Comments on: Media Hysteria, Dehyped

By: JOR

JOR — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:19:01 +0000

#2 beat me to it. The “10-17″ age group made my eyes roll so hard it hurt.

By: primus

primus — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:50:25 +0000

This whole thing has reached ridiculous levels. Remember the old Elvis song “Return to Sender” about a lovesick teenager pursuing his ex girlfriend after she dumped him by repeatedly sending letters to her then after she sent them back he takes it to her and hand delivers it? If a kid today did this he would be arrested for stalking her. Kids today are arrested and given a juvenile record for stuff we got away with. Of course back in the day there was the occasional policeman’s boot that connected with our sorry asses, then the whuppin’ when we got home, because the cops made a phone call. Much more effective way to deal with these matters. Then the parents can take care of it when things are still at a low level. This whole punitive policing approach is what is giving cops, courts and the judicial system a bad name.

By: freedomfan

freedomfan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:09:50 +0000

Maggie and Steve, to be fair, when doing work like this, you almost have to include in the study people who are a little outside the age range where you expect the activity. Otherwise, you can't really tell that you've actually studied a everyone engaging in it. In other words, if you suspect that there's very little sexting among pre-teens, you have to include some in your sample or you don't know if that was true. If you look at the actual journal paper, you will see that the authors were pretty clear that, out of 1560 kids, only 2 below the age of 13 reported "Appearing in, Creating, or Receiving Nude or Nearly Nude Images or Videos". Since the whole conclusion of their report seems to be that teen sexting is much less common than people assume, it isn't likely they included younger kids in order to attract attention or to create headlines.

By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:27:43 +0000

It’s usual to say that prejudice against fat people is the last socially acceptable prejudice, but I think prejudice against children and teenagers is less criticized.

By: B

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:57:20 +0000

When I was a teenager (back in the dark ages when cameras all had film in them) one my favorite pranks to play on my friends was to temporarily steal their camera at a party, sneak off to the bathroom, and take a picture of my bare ass. (I did it to one guy in particular at least half a dozen times.)

Obviously, the real fun there was that they would take those pictures to get developed. But I imagine if I were 15 years younger, I’d have been pulling some version of that with cell phones.

There was nothing sexual about that (except for maybe the mildly homophobic acting out pretty common among adolescent guys), but I’m pretty sure it would fall under the strict definition of “sexting”. And I have to wonder how much of what gets called that really just amounts to adolescent pranks.

By: Piper

Piper — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:45:06 +0000

responding to Maggie:
Back story: I was a Dean of Students at a middle school for 4 years and had 5 or 6 of these cases come up, usually, a girl sent her boyfriend a pic and then it got sent around school, causing a disruption of the school or her ability to function at school. The only people that got police attention where the people passing it around and that was just a warning to them and their parents to not forward it and delete it as it could be considered child porn. Arrests are an overreaction and stupid. BTW all of mine were in the 1 in 100 category and I can proudly say I did not have to examine the photos, I had parents do it.

As far as the age range goes, at my mid school (7-8) the age range was 12-16, if you include a 6th grade that range goes to 10-16, with very few 10 year olds. Since some middle schools will also have 5th graders, I can see 10 being a good cut off.

By: Steve Verdon

Steve Verdon — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:29:42 +0000

#2 | Maggie McNeill =,

No kidding, some measure of a frequency analysis would be nice. But hey, gotta get these things on the citations index so you can get tenure.

By: Maggie McNeill

Maggie McNeill — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:32:57 +0000

“10 to 17″? Could they have come up with a more artificial age range if they had tried? I’d like to see that data; how much you wanna bet that over 95% of those who reported having sent “sexting” messages ere in the 15-17 range? But that’s not scary enough, so let’s extend the range to include tweens.

By: derfel cadarn

derfel cadarn — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:51:33 +0000

One must ask, in American society today does that this type of communication for explicit sexual purposes not qualify as paedophlia and or a sex crime ? As ridiculous as this might sound if YOU had these conversations YOU would be in jail. It is only OK when they do it because it is for the children. Isn’t that convinient!