Indiana Senators Rush To Put In Place Sexting Law When They Clearly Don't Understand Sexting
from the moral-panics! dept
"Until some terrible tragedy happens where a child or teenager commits suicide because they have been bullied by e-mail, texting or sexting," said Rep. Sandra Blanton.Bullied by sexting will lead to suicide? How? And how do you create a law to prevent that? Then there's the politician who wants to ban mobile phones in schools to deal with this issue:
"Keep them in lockers and not allow them in the classroom or on school property to do the sexting," Rep. Blanton said.Really? The sexting happens on school property? If that's the case, then wouldn't the issue be public nudity -- for which I would imagine there are already laws -- rather than "sexting"? If he just means that the sending of these photos continues on school property, I'm not really sure how keeping the phones in lockers fixes anything. It just means those messages will be sent after school when there's even less supervision of what the kids are doing. I guess that's the head-in-the-sand approach to dealing with things, but I'm not sure how it helps any.
Certainly the issue of sexting is one worth educating kids about, so they recognize the dangers of passing on such photos which can quickly multiply and be spread further in amazingly embarrassing ways. But I don't see how any law helps the issue at all -- but plenty of ways laws can make things worse -- especially when the politicians writing and voting on the laws don't even seem to understand what the issue is beyond "sexting = bad!"