Sexting

[BlindLemonAlley]

How would you know if your teen was sexting? With things like Snapchat the picture disappears so there’s no evidence and it’s so easily hidden from parents I assume.

You could see what the reaction is when you mention the law e.g.:

In England & Wales, under s1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988: it is an offence to send an indecent, offensive or threatening form of electronic communication to another person.

...and a reminder that such pictures can and do get saved and shared. If they wouldn't strip naked in front of the entire school then they should not send such pictures as it is the same thing.

Thanks for your replies. We do have conversations with regards to the law and the dangers of sharing and I am pretty sure that it’s not and issue.

I recently had a conversation with a teacher friend who said that parents would be shocked at the extent of this stuff and that despite the monitoring of online activity things like Snapchat make it impossible to monitor.

In reality? There's no way of knowing. Teens will be teens you have just got to let them make their own mistakes and when they mess up be there for them. Also, there's no point regulating their use of Apps like these it will just break their trust but do warn them of the consequences of these things.

Messing up like this sometimes can be retrieved. Teens will be teens accepts that teens will be stupid and I don't think that's fair.

Talk with your teen. I recently supported my neighbour with an incident. Her ds 14/15 yo received naked photos of a girl in his year out of the blue and so over a period of months so did lots of other boys. For some reason the girl then reported all the boys (6 in total). The school suggested somebody was sharing them. School, police and SS have been involved. The boys’ phones were searched and had various other images and as her son had sent a penis pic to somebody he didn’t know this was flagged up. SS thought he was being groomed and lots of meetings were arranged to ensure this wasn’t so. Everything was so fast and thorough and she is thankful to everyone. Her son has learnt a lot from this too as have his friends. A support worker visited before his file was closed to discuss porn, dating, relationships etc in a frank manner too.

One thing that was raised was that checking phones would not have prevented the images as many were snapchat or instagram or whatever ones instantly go.