Three students at Ponderosa High School in Ponderosa, CA are now facing child pornography charges following two separate incidents over the past two weeks. In a press release issued on October 17, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office announced the discovery a sexually explicit video involving three minors: On October 14, 2015, at Ponderosa High…
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…
A confluence of some of the most disturbing trends in American society led to the lockdown Wednesday of Highland High School in Pocatello, Idaho. In the wee hours of the morning on October 7, an unnamed 15-year-old male had a Facebook Messenger exchange with another person, age and gender unknown. A screenshot of a portion…
In mid-September, a young couple in Boyds, MD spent part of a sunny fall afternoon posing for photos. Like dozens of other teens and even some professional photographers, they decide to use the railroad tracks running through town as an attractive backdrop. While 16-year-old Natalie Crim and her twin sister Sarah flipped through the photos…
When I researched and wrote Cybertraps for the Young, one thing that surprised me was the ease with which teens could order addictive and dangerous products from Web sites around the world. Any teen with a credit card (or access to one) could buy products intended for adults and have them shipped home or to…
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.…
The dubious prosecution of two teenagers in North Carolina for sharing explicit photos with each other in the context of a romantic relationship continues to attract attention from media outlets around the world, most of whom (or at least the article commenters) take advantage of the story to deride the U.S. for its lingering prurience…
While sitting in Chicago O’Hare Airport the other day, I got a call from Joanna Walters, a New York-based reporter for London’s “The Guardian” newspaper. [@JoannaWalters13] (h/t to Dr. Jeff Temple for the referral). She was looking for background information on U.S. laws regarding sexting by children, as part of a story about the criminal…
Laws prohibiting the possession, production, and distribution of child pornography are of surprisingly recent origin in the United States. It was not until 1982 that the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that sexually explicit images of persons under the age of 18 are not entitled to legal protection under the First Amendment. See New…
Joke or threat? That’s the question raised by an Arizona high school student’s ill-advised, reckless, fooolish Snapchat post showing a crowded hallway in the Sierra Linda High School in Phoenix. The male student captioned his photo “Planning the school shooting,” followed by three smiley faces. A 16-year-old student in Northglenn High School in Colorado named…
