Just wondering here, but just because the kid used the cellular device at school, it doesn't seem to me that the school has the right to go through texts and pictures. Isn't there some type of invasion of privacy here?

Smells like another place where parents went AWOL. Let's see it as another cautionary tale about how society "educate" children.

Yes, this is a case of "PC-Incduced Lobotomy" at the Greenburg PD.

Good question, kg. Maybe one of the lawyers around here will drop in and weigh in.

I think there is a huge disconnect here between the generations. I saw my first porno when I was in college. Todays kids are literally growing up with it, and it is so extreme now.

And?

Schools have the right to search anything on school property. Cell phones, cars, anything.

I'm still not totally against this. And you'd think Amy'd be happy that at least the girls are being charged too. It's illegal to have naked pics of minors. period. You can't even take a pic of your toddler in the tub anymore. If we're gonna have the laws, we've got to enforce them.

So, if teens brains can't work right, how did 13 year olds manage to command fighting ships, and 12 year olds run households, not that many years ago? I doubt our physical development has slowed down all that much since the 1700s. I think kids are treated and expected to be idiots, and live up to it. If they were given actual responsibility, they'd shape up. I think every kid over 14 should have a job, and be in school. I did. My brothers did. My parents did. Guess how many delinquents we've bred?

A simliar thing happened at Daughter #1's high school earlier this year. It was 2 girls and a boy, one girl was giving the boy a BJ in one of the girls' bathrooms and the other was taking pictures on her cell phone and sending them to people. They all 3 got busted and suspended from school for 10 days, and that was the end of it. If any kids are still doing this, though, they've either gotten more discreet, because we haven't heard about it, or they just don't give a rat's ass. #1 said she knew one of the girls, it was the same one who set her science teacher's hair on fire last year. THIS is the one who needs a good swift kick in the ass. o.O

"On the bright side, it doesn't seem to have occurred to the Greensburg cops to start jailing teens for arson for lighting their farts on fire."

Don't give them ideas. It's bad enough when folks don't use their heads. Unfortunately, sometimes it's worse when they do.

I kind of agree with momof3 here. Yes, it's true that the cerebral cortex is still underdeveloped in teens, but, let's face it, every kid from birth onward learns to live down to the expectations placed on them. I firmly agree that we need to make it clear to teens that we EXPECT self-control and that they WILL be judged by their actions.

I teach my kindergartener these things every day. I see the employees of the recreation center teach troubled fourth-graders anger management. I see kids with AUTISM improve their behavior when educated about expectations. Sex hormones are just another hurdle in a lifetime of hurdles that human beings must be taught to rise above.

"If they were given actual responsibility, they'd shape up."

AMEN. They tend to interpret being given this kind of responsibility as a form of respect, and then they ten to live up to it. At least that was my experience teaching high school - I would give them the impression that it was up to them to act like citizens and set and enforce behavior standards and my job was to ensure that it didn't become the Lord of the Flies. (Anyway, that's the way I presented it; classroon management was still my responsibility.) And time after time the standards they wanted were basically a library atmosphere.

"In Terrorum." Using the law to inspire terror in the targeted population of potential miscreants. "Kill one -- terrorize a thousand." Sound familiar?

The punishment won't fit the crime, but so what?

All this does is reveal the ever-increasing idiocy of our society. Criminalizing the possession of an image of a physically developed person based on the unknowable -- the age of the person (some 19 year-olds look 13 and vice-versa) -- is simply absurd. Criminalizing the production of an image of one's own body is simply absurd.

In my view it's just more of the same old "zero tolerance" = "zero thought" mode of justice.

"how does the school have the right to search a telephone because a telephone was used against the rules?"

This is pretty much just cynicsm but the 4th amendment generally does not apply to minors. So the police want to send a message, how about scheduling a school assembly?

We just passed an IT policy here at work. It has a section about allowable behavior on usenet groups but nothing about blog comments!

Law/policy is just too cumbersome, blunt, and slow to keep up with today's technological changes. I see this as a legislative failure as much as a law enforcement failure. Re-write the law. Photographing yourself, disseminating voluntarily should not be disemination of child pornography, create a new class of criminal behavior to encompass this behavior.

