The Computer Wore Menace Shoes

After a couple months of leaving the topic alone, some media outlets – for whatever reason – decided to poke the sleeping monster of “sexting” and extract a few hundred words-long story from it for appearance’s sake. It’s sort of like trying to make up for all these lurid stories about Tiger Woods by showing a glimmer of social conscience without abandoning the topic of sex.

Sexting, for the uninitiated who should consider themselves fortunate, is a portmanteau of “sex” and “texting.” It refers to the epidemic of young people sending sexual content, such as naked photographs, of themselves via cell phone text messaging. If you want to be technical, however, “texting” is the wrong term, because images are sent via Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is obviously less friendly to those who like to create word mash-ups. By the way, dibs on “MMX.”

How sure are you? Seventy-five percent? That's a good figure. Pretty confident.

What led to a new story about sexting and its accompanying headlines and teases designed to scare the bejesus out of parents of children ages 12-40? An Associated Press-MTV poll. (Oh, sure. MTV is bad until it hooks up – pun intended – with the AP to issue a survey about teens sharing sexually explicit content of themselves. Then parents are all ears.)

According to the poll, more than 25 percent of Americans aged 14-24 have participated in sexting. Do you know what that means?

It means nearly 75 percent of that same group has not done so. One-fourth of a group is significant, but the story ignores seems to consider the three-fourths that doesn’t do it inconsequential.

But what really takes the cake is how the phenomenon is explained:

Research shows teenage brains are not quite mature enough to make good decisions consistently. By the mid-teens, the brain’s reward centers, the parts involved in emotional arousal, are well-developed, making teens more vulnerable to peer pressure.

There’s a 25 percent chance your teen is sexting, and it’s because he or she is stupid and immature. Are you worried now? Are you?

Not only is sexting an epidemic, according to several media sources, but it’s also constitutionally protected speech, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wrong, media. There’s no epidemic. Statistics this low don’t lie. Wrong, ACLU. The Constitution doesn’t talk about freedom of anything but speech.

The ACLU sued to block a Pennsylvania district attorney from filing child pornography charges against three teens on the grounds the cell phone snapshots are protected by the First Amendment. Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick offered 17 other students a deal, allowing them to attend a 10-hour sexual violence and pornography class rather than facing prosecution.

The New York Times reported three female students weren’t interested in the deal, which is how the ACLU lawsuit comes into play. It alleges the students’ First and Fourth Amendment rights have been violated, the Fourth Amendment violations being from the school finding the photos after confiscating the students’ cell phones.

There’s a simple three-point solution to this problem: 1) prosecutors stop filing charges against stupid kids unless it’s actually child pornography, 2) the ACLU stops pretending stupid kids exposing themselves to each other through technology is free speech and 3) kids stop being stupid.

Unfortunately, this plan will probably never be realized. Reasonable people will recognize that, even if prosecutors stop being overzealous and the ACLU reigns in the litigation, teens will always be stupid.

Obviously the potential consequences of sending out racy pictures doesn’t sink in to every adolescent’s brain. Anybody with common sense knows cell phones can get lost or stolen, pictures can be forwarded, intercepted or posted online, and relationships can end badly in a second.

But it shouldn’t be law enforcement’s job to punish juvenile indiscretions of that nature, and the ACLU shouldn’t have to cry “free speech” for things that aren’t a constitutional issue.

One of these days, kids are just going to have to learn to keep it to themselves. Few people want to see you naked on the Internet, and you probably don’t want the ones who do to see that sort of thing.