Editorial: Kids are victims and culprits in sexting

A girl took some sexy pictures of herself. She sent them to a guy.

Not a big deal. Happens every day.

But they both ended up in court.

Why? Because police say she was 15 and he was 16. According to state police, that means he was in possession of child pornography, and when he forwarded that picture to other people, he distributed child pornography, and the girl in the pictures was the pornographer.

The issue of sexting images of kids by kids occupies a weird place in our judicial system. There aren’t many crimes in which you can be both the perpetrator and the victim.

Every smartphone can produce and receive the pictures that break the law, and they are everywhere. According to WebMD, 85% of high school students have them. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law puts the number of teens who have taken or forwarded explicit images as high as 25%.

For years, the recommendations have been to make sure that our kids don’t use computers alone in their rooms. Keep them in a family area. Know what they are doing and with whom. Have the passwords. Limit the time.

But how do you do that when the computer isn’t on a desk? How do you keep control when it’s in a pocket?

The answer is as simple as it is depressing. You can’t.

If we can’t control our kids, we have to do the next best thing. We have to try to teach them to control themselves, which is a lot trickier.

It’s hard enough to talk to kids about sex. Sexting discussions demand we talk about two things that scare us as parents: our babies being involved in any kind of sexual relationship, and the potential for those same babies to get in serious legal trouble.

What we can’t do is let our natural parental desire to ignore that the kids are growing up get in the way of us protecting them by having blunt conversations about the dangers and the consequences. Being convicted or pleading to a sex crime can have serious long-term effects that go beyond not getting into a good college or being suspended.

Sexting happens every day. We can’t pretend it doesn’t, and we can’t pretend that our kids might not be that one in four sending or receiving images. If they had a one in four chance of doing anything else that could land them in court, we wouldn’t hesitate to talk about it.

Our instincts are always to protect them. The only way to do that sometimes is make sure they can protect themselves.