and ends with the parents.

Sadly, we live in a country where a lot of parents don’t care what their offspring are doing. And then there are the people who have been duped into thinking that the nanny state is going to solve all of their problems and relieve them of their parental responsibilities so they have abdicated that obligation.

Overall, people have little to no influence about what bad parents are doing (or not doing) but they do have a tremendous influence over their own children. For the good parents, their only recourse to prevent what happened at this high school is to establish rules and boundaries and become an authority that can be respected. Of course a child is going to do whatever he or she decides to do but at least the foundation has been laid for the ability to make good decisions and to exercise sound judgment. Unfortunately, too many kids have never had that kind of structure in their lives.

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