In March, a Middle Georgia mom received a call from a guidance counselor at her daughter’s private school, saying she needed to come take the 17-year-old home.
Her daughter wasn’t ill, but her mom would soon feel sick to her stomach.
Another student had found naked photos of the girl online, showing them to a teacher, who then showed them to school administrators.
A shocked counselor would find out that those photos were taken when the girl was 13 years old and that dozens of students had already shared them.
The fallout from the event spread in many directions. Students attended an assembly where they heard that if they kept or forwarded those images they could be charged with child pornography — a federal offense.
The mother would eventually go to the GBI after an unknown caller threatened to use those images to send her daughter to jail. And the daughter learned that the bad decisions she made as an insecure seventh-grader would probably haunt her for the rest of her life.
“It’s a shadow over her,” the mother said.
“Sexting” is the 21st century version of “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” The number of American teens who send sexually explicit photographs to friends by cellphone, smartphone or computer is somewhere between 4 percent (according to the Pew Research Center) and 19 percent (according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy).
Why send naked photos? They are teenagers, and therefore short in the judgment department. Girlfriends and boyfriends send each other photos as tokens of their intimacy; or one pressures the other to do so. Friends at a slumber party might do it as a joke, as happened with seven teens in Forsyth County. Or an insecure girl in a Middle Georgia town might send photos to a “friend” online, to get the validation and approval she doesn’t find at her own school.
Also, this generation has a dramatically different sense of boundaries than their parents did. Computer-savvy Cobb County mom Lori Carbone mentions that a “friend” on her son’s Facebook page has posted photos with “barely any clothes on. Do her parents even know what her Facebook page looks like?”
The answer is usually: No. Parents are less familiar with social media than their children and are generally less adept at controlling access.
Most of the time, compromising photographs are not turned against a teen, though sometimes a boyfriend and girlfriend break up and one of them is malicious and tries to embarrass the other. “Most of the time they don’t” get distributed, said Larry Magid, co-director of connectsafely.org and safekids.com, a Palo Alto-based resource for online safety. “Most people aren’t nasty,” he said.
But since these photographs are defined by law as child pornography, parents have discovered that when law enforcement gets involved, the punishment is often out of scale to the crime.
“When child pornography laws were written there were no such things as digital cameras and the Internet, and no one could imagine a kid getting arrested for it,” said former DeKalb district attorney J. Tom Morgan, who has written about Georgia law and minors.
Today a teenager under 17 who “sexts” risks a 15-year minimum sentence.
Occasionally those photos bounce back to make a kid’s life hell. “For some it’s had a very severe emotional impact, up to and including suicide,” said John Whitaker, special agent with the Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes unit of the GBI.
In fact, the Middle Georgia mom lived in fear that she might walk into her daughter’s room “and find her hanging from her closet bar.”
Mother and daughter agreed to speak about their experiences, without revealing their names or hometown, with the hope that other families might avoid such pain.
Nightmare for family
Their story began like a scene from the film “Mean Girls.”
In seventh grade the daughter’s friends were chosen as cheerleaders, but she decided not to try out. After that, they didn’t want her at their lunch table.
A tall, striking blonde, the daughter decided to go in the opposite direction, she said, sporting Vans sneakers, black clothes and streaked hair. She chatted all night with “friends” online who enjoyed “World of Warcraft” and other role-playing games. “I decided I’ll be this nerd kid and that will be more fun,” she said.
An online friend encouraged her to post her anime art and then photos of herself. She bought a peripheral webcam for the home computer. “From there she was lured one baby step at a time,” her mother said. “They would tell her, ‘Just show me your right breast.’ Then ‘show me a little more.’”
Said the daughter, “I thought it was cool, that I was doing something that nobody else was doing.”
The mother, unaware that her daughter had hacked the computer’s Net Nanny, was happy her daughter had found someone to talk to. “I thought, she’s communicating with people her age, she’s happy, she’s playing her games, at least she’s in her house, she’s not doing drugs, she’s not drinking.”
The daughter, who would set her clock to chat in the middle of the night, became a celebrity on a certain image bulletin board, but her parents worried when they couldn’t wake her up in the morning.
Mom eventually took away her daughter’s computer. That was when the daughter’s online admirer, who identified himself as “JP,” secretly sent her a replacement laptop, mailing it to a friend’s house. The mother is convinced that the new computer came with remote spyware, recording events and conversations that even the daughter wasn’t aware of.
Eventually the daughter got a boyfriend and a driver’s license and stopped posting photos. That’s when the phone calls and the threats started from “JP,” who said he would send photos to the daughter’s friends at school and ruin her parents if she didn’t break up with her boyfriend and get back online.
“This blackmail is all too common,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney, who has prosecuted cases for the Safe Child Task Force. “They learn to their chagrin that it’s not a friend at the other end,” but a trafficker in underage images who doesn’t want the supply to stop. “The hard part is tracking down the bad guy.”
The daughter realizes now that she will have to put up with “stupid freshmen looking at me and laughing,” and that photos on the Internet are there forever. To her credit, she hasn’t asked to be transferred, her mother said.
The daughter would like to see someone prosecuted, and at the same time she feels responsible for her actions — even though she was 14 at the time.
“It’s hard for her to admit or realize that she’s a victim,” her mother said.
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