Today I read an interesting article about a Bill that Governor Rick Perry recently passed. The Bill that Rick Perry passed is regarding the consequences of teenage sexting. Now I am sure that most of you know what sexting is but for those of you who do not. Sexting is the act of sending explicit text and photo messages via cell phone, computers, and other mobile devices
I never thought the day would come when a Bill would be called for in order to keep teens from sending each other illicit photos, but it appears that in the era we are in this has now become necessary. What are the consequences if a teenager is caught sexting? Teenagers can be charged with a misdemeanor along with be sentenced to take classes that will help educate them on the danger and consequences of their behavior. If the recipient of the messages reports the illicit message within 48 hours to authorities the recipient will avoid prosecution.
I feel as if this Bill was something most certainly necessary as more teenagers have access to cell phones, computer and the internet. This Bill will help protect teenagers from making a mistake that they are unable to simply delete or erase. Teenagers need to realize the severity of them sending out these messages. I am completely for this Bill being enacted as teens need to be aware of what harm these images could cause them in the long run and for them to look past the initial excitement or possible peer pressure. The fact that if a teen is caught being involved in this illicit behavior will cause them to take educational classes makes me feel as if this law attempting to inform teens. The worry I see with this law is the severity of the misdemeanor, this goes permanently on a person’s criminal record which could affect people from getting a job or even getting enrolled in certain colleges.
https://www.oag.state.tx.us/agency/weeklyag/2011/0311sexting.pdf
While reading your blog and the link you listed I had a feeling of, 'teenagers are young and stupid.' I remember myself as a teenager and I don't remember such a dilemma about sexting that it is now. However, I wasn't surrounded by high school as a teenager. I never encountered an issue with sexting because I wanted to focus on school. I had ambitions that didn't warrant boy/girlfriends. I chose a life of school work by homeschooling myself. So I quickly did some light skimming about sexting as well as ask a few friends.
ReplyDeleteAt first I couldn't understand your dilemma with sexting because who does that? Why not just meet with your significant other and have fun then? I asked my best friend who is the same age as me but she went to public high school while I did homeschooling. Her opinion was that of yours, that teenagers didn't need to be sexting at such a young age. She said that it could, "encourage those actions and I think that's what's causing them to want to have sex at too young [an] age because that's them experimenting at age 10." I asked another friend who also agreed that under a certain age teenagers shouldn’t be sexting and if they did their parents should be able to consent that they are in healthy mind to do so or not.
So I started to consider that maybe teenagers nowadays don’t have the right mental states to be deciding that ‘child pornography’ is okay with them or not. I found an article that went over and was titled, “Consequences of Sexting,” this article helped me see what I couldn’t earlier. The article explains why sexting is considered child pornography and I wouldn’t have connected it that way since I didn’t see myself as a child back then. Most teenagers, I would assume, wouldn’t see sexting as child pornography but as a personal text to a significant other. However, the article I mentioned earlier includes teenager’s of the 2012 age and their opinions.
The percentages were that “three-quarters of teens under 18 think they are too young to be sending sexts, half think they are at least old enough to decide for themselves whether it is ok for them to do it or not... [w]hile nearly all teens think it’s dangerous to be sending sexts of themselves, just over half know there are legal consequences.” So in my thoughts this means that teenagers know there are dangerous actions that follow sexting and that they are able to recognize the possible risks and decide if it’s right to continue with their decision. Yet, the article titled, “Sexting: A Brief Guide for Educators and Parents,” tells a different story. In this article teenagers still sext and at increasing rates (see Sexting by Age graph within the Formal and Informal Responses section).
... Please continue the reading of this comment on my blog as only 4,096 characters are accepted in this HTML. Here is my blog; http://govdumster.blogspot.com/2012/05/teenagers-have-courting-rituals.html
Wow. I can’t believe that our government is passing laws about common sense. I see this as failure to parent correctly, an issue of horrible common sense, and a law that will be really hard to enforce.
