The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Sexting in Middle School

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Sexting in Middle School

I think, all in all, I am a pretty liberal parent. My kids talk to me (okay, we shout, and cursing is allowed during these times), but generally, they know what I expect from them,

and I try to

meet their expectations. But a few days ago, while some friends were over, a group of girls began sexting the boys -- my boys and their friends.

I had heard of sexting, in the same way I had heard of bombs and assassinations and plagues. They were terrible events, but blessedly distant. I didn't worry too much about any of it. But then, over the weekend, during a sleepover, these girls decided to shoot pictures of areas that are covered on American beaches and send them to boys' cell phones. The girls are 13.

My response? I wanted to call the girls' parents.

The boys quietly deleted the images. They sat me down and explained this had been happening for quite some time, but since they knew I would become "justice mom" they didn't want to tell me.

"So, do you think there's something wrong with them?" I asked.

My high school boy told me if they took a picture of someone else and sent it, then, yes, that was wrong. But girls did it all the time. It was, he reasoned, their body and their choice.

My middle schooler agreed. He explained girls sometimes did this as a way of flirting.

"They're in the eighth grade," I protested, "they are children. Can't these pictures be downloaded to the Internet?"

The boys looked at me. After a few seconds of glaring, they explained the pictures (and sometimes acts) made them uncomfortable, but they came unbidden as text messages. The end result? They wished I had never found out.

But I did. And what I have learned is that there are potentially criminal charges for the sexters.

It is a form of telecommunications harrassment and depending on the age of the sexter, sending pictures like these can be construed as pandering obscene material. But that wasn't as bad as the next fact I discovered: kids as young as ten are engaging in this behavior (modeled by older siblings) and the behavior is not only increasing: it is exploding in popularity.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...: I had not heard about this. But, sadly, I'm not surprised. Our lives and those of our children are becoming so "virtual" and disconnected from reality that many are not counting the cost of their spontaneous choices. They are living for the moment. Thanks for letting us know about this new "trend." It's something to keep an eye out for in protecting our kids from other kids. Isn't that a horrible thing to have to say?

CJ; Wednesday, 04 June, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: It is horrible, CJ. I wasn't going to blog about this, but, as my boys predicted, the "justice mom" rides again. All the boys seemed so calm about the pictures; it has happened before. It could also be that I was raised with a whole lot less nudity than they were (no cable tv until college).
But it's the girls' AGES that leaves me shaking my head...; Wednesday, 04 June, 2008
Anonymous said...: My god.; Wednesday, 04 June, 2008
Bish Denham said...: This is new to me. Alas and alack, that Innocence lies dying at our feet. My heart is sore.; Saturday, 07 June, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Actually, the more I think about it, the more I blame the television culture. Kids see so much suggestive behavior from such a young age that it becomes normalized. They hit early puberty and act it out.; Saturday, 07 June, 2008
Write2ignite said...: I knew it happened, but didn't know the "proper" name for it. Thankfully, 10 year old can't even stand to wear jeans that MIGHT show her belly button. She says, "MOM! I hate low riders! They give me wedgies!"

AND she doesn't have a cell phone. She's thankful just to get to use the landline. Mwhahahahahah!!!

Besides...I'd have to lock her in our medieval tower if she even thought about anything like that.

so there.; Sunday, 08 June, 2008
Write2ignite said...: obviously I meant to say MY 10 year old in the above post...not just 10 year old. Duh. It's late. I'm tired.

I'm going to bed. :); Sunday, 08 June, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Good point, WW. I wonder how many of the parents of these girls have any awareness of their behavior. If you Google this, you can find it's all over US schools.
I also wonder how strong the peer pressure is on young teens who wouldn't normally participate in public displays of nudity. Is it an "I dare you..." kind of thing?; Monday, 09 June, 2008
Marcia said...: God help us.

Frankly, current social trends are one reason I write historical novels. I don't get these kids, and I'm beginning to wonder to what degree MG and tween kids even see themselves or their peers in their contemporary literature anymore. If this is really what's going on, their books are more innocent than they are.; Saturday, 12 July, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Thanks for visiting, Marcia!
I think, in fairness to MG and YA kids, there are a few kids involved in sexting, but like other bad behaviors such as drinking or cheating, that behavior affects them all.
When the subject came up around a group of my sons' friends, the kids acted really embarrassed about the whole trend. They can't help but be involved with it since they are involved with their peers, but I think, on the whole,the majority of kids are still pretty innocent.; Sunday, 13 July, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***