The Cyber Effect (27 page)

The authors call for a moratorium on any sexting-education programs until the right strategy can be conceptualized. In my opinion, a good approach would be incorporating information about sexual images and sexting into the curricula of general sex education—which deals with bullying, dating, and interpersonal relationships. (And I hear this is now being done in some school systems.) The content needs to be developed in close cooperation with teenagers, and the message needs to be evaluated for effectiveness. Just telling teens not to do something isn't enough. We need to understand the motive and psychology of the behavior as well as teach kids about legal consequences.

The current laws do not deal adequately with the problem of sexting. At Middlesex University I have conducted extensive research in this area—involving the London Metropolitan Police, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Australian Federal Police under the umbrella of the INTERPOL Specialists Group on Crime Against Children. Following four years of research on three continents, I came to the conclusion that one of the problems is that sexting is viewed almost exclusively through the legal lens of child pornography, and while it is true that the images can look very similar, they are very different in terms of intent. In one instance, the explicit image taken by a teenage girlfriend and boyfriend is done voluntarily, and at the other end of the spectrum, the image is coerced from a child victim by a criminal sex offender. There needs to be an active review of the law in this area and the creation of a legal classification framework that differentiates between teenage voluntary sexual exploration and criminal generation of child abuse material, the defining criteria being
mens rea
, or intent. I am actively working on proposed amendments to legislation in this area through my involvement with The Hague Justice Portal in Europe.

Do I agree with Finkelhor and Wolak that there's been an overreaction
to the rise of sexting? No. As a society, we need to pay attention to cyber effects, the ongoing evolution of behavior, and, importantly, how we react, adapt, and respond. It is impossible for me to ignore the stories of truly vulnerable individuals who have been tragically impacted by the behavior.

The darkest place where the practice of sexting can take a teenager is actually part of my work. The risks of any online behavior need to be discussed carefully and thoroughly rather than swept under the rug. We have to make sure we've educated kids properly and created adequate measures to protect them.

Jesse Logan was a vivacious, artistic girl, a junior in high school in Ohio, whose boyfriend asked her to send him nude pictures of herself. After Logan and her boyfriend broke up, he shared the nude images with younger girls at the high school, who started calling Logan a “slut” and a “whore.”

Miserable and ashamed, Logan began missing class—a cry for help, and a sign of a teenager in crisis.

Her mom, Cynthia Logan, didn't discover that her daughter was cutting classes until she was notified by the school. When Jesse told her about the photographs—and the bullies—Cynthia Logan pressed the school to take strong action. But when administrators didn't do enough to satisfy her, Cynthia convinced her daughter to appear on a local Cincinnati TV station and tell her story. That was May 2008.

“I just want to make sure,” Jesse told the interviewer, “that no one else will have to go through this again.” Two months later, she hanged herself in her bedroom. She was eighteen.

The point of this story isn't just to shock and scare you. What it tells me is that how sexting is handled—by parents, by the media, by schools and courts—may be more potentially risky than the behavior itself. Jesse's tragic suicide brings me to another important point. The number of teens—and even younger children—who are engaging in self-harm is now more evident than ever. This urgently needs to be researched and
investigated. I believe self-destructive behavior is amplified and even encouraged by information readily available on sites and forums that target vulnerable youth—the worst cyber effect of all.

There's a name for the sharing of indecent images by an embittered ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend as a way to “get back”:
revenge porn
. It's a burgeoning trend and discussed in the media. But is it appropriate to call it “porn”? As I've mentioned, the intention behind the taking of these images is very different from marketed pornography—and calling it “revenge porn” just seems to further victimize a victim. But whatever you call it, there are many efforts now under way to try to combat the escalation of this behavior. But until recently, before it was given a name by the media, authorities had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it, or act on it.

Jesse Logan's story resonates with another well-known case, that of Amanda Todd, a fifteen-year-old girl in Canada whose circulated sexual image led to her becoming a target of online bullying in 2012. Teenagers usually don't have the resilience and strong sense of self in place to handle the fallout from being stuck in the role of a whistleblower or an anti-sexting missionary. Why put this responsibility on a vulnerable child who has already been a victim? An investigation of Todd's hard drive provided more details. It wasn't a shared sext that got her into trouble, but an indecent image. Todd had been in a webcam chat room with more than 150 people when she decided to lift her shirt and flash her breasts to the camera.

It was an impulsive act, but one that she was unable to leave behind. Someone took a screen capture of the image and sent the link to all of Todd's Facebook friends. That's how the image of Todd's flashing moment fell into the hands of online predators, individuals who troll the Web looking for embarrassing pictures, like hers, and then contact the subjects for
sextortion
purposes, or blackmailing, typically by threatening to post the explicit images more widely on the Internet.

Victims of sextortion are sometimes asked for money, but more often they are asked for more photographs—or to perform sex acts for the camera. Todd had been approached by sinister blackmailers, as the disturbing records of her chat log revealed:

Hindsight is 20/20, and maybe vulnerable Amanda Todd should have stopped having an online presence at this point. Instead, she created a haunting video and posted it on YouTube. Without showing her face, she told her moving story of depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and self-harm in cue cards. One month later, she killed herself.

Two years later,
a thirty-five-year-old man living alone in an isolated resort town in the Netherlands was charged with extortion, Internet luring, criminal harassment, and child pornography in the Amanda Todd case. He was suspected of numerous other instances of online abuse in the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S.

