On impulse, a depressed 8th grade girl named Marguerite snapped and sent a naked photo of herself to her new possible boyfriend.
What followed after involved criminal charges and altered a bunch of young lives.
This well-written story by Jan Hoffman from Sunday’s New York Times is well worth the attention of anyone who is raising or who cares about teenagers.
One day last winter Marguerite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend.
Both were in eighth grade.
They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite’s. Around 11 o’clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.
“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”
In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.
In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate.
Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.
In a sidebar article the NY Times notes how states disagree about how to handle the transmission of sexual images by teenagers to other teenagers.
California appears to still be dithering.