Yes we want to discourage this but ruining lives needlessly is cruel and grouping it in with actual child porn distribution cheapens the real crime, which should remain extremely heinous.

"In loco parentis"

Latin for "in place of a parent." A person or institution that assumes parental rights and duties for a minor.

From Wiki (I know, Wiki's lame but I'm lazy. Do your own research if you want to know more.)...

New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985) upheld the search of lockers and other personal space while on school property, indicating that students are not afforded the same rights as adults in other settings and stating that while acting in loco parentis, school officials are still representatives of the state.

In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1987) the Supreme Court similarly ruled that "First Amendment rights of students in the public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment" and schools may censor school-sponsored publications (such as a school newspaper) if content is "...inconsistent with its basic educational mission."

"the first amendment does"

Remember the Bong Hits for Jesus case?
From Justice Stevens' dissent: "This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message."

We've come a long way since your high school journalism class.

I find the inconsistencies in how we treat people from the ages, of say 13-21, fairly disturbing.

We realize that teens aren't mature and set many restrictions on them. And yet we hold them responsible for crimes as if they were adults.

We don't hold retarded people 100% responsible for their actions (of course, it's up to a jury on a case by case basis, but overall as a society we respect the idea that people with mental disability are judgment impaired). Likewise, we need to examine these types of cases more closely and start using more common sense. A pot charge from when you're 19, in college, can really fuck you over...(just in case my sister's reading!).

My understanding is that the purpose of child pornography laws are to prevent or punish the sexual exploitation of children. If these girls are taking the pictures of their own free will and sending them to the boys, I fail to see the exploitation.

2 points, as a school administrator, I have dealt with this type of situation about 4 times in 2 years. None of our kids have been charged. According to the statues here there has to be a “sexual component” or focus of the pictures for them to rise to the level of child porn. A picture of your naked kid on the bear skin rug is not porn, but one of just their genitalia, would be. The only kids in this district that were charged, that I know of, were some girls that were collecting and then sending out many different pictures of the girls and boys at their school, this also led to the arrest of an adult pedophile who was registered and trying to meet these kids, things worked out
Point 2 I can search the phone, if that is the reason for being in my office.The second time I had to deal with this, I had over 30 phones turned in at lunch. The kids had been texting and sending messages in class, so I checked to see if it was an academic situation (cheating), or a discipline one (disrupting class). It turned out 4 pictures were making the rounds. I just cited each kid for a tech violation; parents have to pick up the phones, and had them erase them, worked out well, education and information rather than punishment.

law of unintended consequences, live it or else. I can tell my 14er this every day, but he still doesn't think of future outcomes the way an adult would.

That is one of two related issues I can see here. The other is that there has NEVER been such a device as a camera phone before. Cameras that you had to get the film developed for, or digital with media that had to be run through a computer to be broadcast. Either way there was no instantaneous way to make an image and broadcast it. There had to be a lot of forethought in making an image. That meant that someone had to be determined to make it happen. Then there is plenty of time to think "am I going to get caught/is this wrong/is this smart". When you can shove a lens in your pants, and hit send, there is no time to really think on it past the original impulse.

Which brings me back to the original point. Impulse control has never been a feature of teens. When we were young and working after school [I started in my mom's store at 13] that didn't impart impulse control. It was a framework of things to do. THAT is a difference. Keeping a teen busy enough to not get into trouble as much, is time honored, and really handy. It doesn't help control the impulse though. Some kids are better with it than others, some wouldn't think of doing anything, and some are just uncontrollable. Parents and teachers have to do the best they can, and judiciously.

Understanding all that doesn't make for easy law though. Those boys are lucky the girls didn't want to do anything more, cuz they could've ended up jailed for the real thing. The sending of image is a whole other thing, but overzealous adults abound. Punishing kids to send a message has to be well thought out, but it doesn't sound like the prosecutor cares about that. At such a low level, I would think that this should be a parental responsibility only. Why the prosecutor thinks "sending a message" would work in this case, I don't know. But the impulse is that you want the word out before something bad actually happens.

the money would be better spent in educating students to the unintended consequences that are out there... maybe schools themselves should teach online consequence as a part of curriculae. [except for the part where there is no money for it.] The reason I think about the school and not tha parent doing that, is this takes some tech saavy that many adults don't have. I work in the IT world where engineers with several degrees will download a virus without thought and then come crying to me when it bricks their hard-drive. The concept is simple, but the execution is hard. Anything you EVER do online stays somewhere will it come back to bite you? Now how much harder is it to get that across to a kid who can't see past high school yet? "we just found a tush shot of you from 15 years ago online, and HR wants to talk to you..." It could happen...

