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Sexting

High school girl: 'The only reason to regret it is if you get caught'
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When police began to investigate a high school sexting situation in Louisa County, Virginia, they got more than they imagined, according to Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic:

[Sheriff’s investigator Major Donald] Lowe has lived in Louisa County, or pretty close to it, for most of his life. The county is spread out and rural, but it is by no means small-town innocent. People there deal drugs and get caught up with gangs, and plenty of high-school girls end up pregnant. Usually Lowe can more or less classify types in his head—which kids from which families might end up in trouble after a drunken fight in the McDonald’s parking lot. But this time the cast of characters was baffling. He knew many of the girls in the photos, knew their parents. A few were 14, from the local middle school. They came from “all across the board,” Lowe says. “Every race, religion, social, and financial status in the town. Rich, poor, everyone. That’s what was most glaring and blaring about the situation. If she was a teenager with a phone, she was on there.” He knew some of the boys who had followed the Instagram accounts, too. Among them were kids with a lot to lose, including star athletes with scholarships to first-rate colleges.

Three paragraphs in, and this is already starting to sound like The Lost Children of Rockdale County. It turns out that it was not only widespread, but that there was not a lot of shame in it, as far as the kids were concerned:

Most of the girls on Instagram fell into the same category as Jasmine. They had sent a picture to their boyfriend, or to someone they wanted to be their boyfriend, and then he had sent it on to others. For the most part, they were embarrassed but not devastated, Lowe said. They felt betrayed, but few seemed all that surprised that their photos had been passed around. What seemed to mortify them most was having to talk about what they’d done with a “police officer outside their age group.” In some he sensed low self-esteem—for example, the girl who’d sent her naked picture to a boy, unsolicited: “It just showed up! I guess she was hot after him?” A handful of senior girls became indignant during the course of the interview. “This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it,” or, “I don’t see any problem with it. I’m proud of my body,” Lowe remembers them saying. A few, as far as he could tell, had taken pictures especially for the Instagram accounts and had actively tried to get them posted. In the first couple of weeks of the investigation, Lowe’s characterization of the girls on Instagram morphed from “victims” to “I guess I’ll call them victims” to “they just fell into this category where they victimized themselves.”

What do you do with this, if you’re a cop? What do you do with this if you’re a parent? What happens if people are passing around images that meet the legal definition of child pornography, but the people doing it are minors, and the images have been produced by the same minors in the image, for the purpose of sexually exploiting themselves? Every one of the teenagers, both boys and girls, caught in the Louisa County sweep could have been charged with a felony. Do you really want to do that? The county chief prosecutor said:

“What do you do? Turn a blind eye? You’re letting teenagers incite the prurient interest of predators around the country,” fueling a demand that “can only be met by the actual abuse of real children.”

But, says Major Lowe:

“They’re not violent criminals,” he told me. “If these kids just made a dumb-ass mistake, we don’t want to ruin their future.”

It’s a really good piece, and a challenging one. Look at this, from Rosin’s interview with local boys:

Sometimes in Louisa County, between interviews, I hung out with a group of 15-year-old boys who went to the library after school. They seemed like good kids who studied, played football, and occasionally got into fights, but no more than most boys. They’d watch videos of rappers from the area and talk about rumors in the rap world, like the one that the Chicago rapper Chief Keef, a rival of D.C.’s Shy Glizzy, had gotten a middle-school girl pregnant. They’d order and split a pizza to pass the time while waiting for their parents to leave work and pick them up. I started to think of them as the high school’s Greek chorus because, while I recognized much of what they said as 15-year-old-boy swagger—designed to impress me and each other, and not necessarily true—they still channeled the local sentiment. This is how one of them described his game to me: “A lot of girls, they stubborn, so you gotta work on them. You say, ‘I’m trying to get serious with you.’ You call them beautiful. You say, ‘You know I love you.’ You think about it at night, and then you wake up in the morning and you got a picture in your phone.”

“You wake up a happy man,” his friend said.

“Yeah, a new man.”

“Yeah, I’m the man.”

How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.

“Super thots.”

“You can’t love those thots!”

“That’s right, you can’t love those hos.”

“Girls in Louisa are easy.”

Girls can’t win. These boys have absorbed the degenerate values of rap culture, which takes the latent exploitative tendencies in young male culture, and valorizes them.

But girls are not victims, not all the time. There’s this:

“The only reason to regret it is if you get caught,” one girl told me.

Read the whole thing. This is the world we’ve made for our kids. Rosin points out that all this is happening in a culture in which teen pregnancy rates are going down, and kids are waiting longer to become sexually active. OK. That’s better than the alternative, but if we think this is harmful and destructive only if it results in early sexual activity or pregnancy, I would suggest that we have an impoverished idea of what constitutes harm. I think a teenager who can say that this kind of thing is only bad if you get caught is morally and spiritually damaged to a significant degree.

Things like this make me so grateful that we homeschool. No parent can afford to be blasé about this, and assume that their children cannot or will not be part of this world. But it’s hard to imagine my kids being in the mainstream of a teenage peer culture where this kind of thing is normal, and the kids doing it believe the only thing wrong with it is getting caught. It is not enough to protect your kids from the external threat, insofar as you can; you also have to build up in them the moral resilience and self-confidence to reject this kind of thing when it comes to them. And it seems to me you can’t wait until they’re teenagers, or almost-teenagers, to start.

By the way, don’t miss Gracy Olmstead’s post from earlier this week on sexting and girls.

I wish PBS Frontline would do a follow-up on the Rockdale County kids it profiled in that late-1990s episode. Where are they now? How did they turn out?

Hey, I’m traveling most of the day to Boston, then going straight to the event at BC. Will be slow posting around here, and slow comments-approving. Thanks for your patience.

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