Let's backtrack a bit. What was behind Todd's original act—which led to her tragic ending? Impulsivity. It is certainly a psychological factor that contributes to the production of a sext, but it is also linked to immaturity. Young people have less self-control and have a much harder time resisting an impulsive urge. Their desire to explore overrides the risks of impulsivity.

How many teenagers have mooned a passing car on the highway or flipped the bird at a police car or other figure of authority—and paid a price for it? Many. And they went on to live perfectly decent, law-abiding lives. I am not saying these dumb mistakes of adolescence should be encouraged, but I believe they should be accepted as part of a long process called
growing up
. Mistakes are supposed to be made. And teenagers will make them. In the case of Amanda Todd, she lifted her shirt and flashed her breasts. Should it have been the end of the world for her?

There's one more important point that needs to be made as I finish retelling the sad story of Amanda Todd. Her video has 19 million views now and is still available online. I have to weigh in—and share my opinion of “memorial sites” on Facebook that honor teenagers who have died or killed themselves.

I realize that this is where family members visit and leave updates
and posts, and express their sorrow and remember their departed loved ones. And yes, it's true that families and friends may find great comfort in these sites. But I have a greater concern. This type of memorial afterlife is very powerful—and can appear to leave a legacy, and bestow fame, on the departed teen. I am concerned that this could lead to more self-harm and more suicide attempts. Some teens fantasize about dying as a way to get attention or even revenge. The Internet has the power to turn that need into a spectacle. I believe we need to reevaluate the constructiveness and impact of the memorial sites, and consider taking them down.

There should be no upside to suicide, in the real world or in the cyber one.

In real life, would a teenage girl walk around with a photograph of herself naked—and show everybody at school? Would she undress in class and pose suggestively? That's what happens, potentially, every time a sext is sent. Besides impulsivity and narcissism, what are the other possible explanations for this disinhibited behavioral shift online?

It could be this simple: It's fun.

You probably don't need to be told that kids like to have fun. But for scientific purposes, it has been demonstrated in studies that having fun is another important part of development. In psychology, it's generally referred to as
play
. Could sexting constitute an
adaptive form of play
? Psychologists haul out the word
adaptive
whenever they want to describe behavior that is changing in order to keep up with either the environment or evolving social mores. Considering that as many as half of all U.S. teens report sexting, it could simply be another way of “keeping up.”

Another way of saying this:
Mom, all the other kids are sexting
. But what about privacy? Don't teenagers worry about their photos careening around cyberspace and being seen by strangers? This brings up another fascinating and much explored area of research. In cyberpsychology it is called the
privacy paradox
, a theory that was developed by
Susan B. Barnes, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to demonstrate how teenagers exhibit a lack of concern about their privacy online. It's an interesting shift because so often in the real world, many teens are self-conscious and tend to seek privacy. But online, something else happens. Even teenagers who are well versed in the dangers and have read stories of identity theft, sextortion, cyberbullying, cybercrimes, and worse continue to share as though there is no risk.

In the early days of the Internet, this paradox was somewhat understandable. Very few people were able to imagine how behavior would shift and escalate online. In 2005, when the Facebook accounts of four thousand students were studied, it was discovered that only a small percentage had changed the
default privacy settings. The most recent study, done in 2015, shows that now 55 percent of teenagers in the United States have adjusted their Facebook settings to restrict total strangers from viewing their content. While that shows a change to greater concern about privacy, it still is too low a number.

The explanation is lack of interest.

Teenagers simply don't care.

Why?

Because privacy is a generational construct. It means one thing to baby boomers, something else to millennials, and a completely different thing to today's teenagers. (In ancient Greece, it meant nothing at all; there wasn't even a word for “privacy.”) So when we talk about “
privacy” concerns on the Internet, it would be helpful if we were talking about the same thing—but we aren't.

But just because teenagers don't have the same concerns about privacy as their parents do—and don't care who knows their age, religion, location, or shopping habits—it doesn't mean they don't pay attention to who is seeing their posts and pictures.

According to danah boyd, the TED Talk celebrity and visiting professor at New York University, most teenagers scrutinize what they post online very carefully. In her book
It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
, she argues that teens adjust what they present online depending on the audience they want to impress. Everything is calibrated for a specific purpose—to look cool, or tough, or hot.

In other words, when it suits them, teenagers can be enormously savvy about how to protect the things they want kept private, mostly from their parents. “The kind of privacy adolescents want is the same kind of privacy that they have always wanted,” says Ian Miller, who studies the psychology of online sharing at the University of Toronto. “They don't care if Facebook knows their religion, but they do care if their parents find out about their sex life.”

For my generation, a “secret” is something you tell only your closest friend—and swear them to an oath for life. For teenagers, a “secret” is shared online with four hundred of their closest friends, some of whom they've never met face-to-face.

This explains why the “privacy” debate has been muddled. There's a communication breakdown. Although we share the same language, we are sharing a label that refers to two very different things. How about a new label
—open privacy
—a different concept from “privacy,” since teens have a different understanding of what they feel is appropriate to share with friends, friends of friends, and basically strangers.

We've explored explanations for why an individual teenager might post a heartless selfie and why teens don't consider their privacy in the same ways that adults do. But why does sexting continue to be popular with teenagers when it has been shown repeatedly to be a bad idea? And why has it become more prevalent, in spite of all the school lectures, social awareness campaigns, and so forth?