For someone researching digital misconduct by educators, summer vacation is the slow season, which made it good time to take a break to finish my most recent book (Cybertraps for Expecting Moms & Dads). But these types of cases never stop completely. In June, a child abuse complaint was lodged with the Berks County (PA)…
North Carolina, I’m looking at you. Ten months after the state made national headlines for charging a 16-year-old high school quarterback and his 15-year-old girlfriend with two felonies each for exchanging nude cell phone photos, state officials have leveled four felony counts against a 16-year-old boy for disseminating obscenity (i.e., photos of his penis). At…
On Thursday, May 26, Good Morning America aired the latest segment in a series that it has been doing on teens and technology. Entitled “What Your Kids Don’t Want You to Know: Teens Exploited Via Technology,” the piece “examines how some teens are coerced or blackmailed into sending explicit pictures or video to a predator.”…
Sometime during the middle of the 2013-2014 school year, Kearney Day, a 20-year-old teacher’s aid in the Allen Independent School District, used the Kik messaging app to start chatting with an unnamed 16-year-old student. In April 2014, the student told members of the Allen High School administration that she and Day were in a relationship.…
A teenager at the heart of a significant sexting scandal at North Penn High School in Landsdale, PA, entered a guilty plea on March 22. Brandon Tyler Berlin, 19, pleaded guilty to a single charge of “transmission of sexually explicit images by a minor,” a misdemeanor. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was…
2016-02-17 Your Digital Footprint from Frederick Lane A 60-minute presentation delivered to grades 5-12 at the Cordova School District, Cordova, AK on February 17, 2016. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or professional development program for your organization on this topic, please contact me for information regarding my rates and availability.
A 25-year-old Las Vegas teacher named Jill Lafave is charged with having sex with an 16-year-old male student in classroom at Valley High School, just east of the city’s infamous Strip. Lafave, who is currently on paid administrative leave, was an English and special education teacher at the high school. The two were reportedly seen…
One of the ongoing challenges in investigating cases of educator misconduct is that so many of them involve text messages, which are a particularly ephemeral form digital evidence. Unlike files on a hard drive, which typically linger long after they are “deleted,” or emails, which are routinely archived in multiple locations (just ask Ollie North!),…
A short time ago, I wrote a blog post about the need to reframe the discussion over the involunatary capture and distribution of intimate images (colloquially described as “revenge porn”) so as to better capture its true nature: “electronic sexual assault.” One of the concerns that I expressed in that post is that the terminology…
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…
