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Sexting Is Newest Disturbing Trend Among Teens

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By KEITH MORELLI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 12, 2009

It seems like every newfangled technology designed to make our lives easier and more enjoyable, drifts into the risqué world of sex.

Videocassette recorders and tapes that evolved into DVDs have fertilized the pornographic industry. So has the Internet, an indispensible tool for research and communication, also is a prime home for smut.

Cell phones that are commonplace can send secret messages via texting. Cell phones now double as cameras and can take and store photos and even send them to friends and acquaintances. Enter the art of sexting.

It's like texting, but with racy pictures.

Mostly it's happening among teenagers, which technically makes it a child pornography crime.
Nonetheless, it's catching on across the nation:

-- An Ohio teenager sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend and when they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls, who harassed Jesse Logan. The ordeal sent her into a spiraling depression.

In July, 2008, Logan hanged herself in her bedroom. She was 18.

-- A 19-year-old Polk County man was accused of sending naked pictures of himself on his cell phone to a 14-year-old girl's cell phone. Ronald Eugene Steward made his first appearance before a Polk judge this week and was ordered held under $105,000 bail.

-- Over the weekend, Pinellas County middle school teacher Christy Lynn Martin, 32, was arrested on allegations she sent naked pictures of herself to the cell phone of a 14-year-old boy, an eighth-grader at Azalea Middle School, where she worked.

She was released this week after posting $20,000 bail.

Alan Grieco, a Winter Park psychologist who has treated sex offenders in Central Florida for more than two decades, said the sexting phenomenon doesn't surprise him.

"I just think it's the latest manifestation of using technology and putting a sexual twist on it," he said. "When you look back, hasn't everything done this? Let's just face it. Every communicative technology has been used in some sexual way."

Just why teens take compromising photos of themselves also isn't entirely a mystery, he said. Most sexting incidents involving girls begin with suggestions from boyfriends or male acquaintances.

"Girls, for their part, may be struggling with low self esteem," he said. "Fitting in is huge when you're a teen and that's a way to be cool, complying with requests to things that are a little bit edgy."

The problems show up later, he said. Photos can get out, be posted on the Internet. They can lead to criminal charges and close doors down the road.

"Years later, after you join the convent or the ministry or even politics," he said, "it can be very compromising."

National surveys say that 20 percent of teenagers have sent or received naked pictures over their cell phones. And nearly half of those say they realize the photos may go beyond where they intended.

Good parenting can help, Grieco said. Moms and dads should not be judgmental, but they should make it clear that posing for photos is fine, as long as it doesn't cross the line. Bathing suits are acceptable but anything beyond that can lead to embarrassment and even criminal charges.

Grieco said he is treating a client who is a registered sex offender because of a sexting incident.

A few years ago, his client, then 20, was dating a 17-year-old girl. He took a nude photo of her on his cell phone. He didn't send it to anyone else. He broke up with the girl and his new girlfriend found the photo and sent it to the first girl's parents.

The man was charged with child pornography.

Child protection officials say the photos could land in the hands of pedophiles intent on preying on teens and children.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said that of the 2,100 children it has identified as online porn victims, a quarter of them initially sent the images themselves.

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760.

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