IMHO this isn't just one question, but dealing with never before seen tech, and trying to apply old law to it... and old ways of thinking.

Anything you EVER do online stays somewhere, will it come back to bite you?

Oh yeah: One that came back to the originator is this e-mail. The pilot let out some info, but the last paragraph was what got him in trouble.

I had my own personal website back in the day and was working as a temp at an unnamed company. I made some comment on the bottom of my page about my job, and then I was never hired by them. They didn't get rid of me as a temp -- but I was basically got from the interview that I was permanently out of the running.

Why do these kids even have cellphones? Parents like to think its so they can keep tabs on their kids when really all the kids want to do is ridiculous stuff like this. If people knew how to parent we wouldn't need to keep tabs on anybody. Charge the parents, not the kids.

Why do these kids even have cellphones?

All I can think for this is have a reality check. Cell phones are now so common that most phone companies are getting rid of the pay phones. They aren't profitable.

We have now reached the digital age where being out of contact is the exception rather than the norm.

I knew it was time to get a cell phone when a few years back I saw an old guy (looked like he knew Moses on a personal basis) driving a tractor down the road with a load of hay and talking on his cell.

Why are parents so convinced that sex is bad? Their kids are horny as hell and are going to experiment with each other. The only thing they can do is educated them about protection against pregnancy and disease and then step back. They will find a way to have sex nomatter what the adults say.

"I find the inconsistencies in how we treat people from the ages, of say 13-21, fairly disturbing."

I don't know why you would. Not only are laws for that sort of thing passed by voters like yourself, the 18-21 age group is notoriously absent from all sorts of public affairs. Thus letting others determine what they may do, legally.

And, of course, if you are like the bulk of citizens, you don't mind that the Federal government comes in and imposes Federal standards for the 1st Amendment, but strenuously object to the same thing w/r/t other issues in the Bill of Rights. You might not notice that power brokers count on activist energy being dissipated in noise on many issues; let 'em talk, they won't actually do anything.

> Sex hormones are just another
> hurdle in a lifetime of hurdles
> that human beings must be taught
> to rise above.

I'll settle for containment... Your sentiment is perfect but I'll quibble with the wording, "hurdle" "rise above". Almost everyone's sexuality is a burden for them at some time or another, but calling it a "hurdle" sounds kind of puritan. Too many people (such as gays, teenage masturbators, and every minority you can name) have been told their sexuality is something low and despicable. It's probably better just to say this is part of life that needs boundaries.

> I find the inconsistencies in
> how we treat people from the
> ages, of say 13-21, fairly
> disturbing.

Perhaps the weirdness we have about teen sex (and child sex) is a product of divorce culture. With so many parents shattering the souls of their children in early times anyway, it's easier to pretend that this part of a kid's life is a foggy midnight of freaky noises and uncontrollable impulse: 'I just don't know what's going on with these teenagers with their tattoos and their Ipods....

That's more palatable than admitting that sex problems are much less frequent in the homes of loving, intact families. Our tolerance of divorce brings complicity with the blood relations who ignore these kid's interests.

Thanks Crid, I agree that my wording wasn't the best. In fact, I just had a near-fight with one of my boy's teacher's educational assistants who FREAKED OUT just because my five-year-old said, "My mommy has a vagina." ...Well, yes. Yes, I do. I utterly fail to see why he should have received a completely age-inappropriate punishment from her for stating a simple biological fact. Most adults simply cannot deal with any inkling of sexual curiosity from children, and neither demonizing sexuality nor enforcing the most puritan sentiments of said adults is not the answer.

