located on the Virginia Peninsula, some thirty-five miles inland from the Chesapeake Bay), because I wanted to talk to a girl who was in the news after posting nude pictures of herself on Twitter. She had reportedly been arrested.
The legal system seems at a loss to know what to do about children seeing and sharing nudes. It has become so common. The girl, age sixteen, who went unnamed because she was underage, had been charged with a felony, the possession and distribution of child pornography, according to reports in February 2014. That the girl herself was the same child whose naked images were being distributed made no difference under the law. The charge, under a section of the Virginia code, carries a potential prison term of five to twenty years.
When I talked to Nate Green, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Williamsburg and Jamestown (the two cities that make up James City County, population around 70,000), he was already backpedaling from the charge, possibly due to the negative reaction the girl’s alleged arrest had been receiving in the media. “We have no interest in criminalizing a juvenile who does something like this,” said Green. “We just want to stop it from happening. We don’t want these pictures following anyone to college or making them out as easy prey on the Internet.” He said the girl would just receive some “education and counseling.” Stephanie Williams-Ortery, a spokesperson for the James City County police, told me, “These were fully nude pictures [the girl] tweeted. She acknowledged she was trying to get the attention of some young men. What she did was pretty brazen.”
She was sharing nudes. A nude is a type of sext, an electronically sent message, either in pictures or in words, intended to cause arousal or attraction in, or convey one’s arousal or attraction to, another person. Sexting is a kind of virtual flirting, also a kind of sex, cybersex. The results of studies on what percentage of kids sext vary so widely as to make even an educated guess difficult, some researchers say; studies are inconsistent in the age ranges surveyed and in their definition of sexting, which can involve everything from sending a fully naked photo of oneself to sharing a link to a porn site to simply texting “I think your body’s hot” with no image included. Studies have found that the number of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers who sext, with either words or pictures or both, is anywhere from just 4 percent to more than 50 percent. It’s safe to say that sexting is part of the culture of social media; whether or not a girl is sexting, she’s most likely aware of the practice.
Snapchat and Kik Messenger, an anonymous instant-messaging service, are two of the apps where kids say they’re most likely to share nudes, as well as by texting. “ ‘Got Kik?’ means, Do you want to sext?” said a fourteen-year-old girl in New York. Since its creation by students at the University of Waterloo in 2009, Kik has appeared in the news in stories involving pedophiles who say they used the service to communicate with underage girls. In 2014,
The Trentonian
reported that a twenty-seven-year-old man was arrested after allegedly being found with “14 photographs of a female” he met on Kik, identified as a thirteen-year-old resident of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, “in different stages of nudity and one video of that female masturbating.”
A woman who works at a middle school in James City County told me that in the last few years they’ve been having trouble with kids getting distracted because they were sexting during class. “We had a twelve-year-old writing to the boy, Do you want me to touch your D?” she said, sounding appalled. “D” meant dick. “And we’ve seen boys looking at naked pictures of girls in school,” she said. “There was one girl who texted the boy, I’m home watching porn.”
Most states have laws against minors sexting, which prosecutors say is appropriate,
The legal system seems at a loss to know what to do about children seeing and sharing nudes. It has become so common. The girl, age sixteen, who went unnamed because she was underage, had been charged with a felony, the possession and distribution of child pornography, according to reports in February 2014. That the girl herself was the same child whose naked images were being distributed made no difference under the law. The charge, under a section of the Virginia code, carries a potential prison term of five to twenty years.
When I talked to Nate Green, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Williamsburg and Jamestown (the two cities that make up James City County, population around 70,000), he was already backpedaling from the charge, possibly due to the negative reaction the girl’s alleged arrest had been receiving in the media. “We have no interest in criminalizing a juvenile who does something like this,” said Green. “We just want to stop it from happening. We don’t want these pictures following anyone to college or making them out as easy prey on the Internet.” He said the girl would just receive some “education and counseling.” Stephanie Williams-Ortery, a spokesperson for the James City County police, told me, “These were fully nude pictures [the girl] tweeted. She acknowledged she was trying to get the attention of some young men. What she did was pretty brazen.”
She was sharing nudes. A nude is a type of sext, an electronically sent message, either in pictures or in words, intended to cause arousal or attraction in, or convey one’s arousal or attraction to, another person. Sexting is a kind of virtual flirting, also a kind of sex, cybersex. The results of studies on what percentage of kids sext vary so widely as to make even an educated guess difficult, some researchers say; studies are inconsistent in the age ranges surveyed and in their definition of sexting, which can involve everything from sending a fully naked photo of oneself to sharing a link to a porn site to simply texting “I think your body’s hot” with no image included. Studies have found that the number of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers who sext, with either words or pictures or both, is anywhere from just 4 percent to more than 50 percent. It’s safe to say that sexting is part of the culture of social media; whether or not a girl is sexting, she’s most likely aware of the practice.
Snapchat and Kik Messenger, an anonymous instant-messaging service, are two of the apps where kids say they’re most likely to share nudes, as well as by texting. “ ‘Got Kik?’ means, Do you want to sext?” said a fourteen-year-old girl in New York. Since its creation by students at the University of Waterloo in 2009, Kik has appeared in the news in stories involving pedophiles who say they used the service to communicate with underage girls. In 2014,
The Trentonian
reported that a twenty-seven-year-old man was arrested after allegedly being found with “14 photographs of a female” he met on Kik, identified as a thirteen-year-old resident of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, “in different stages of nudity and one video of that female masturbating.”
A woman who works at a middle school in James City County told me that in the last few years they’ve been having trouble with kids getting distracted because they were sexting during class. “We had a twelve-year-old writing to the boy, Do you want me to touch your D?” she said, sounding appalled. “D” meant dick. “And we’ve seen boys looking at naked pictures of girls in school,” she said. “There was one girl who texted the boy, I’m home watching porn.”
Most states have laws against minors sexting, which prosecutors say is appropriate,
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