When teenagers fall in love, as they sometimes do, it can get ugly. Made irrational by a potent blend of hormones, peer pressure and angst, teenagers routinely do things they later come to regret. While their indiscretions sometimes seem "totally life ruining" at the time, they typically resolve themselves and all parties survive until adulthood. Recently, however, teenagers have combined telecommunications with carnal desire to produce something far more nefarious than usual: sexting. Understandably, parents and policymakers are upset, but their response has missed the point entirely.
The FBI recently arrested a Maryland police officer because of sexually explicit texts between him and a 16-year-old girl, and courts in several states are currently hearing sexting cases. Among those cases is an appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union in a Philadelphia appeals court after prosecutors charged a middle-school girl with child pornography. Parents are justifiably appalled at this trend for both its obscene nature and its brutal social ramifications. Sexting almost always becomes public when a begrudged teenager disseminates the photos of an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, and what was once a picture intimately sent to "the one" becomes the butt of jokes across a high school.
The solution to the problem parents and authorities erroneously suggest is censorship, banning cell phones at school or criminalizing the images. What they should realize, but don't, is that teenagers are not known for their foresight, emotional maturity or willingness to follow their parents' advice. Teenagers who fail to realize why sending naked pictures to ephemeral love interests is a bad idea clearly won't respond to heavy-handed legislation from adults. Expecting them to follow rules about cell phone use is as realistic as teenagers obeying their curfews, finishing their schoolwork on Friday night and driving defensively with their hands at ten and two. We clearly need a solution to this trend, but banning the phones and images themselves is not the answer.
Technology is always responsible for societal woes. Explicit video games are responsible for school violence. MySpace is to blame for bullying. The circumstances, actors and contexts change, but the one unifying response is that moral decay comes from a source outside the home. Every opportunity for genuine, self-reflective dialogue dissolves into a frantic search of the perpetrator's room to find the CD, Xbox game or web site that surely caused the problem. Once parents find that contraband or the media identify it for them not only is the tragedy explained, but they also have a standard by which to judge others and prevent a recurrence. All teens listening to Marilyn Manson must be troubled. Parents who allow their children to play Halo are irresponsible. Too many hours on MySpace turns your son or daughter either into a victim to perverts or a cyber-bully.
I'm clearly not an expert on how to keep teenagers safe. What I seriously doubt, however, is that banning phones in class or criminalizing explicit images will succeed in curbing teenage sexting. But, unfortunately, my pessimism fails to offer any revolutionary solutions. I can repeat some obvious (but often overlooked) suggestions: that parents have honest and open conversations with their children, recognizing that sexual urges are an inevitable part of growing up, or that we should look at the way we teach children about sex. Do high school health programs have a realistic curriculum that prioritizes safety over moralistic preaching, or is the program's goal to guilt teenagers into repressing their desires? Does the program resonate with participants, or does it reinforce their feelings of alienation from adult "experts"?
These questions are as uncomfortable as the problems they seek to address; they will be neither easy to ask nor answer. But, if parents don't feel up to the challenge they can always blame Apple's new iPad, which is sure to bring with it a wave of moral degradation, school violence and teen sexting.
