Parenting: Step Your Game Up "Sexting"

This has been in the news recently in Massachusetts and reported about on NBC's The TODAY Show.  

It's just another thing for parents to pay attention to, but with new technology, parents have to stay on top of things and "step their game up".  If parents continue to be naive and think that their daughter or son is not prone to being cyber-bullied, then they're asleep at the wheel.

Parents, protect your daughters from text pressure: Connie Schultz

by Connie Schultz/Plain Dealer Columnist

Wednesday February 11, 2009, 5:47 AM

The mother could see that somebody else's daughter was in trouble.

The teenage girl was standing in front of a school in an affluent neighborhood on Cleveland's East Side. The mother was sitting in a parked car, waiting for her own daughter. Even with her car windows up, sitting 30 feet away, she could hear the girl screaming into a cell phone.

The woman lowered her window, concerned that the girl might need help. For 10 minutes, she listened with growing horror as the girl begged a boy to leave her alone.

"I was driving in my car!" she shouted. "I couldn't answer any of your text messages because that's not safe! You kept texting, you kept texting, and I couldn't answer!"

Over and over, the girl pleaded. "Please stop. ... Please stop. ... Please stop. ... "

Weeks later, the mother can't shake what she heard. To protect the privacy of her own daughters, she doesn't want to be identified, but she doesn't want to remain silent, either. She's read recent coverage about girls being humiliated, and sometimes prosecuted, for distributing naked photos of themselves -- it's called "sexting" -- to boys' cell phones. She also knows, from listening to her daughters' friends, that some boys lure girls into cyber hell by monitoring their every move through texting.

"It's a new stress for girls," she told me, "and parents are real reluctant to talk about it."

Two recent surveys of teens back her up. Teenage Research Unlimited's 2007 study found that 1 in 3 teens say they have received text messages 10, 20 or 30 times an hour from a partner wanting to know where they are, what they're doing or who they're with. A study last year by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported that 51 percent of teen girls said pressure from a guy is the reason girls send sexy messages or images; 18 percent of teen boys said the pressure comes from girls.

Pew Research reports that about 70 percent of teens talk daily with friends on a cell phone, 60 percent send text messages daily, 54 percent send instant messages. Nearly 50 percent send e-mail messages daily over social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Fertile ground, indeed, for what some researchers call "digital abuse."

Too many parents, though, are clueless, which is why that mother called me. "When I tried to bring it up with other mothers, some of them were shocked," she said. "They'd never heard of such a thing."

A new ad campaign might help change that.

The Ad Council has joined with the Family Violence Prevention Fund and the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women to launch ThatsNotCool.com. In addition to the interactive Web site, a television public service ad has begun running across the country. You can view the ad online at www.prnewswire.com/mnr/adcouncil/36936/. It's worth the 32 seconds of your time.

In the ad, a teen girl is followed from morning until night by a boy talking at her through a giant cell phone that bleeps and vibrates with each new message:

G-morning, sunshine. ... Wakey, wakey. Text me. ... Are your parents home later? We can hang. ... L-U-V love you ... JK. ... Holler back. ... Holler back. ... Holler back. ... Are you with your friends? That's lame. ... We're in a huge fight right now. ... X-O-X-O ... Is it something I did? ... Are you on the way to the mall? ... I'm lonely. ... Nude pix, send me some. ... Text me.

Many parents may watch this ad and feel increasingly twitchy as they consider the teenagers in their own homes constantly fidgeting with cell phones. All that reading and typing, reading and typing. How often does any mother or father look at what's scrolling across the screen of that parentally funded phone?

"A lot of parents hear about this and, just like with traditional domestic violence, they never think it's happening with their daughter," Family Violence Prevention Fund spokesman Brian O'Connor said. "We're committed to helping their kids build healthy relationships. This will be a two-year campaign, and we're going to constantly refresh it."

While it would be nice if parents stepped up en masse to educate their daughters, O'Connor said that it's more likely that kids worried about friends will send them a link to the Web site.

"Kids tend to turn to each other," he said.

Especially when a parent turns away.