Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend. They broke up soon after. In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it. In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate. But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.
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A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone. The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender. Experts condemned the case as ludicrous. The boy was, however, punished by the courts, and had to agree to be subject to warrantless searches by law enforcement for a year, in addition to other penalties. The young man was also named in the media and suffered a suspension as quarterback of his high school football team while the case was being resolved. Cormega Copening, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was prosecuted as an adult under federal child pornography felony laws, for sexually exploiting a minor. The minor was himself. Copening was charged with four counts of making and possessing images of himself and one count of possessing a naked image of his year-old girlfriend. His girlfriend, Brianna Denson, took a plea deal after being prosecuted on similar charges for having naked, suggestive pictures of herself on her cellphone.
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Please refresh the page and retry. Dr Natasha Bijlani, a consultant psychiatrist at the Priory Hospital, said online pressures — particularly over sex and nudity — could even drive an upturn in the number of young people who go on to self-harm. S he added that the full impact of internet abuse and sexting - when intimate photographs are swapped between users - may not be apparent for years because psychological damage suffered in childhood can sometimes only manifest itself in later life. T he Priory Group disclosed that it had seen a sharp rise in the number pf unders treated for serious depression, anxiety and stress. In it dealt with just clients aged 12 to 17 for such issues, but last year the figure was , an increase of nearly 50 per cent, compared with a 25 per cent rise among adults over the same period. In March, research revealed how children as young as seven appearing in explicit images on the internet which has been posted by themselves or surreptitiously recorded by a third party. A report by online safety group the Internet Watch Foundation and Microsoft, the technology giant, which worked together on the research, said they identified nearly 4, images and videos in a snapshot covering three months last autumn. Of those, In a separate development it also emerged how increasing numbers of children are being bullied into taking explicit sexual pictures of themselves online.