A 45-year-old science teacher at Santa Ana High School was arrested in early September “on suspicion of having sex with a 16-year-old female student” two years earlier. According to the Santa Ana Police Department, Alvar Albert Gonzalez, met the victim in one of his classes and allegedly had sex with her during her school lunch…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
I tell you three times: camera phones are the most significant driver of social change since the early 1960s, when television brought the street battles over civil rights into nearly every American home. We are only just beginning to appreciate the myriad ways in which the constant presence of camera phones is changing our society,…
Marinko Jankovic, a 61-year-old teacher at Berwick Secondary College in Berwick, Australia (just down the road from Melbourne) is facing six months in jail on charges of surreptitiously taking upskirt photographs and videos of female students in his classroom. Although he pleaded guilty to making 106 videos over a four-year period and to possession of…
A four-month investigation resulted in the arrest and jailing of a 39-year-old elementary school teacher named Eric Shank Van Eenige. According to Van Eenige’s public defender Sandra Bennewitz, he has taught at the Ariel Elementary Community School in Chicago’s North Kenwood neighborhood for the past decade, earning just over $85,000 per year from the Chicago…
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…