ReplyDeleteParents should be teaching their kids about the consequences of decisions they make. If sexting is truly a problem large enough to warrant a law forbidding teens to do it, then the parents should be teaching their kids about all the possible negative repercussions of sending sexual content to someone. In my mind, lessons about proper cell phone usage should have come when the kid was given the responsibility of having the cell phone. The internet is full of suggestions to parents for what to teach and impress upon their offspring for almost all topics and this one is no exception. A quick search even shows a hit for sexting on the first page. http://bit.ly/K3c73D
Teaching a class of students in my area of expertise, I was often told that I can’t teach someone common sense. And that is not something specific to me; it’s just an area that can’t be taught with a lecture. It takes experience and practical application to develop. Ideally the process takes place in settings with minimal consequences but this isn’t always the case. With regards to teen sexting, they should be thinking, “I am about to send a text of myself naked to someone. After it leaves my phone I will no longer have the ability to control when it is seen or by whom. I am placing an enormous amount of trust in the recipient. If our relationship sours, s/he will have material that can be used to embarrass and humiliate me.” Somewhere along the course of that thought, it should have occurred to them that this is a horrible idea.
So assuming the parents failed to teach and the youth failed to apply rational logic to their action, a sext was sent. How is law enforcement going to find out? I suppose a parent of a youth with the picture could take it to the police instead of bringing it to the sender’s parents attention or that the recipient youth could take it in. The content could be temporarily posted on the internet and law enforcement searching for child pornography could find it and decide to spend a lot of time, energy, and tax payer dollars to track down the errant youth. All of these scenarios seem highly unlikely to me which pretty makes the law nothing more than a scare tactic.
If a child has managed to evade all of the warnings that this is a bad idea, I fail to see how they would know of a law that prohibits what they are seeking to do and worse, if they have that little common sense, I fail to see why they would care. It seems to me that the legislature is churning out laws to enforce common sense. Then again, there is a law against murder and I figured that would have to be a pretty basic law of common sense.
Sexting Law: Necessary and Effective?
ReplyDeleteI was searching for a classmate's blog to comment on and, when I came across “Teen's: Think before youpush the send button on that message!!!”, it immediately caught my interest. Obviously I have known of the issues surrounding “sexting”; it seems to always be a big problem that can have negative long term effects on teens. I hear stories in the news and on The Bobby Bones Show all the time that give examples of the consequences of the act of sexting. I believe every teenager in the past decade, and maybe even longer, has had this come up at some point.
My classmate focuses on the bill that has been passed, that give a much harder consequence for teenagers that get caught sexting. They will be charged with a misdemeanor and take a mandatory class that will educate them further on how it can hurt them in the future. In this blog the writer completely agrees with the bill that was passed and thinks that it will help the problem of teens sending these kind of texts. With the law being passed, teens will know about this law, and it will make them think twice about sexting, and help them realize how stupid it really is.
I also agree that if it works then that will be great; I just don't know if it will actually make a difference. Knowing how teenagers can be, because I was one and obviously was around a lot of them, I realize they can be extremely stubborn and not make the smartest decisions for very immature reasons. I think they are smart enough to realize the repercussions of it, but just don’t care at that moment and time. It is just the same as with drinking and drugs. There are even stronger laws against it and many get caught and in trouble with the law, but the majority seem to do it anyways.
Another thought I have about this is: how will it be enforced successfully? A big part of that would probably depend on the help of parents, but I'm not sure that will be very effective. Parents might not want to go to the extent of getting their children in trouble with the law. Also, things on your phone can be very secretive. There are passwords, and texts can be deleted whenever the users want them to be. A good point in my classmate's blog is the question whether being caught sexting is serious enough to get put on a teenager's permanent record. I guess it depends on how you look at it. You can think that it is just another consequence that might stop someone from pushing that send button, or that it is a bit too severe.
As I said before, if it can make some difference for some teens, then it must be worth something. Hopefully, for most teenagers it won't get to this point because parents will address this problem head on, and teach their kids to make the right decision and not get involved in this trend.
Do yo have to be 18 years old in order to do sexting now? In response to Stephanie Glenn's blog post about "teenage sexting", I would have to agree with Rick Perry for passing the Anti-teen Sexting law, but the consequences are too severe in my opinion. For the most part, wouldn't posting photos of yourself on facebook or online, that are considered above PG 13, be considered sexting as well? The answer to that question is, NO! Therefore,I think this new law needs some more attention because there are a couple loopholes in it. After doing more research; and I can be wrong on this, but I don't see anything stating that a teen uploading nude photos of themselves on the internet as a violation of this law. By knowing this, there is most likely a way to get around it. Overall, the law can reduce teens from taking these kind of actions, which are considered to have the ability to ruin your life, if it was to be exposed to the public.
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