Sexting and Our Moral Future
Posted By editor On April 20, 2009 (2:38 pm) InCommentary
by Rushworth M. Kidder
survey: According to a survey last fall by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of teens say they have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves.
You’d think we would have foreseen it. Give a kid a cell-phone camera, and we know they’ll take pictures. Give them messaging capability, and we know they’ll start texting messages and sending photos of themselves to each other — alone or with friends, goofy or serious.
Then why didn’t it occur to us that some of those shots would be in the nude?
Once again we’ve been caught flat-footed by the latest teen fad: sexting. According to a
This isn’t the first time our lack of moral futurism has tripped us up. Several years ago it was DWT — driving while texting. Only when DWT created headlines with the death of five teenage girls in upstate New York in June 2007 — and then, spectacularly, in the Los Angeles commuter train wreck that killed 25 people last September — did we begin to understand that it could be fatal.
Shame on texting drivers and teenage sexters? Sure. But shame on us as well. We regularly let our technologies leverage our ethics, so that single unethical acts can create enormous, unforeseen ethical problems. Then we act surprised when fads or calamities strike. "Wow!" we say. "Technology has created a whole new ethical problem! Who knew?"
We knew — or at least we should have. Here we’ve got these cell-phone cameras. Here we live in a video culture drenched with explicit eroticism. Here we access an Internet system where pornography is the single most common target of Web searches. How hard would it have been to imagine what would happen if you put these three threads into the hands of teenagers with little instruction and no warnings?
What’s wrong with sexting? For starters, here are seven arguments:
It constitutes the kind of "lewd and lascivious behavior" that society seeks to avoid and the law generally prohibits.
When you transmit such images, you may be guilty of circulating pornography — a tough charge, especially when it involves minors and could lead to permanent labeling as a criminal sex offender.
Sexting surrenders a key aspect of your individuality — the way you invite others to see you — to a medium beyond your control. What keeps recipients from forwarding your picture to dozens of others — or posting it for everyone everywhere to see?
Sexting may encourage aggressive sexual activity that, absent responsibility or affection, is especially harmful to young minds and bodies.
Sexting promotes a desensitized peer culture where sexual activity becomes more difficult to resist — even among teens who avoid instant gratification and value abstinence.
If such a culture leads to teen pregnancy and abortion — or early marriages at high risk of divorce, generating more single-parent families — the psychic and financial burdens to society can be severe.
If such a culture leads to rape, domestic abuse, and sexual predation, the consequences are enormous.
What should we do? The Vermont Senate recently passed and its House is now considering legislation that, oddly enough, reduces the penalties for sexting. Supporters on both sides of the aisle explain that they aren’t legalizing sexting so much as partially decriminalizing it. Why? Because after 12-year-old Brooke Bennett was sexually assaulted and murdered in Vermont last summer, the legislature crafted one of the nation’s toughest sexual predator laws. The proposed sexting law, its supporters argue, would merely ensure that juveniles caught sending these pictures won’t be subject to punishment under that toughened law. They could still be prosecuted under pornography or lewd-behavior statutes, but they wouldn’t be placed on sex-offender registries for the rest of their lives.
Fair enough. Young people making stupid mistakes deserve reformation, not retribution. But how?
Here’s an idea: What if cell phones came equipped with a feature that, whenever any picture was sent or received, would automatically send a copy to a designated third party? Some parents wouldn’t use it, trusting their teens. Others would have the pictures sent to an archive to access later if they suspected something. Still others would have the pictures sent directly to their own cell phone in real time. Whatever they did, parents would have to make a choice about whether to have that feature permanently turned on or not. And that choice would compel a conversation about sexting with their teens. "Tell me why you want the feature turned off," parents could say. "If you’re only sending or getting innocent pictures, having it on won’t bother you. But if you plan on sexting — sorry, I’m not paying for your phone."
Not every parent would opt in, and some teens might buy their own phones. But every would-be sexter would have to suspect that some parents would have access. Would he or she (and most sexters are female) be so quick to send pictures?
Whatever the result, the very availability of such a feature would raise a tough moral dilemma, pitting the rights of teenage privacy against the responsibilities of adult supervision. We don’t want censorship, but we also don’t want pornography. If every parent’s purchase of a phone for a teen would provide the occasion for a serious ethical conversation on that point, we’d be well on our way to addressing sexting. Then, instead of technology leveraging our ethics, we might find that our ethical foresight was beginning to drive our use of technology.
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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