Sex and predatory adults are not the biggest dangers teenagers face online. Their main risk is garden-variety kid-on-kid meanness.

What’s the Matter with Teen Sexting?

By Judith Levine

A couple of weeks ago, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, prosecutors charged six teenagers with creating, distributing, and possessing child pornography. The three girls, ages 14 and 15, took nude or seminude pictures of themselves and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys, ages 16 and 17, who are among the defendants. Police Captain George Seranko described the obscenity of the images: They “weren’t just breasts,” he declared. “They showed female anatomy!”

Greensburg’s crime-stoppers aren’t the only ones looking out for the cybersafety of America’s youth. In Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah (at last count) minors have been arrested for “sexting,” or sending or posting soft-core photo or video self-portraits. Of 1,280 teens and young adults surveyed recently by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, one in five said they engaged in the practice — girls only slightly more than boys.

Seranko and other authorities argue that such pictures may find their way to the Internet and from there to pedophiles and other exploiters. “It’s very dangerous,” he opined.

How dangerous is it? Not very, suggests a major study released this month by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet Studies. “Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies,” the result of a yearlong investigation by a wide range of experts, concludes that “the risks minors face online are in most cases not significantly different from those they face offline, and as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems.” Almost all youth who end up having sex with adults they meet online seek such assignations themselves, fully aware that the partner is older. Similarly, minors who encounter pornography online go looking for it; they tend to be older teenage boys.

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