Age-appropriate punishment... you know, I think that is the ultimate key to this issue-- how does society determine age-appropriate punishment for teenagers? I agree that slapping people on a sex-offender registry is brainless. But they DO need legal consequences for doing stuff they've been told is illegal! So, what should those consequences be is the overriding question.

I'd have to believe that this is the least important topic for police to be on top of. Honestly. Some of the comments here are disturbing, too.

" I think there is a huge disconnect here between the generations. I saw my first porno when I was in college. Todays kids are literally growing up with it, and it is so extreme now."-eric

It took you till the age of eighteen to see a porno? I don't know how old you are, and what era you're from, but i don't think kids these days are seeing it any faster. I think you sir, were a late bloomer. Yeah, maybe its easier for these young generations to obtain it, but im sure if you took away the internet, all the boys would just go back to pretending to be eighteen at corner stores that don't care in order to buy a copy of hustler.

I feel like people need to re assess there view of the laws on child pornography. An old man running around with a camera taking pictures of minors is serious. A boy the age of fifteen being literally given/asked by a girl to take a picture of her half naked is not.

Though I like some of the suggestions made here, (giving children responsibility, etc.), but really, the catholic church has been trying for a millennia or two to stop people from doing stuff like this. They have yet to succeed.

"My understanding is that the purpose of child pornography laws are to prevent or punish the sexual exploitation of children. If these girls are taking the pictures of their own free will and sending them to the boys, I fail to see the exploitation.

Posted by: Steamer at January 16, 2009 1:08 PM"

You fail to see the exploitation because you think logically. This is contrary to what society has attempted to cram down everyone's throats the last 50 years. Its exploitation because, girls = sugar, spice and everything nice and boys are snails, tails and evil. Girls are always innocent flowers, angels etc. being taken advantage of by boys.

Mellisa G -

We had a similar problem with my seven year old, back when he was in preschool. He was climbing around on a retaining wall, when he slipped and smashed his testicles a bit. It was the first time he had ever actually gotten the pain in the testes and managed to get a scratch on his penis to boot.

When he was over the pain, he really felt like talking to the other boys in his preschool about it and was bent on using it as the topic of the next writers workshop they had. We made it clear that it really wouldn't be a good topic to use for the workshop, but didn't drive home well enough, that it was not appropriate to discuss in school (mind you, we thought it being inappropriate was ridiculous, but he had already had some trouble with this in that class).

So he decided to warn some of the other boys in his class about what had happened. Which led to yet another call from the teacher and the admonishment that we should discuss this with his therapist. Mind you, his therapist was pretty clear that the earlier issue was entirely a problem with the school, not our child.

The first round of inappropriate we went through, led to a discussion about whether or not our son might be the victim of sexual abuse. Why? Because having quit napping almost two years prior, naptime was fucking boring for him. Apparently he had decided that playing with his penis was a great way to pass the time. He wasn't even four quite yet, but they figured this had to be a sexual thing and not just a little boy, fairly recently out of diapers, figuring out that this penis thing does weird stuff when you touch it.

So they wanted us to get him assessed, made veiled accusations and forced us into a position of having to explain complicated ideas about sexuality to a four year old. Fucking ridiculous.

right there with 'ya duwayne... finally had to pull #1 son out of his school because of the puritanical teachers that really think that boys are teh ev0l, because they won't sit still and do what they are told. This because of a triple dog dare by second graders to snap a girls underware. Basically all the boys in his class were suspended for several days... How am I supposed to explain to a 2nd grader that because he was in the rom, and was a boy, he was getting booted? Never mind that the boys treated it like a mini vacation. I eventually went with the explanation that somebody that dares you to do something is a coward unless they do it themselves first...

Oh BOY do I feel your pain, DuWayne and SwissArmyD!!! It's not funny at the time AT ALL-- I went round and round with a totally brain-dead school counselor about age-appropriate behavior for kindergarteners and developmentally appropriate behavior for kids with autism. I'm thinking we'll be able to laugh about it later... I hope.

Here we go into the Radioactive Burning Stupid that is the Zero Tolerance Policy. Circumstances must be considered by educators, but these legal policies make it mandatory for offenses involving genitalia to be reported to social services!