In September, a 13-year-old girl in Florida named Hope Witsell hanged herself. Raised in a rural Florida suburb, she was the only child of a church-going couple who met in the post office where they're both employed. "She often went fishing with her father in her big, white-framed sunglasses," according to the excellent reporting in this story in the St. Petersburg Times.
Last week, Hope's suicide became the second with a clear link to sexting and the peer torture that can follow from it. At the end of seventh grade last spring, Hope sent a photo of her breasts to a boy she liked, and the picture went viral at her school. "Tons of people talk about me behind my back and I hate it because they call me a whore!" Hope wrote in her journal before her death.
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As a grown-up and a parent, at first I was skeptical about how prevalent anything this blindly risky could really be. But I'm starting to think I was wrong. In three polls that have been conducted on the prevalence of sexting, the numbers are fairly high. The latest, which looks methodologically solid, is an MTV-Associated Press poll reported last week of about 1,450 teens and young adults aged 14 to 24. More than one-quarter said they'd been involved in sexting in some way. Ten percent had sent out naked pictures of themselves on a cell phone or online. And 17 percent of the kids who'd received such a picture reported passing it along to someone else.
Those results match up fairly well with research by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin, academics who direct the Cyberbullying Research Center, based on their 2007 survey of about 1,900 middle-schoolers. About 12 percent of the kids in that survey said they'd taken a picture of someone and posted it online without permission. That's a lower number than the MTV-AP poll, and the photos involved weren't necessarily sexually compromising. But these kids are younger, and the data was collected two years ago. So, again, dismaying. "Kids do it without thinking," Hinduju says of sexting. "It's a courtship ritual between boyfriend and girlfriend. Or in a more severe situation, there is coercion or trickery to get the picture. But it's becoming commonplace behavior, even if it seems moronic to you and me. We're talking about the neurological immaturity of youth."
This is painful for me to even read. But the reality is that several teens are doing this, and there's a good chance a teen that listens to you on Sunday morning or Wednesday night is doing this. So we need to address it. Not only is it immodest, it can be terribly damaging, as this story highlights.
On the topic of electronic media, I am of the opinion that not all media is morally neutral. For example, I don't believe what some say: that there is no inherit value difference between the written word and television. I believe that television, movies, and other video media can be useful, but that such media also discourages deep thinking and imagination. As a thinking Christian, a morally positive choice would be to watch less television (regardless of the content) and to read more (as long as it is spiritually beneficial).
With that in mind, there is something to be said for spending less time on electronic media and communication methods, especially social networking and texting, and more time on other activities, such as reading God's word and engaging in beneficial relationships with others. I am not saying that these electronic forms of communications cannot be used in a positive way. I do text and our ministry has a Facebook page for announcments. But as a method of relating to other human beings, they can often cause more harm than good. Here is one reason:
But it's also clear that e-mails and texts and social media have some traits of their own, as the writer danah boyd explains. The bar for becoming a cyber-bully, or even a cyber-bully's accomplice, is much lower than the bar for becoming an actual bully. To torment a girl with a nude photo via sexting, you don't have to Xerox her photo and pass it around, or yell a taunt in the cafeteria, or even whisper about it over the phone, explains Robert King, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. You can just press one button and forward the message to lots of other kids. And then those kids, one more step removed from the human being at the center of the flaying, can catch the contagion and spread it.
I realize that my stance on these forms of communication is not the most popular, but that's okay, because I'm used to it. I went to math camp. My hope is that we would help students at least think about how these tools affect their lives and the lives of their peers. And of course, I would hope that they would have the courage to stop the kind of abuse and bullying described in this article as soon as they see it, even if that's an unpopular stance.
