A 13-year-old girl in Dallas, TX is facing a third-degree felony charge for posting a shooting threat on Instagram. Officials at the T.W. Browne School in southwest Dallas were told last Monday night that someone had posted a photo to Instagram of man pointing a gun straight at a camera, with the following grim caption:…
2015-10-19 Teens, Technology, and Suicide: Understanding Causes, Effects, and “Bullycide” from Frederick Lane A Featured Presentation delivered with Joanne Harpel, JD, MPhil, at the 2015 Annual Conference of the New York State School Boards Association on October 19 and October 20, 2015 in New York, NY. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or…
In August 2010, a woman named Jennifer Woolsey reportedly found a video on the desktop of her family’s shared computer that showed her husband Brian on the receiving end of a sexual act by a young woman. At the time, both she and her husband were teachers at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Arizona,…
At the end of September, Canadian tech entrepreneurs Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough announced the pending release of “Peeple,” an app designed to enable users to give one- to five-star ratings to the various people in their lives — basically, “Yelp” for humanity. The reaction to the announcement was, to put it mildly, ferociously negative.…
In April, Charles Clay Dawson, a teacher at Wanette Public Schools in Pottawatomie County, was charged with soliciting nude photos from two female students, one aged 16 and the other aged 15. According to the investigative report, the 43-year-old Dawson solicited the photos from the students using standard text messaging and the KIK messaging app.…
Back in June, I wrote about the case of Patrick Newman, a Social Studies teacher at Trinity High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Louisville, KY. Following a tip by Twitter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, investigators determined that Newman had used Vine (a video app owned by Twitter), Kik, and…
A goofy but reportedly “innocent” photo posted to Instagram has landed a Rochester (PA) Area School District teacher in hot water. At the District’s prom in May, high school chemistry teacher Amy Douglas posed for a photograph with two female students. According to the description published by a local Web site, BeaverCountian.com, the photo clearly…
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a sobering report about a case in Indiana involving a teenage boy, a teenage girl, a mobile app, and the state’s sex offender registry. It is not, as you might expect, a love story. Last December, Zachery Anderson, a 19-year-old resident of Elkhart, IN, arranged a date…
This story does not describe a common cybertrap for young people, fortunately, but it does help illustrate a couple of relevant points: first, that if young people have a camera available to them at all times (as nearly 100% do), they will occasionally take photos of private activities, and second, even if those private activities…
Parents, educators, and law enforcement agencies around the world are grappling with the phenomenon of underage sexting. Despite increasingly strident warnings from adults to children about the risks of taking and distributing nude photos, the trend shows no sign of slacking anytime soon. In fact, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency recently declared that sexting…
