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Won’t someone think of the children!!!!!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/04/beatbullying_survey/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8182033.stm

Another story designed to shock parents into mirco chipping their kids. I smell a Quango trying to justify its own existence via a shocking and entirely misleading headline!

So 38% of a group of 2000 teenagers have admitted to sending sexy messages to their classmates or significant others. But please, before the parents on the board break out the cotton wool padding to wrap up their children lets take a closer look at the figures eh shall we?

Firstly the age range concerned. 11-18 year olds. Well already an alarm bell is ringing here! For starters an 18 year old is an adult so why are they being included in the survey at all? Secondly no mention is made of the age spread. If 90% of the positives came from 18 years olds and only 1% from 11 year olds then suddenly it doesn’t seem as shocking. The fact that it’s not mentioned seems to indicate a bit of figure padding has gone on here.

Why are 11 year olds and 18 year olds being included in the same category anyway? It’s fairly common sense than there is a world of difference between an 11 year old and an 18 year old or even a 16 year old. Lumping them together just makes the results that much more meaningless and again I suspect has been done to make it look far worse than it actually is.

Also in the UK (can’t speak for elsewhere) the legal age of consent is 16. Why are people over the age of consent being included here? If they are able to legal have sex then why on earth is an issue for them to send or receive a sexy text message. Moreover is it anyone’s business if they do? If it’s legal for a 16 year old girl to be naked in the same room as me then why is it illegal for me to have a photograph of this? So out of the 8 ages covered 3 are irrelevant and it’s those 3 years which probably make up the vast bulk of cases.

Lets continue shall we.

offensive or distressing sexual image

Well that’s 2 very different things for startes and offensive or distressing by whose standards? Was the sender or receiver offended or distressed? I doubt it. I can only speak from my own experience but as a horny teenager I would certainly not have been ‘distressed’ at seeing a photo of girls classmate norks. Was this a set of criteria drawn up and applied by the charity themselves? Far more likely.

Two per cent of the messages came from adults.

So this is almost entirely teenagers experimenting with each other? Like they have since the beginning of time? Shock horror!

Just 2% from adults? So that would seem to knock the pedophile angle on the head. Going back to the previous point that considering that 1/8th of the surveyed people where themselves adults and a further 2/3 are above the age of consent, making it perfectly legitimate for them to be engaged in a sexual relationship with an adult, just how many of this 2% are nonces looking to groom a underage child? Almost certainly a tiny tiny fraction.

Beatbullying said that in many cases girls, in particular, are bullied into making and distributing explicit pictures of themselves.

No figures I notice, just a non committal, unspecific yet highly implicate word, ‘many’. Sounds to me like 99% of this text are entirely consensual. Did they regret it afterwards? Perhaps, but that’s not the same thing.

So where am I heading with this. Well predictably the story ends with this sound byte:

"Politicians must pool together organisations like Beatbullying to create an intervention and prevention task force in schools and the local community," she added.
Schools Minister Diana Johnson told the BBC that the government was engaged in developing policies to tackle all forms of bullying, including developing schemes in partnership with technology firms to combat high-tech threats.

*Bangs head against a wall* excellent, yet more interference and legislation to solve an issue that as we can see is not as prevalent as this manipulative drivel would have us believe.

So the next time the government wheels out the latest rounds of communications monitoring or intrusive background check legislation for anyone who even lives on the same street as a child, this is just the sort of misinformation they will use to justify it. Be afraid.

This reminds me of the article I read some weeks back about a 13-14 year old girl who was charged with pedophilia for posting up racy pictures of herself on myspace.

Because of the Miranda Laws in the US, she was going to be charged and registered as a sex offender. I forget what happened with that case. I should dig that article up from the interwebs.

Bah! You people aren't seeing the golden goose here. Its an excuse to quit paying for teenager cellphones. After all, the parents are just doing it for the children!

The world is quickly becoming a plaything of strident, ultra-minority fearmongering lobbyists. Another sign that the Human race is doomed.

Go with the Aussie solution, ban any dialing device other than the rotary.

I think that if you are underage and caught sending sexually explicit photos then your parents should be required by law to send sexually explicit photos of themselves to you. Talk about scared straight.

barlio wrote:I think that if you are underage and caught sending sexually explicit photos then your parents should be required by law to send sexually explicit photos of themselves to you. Talk about scared straight.

This.

These Mary Whitehouse-esque ultra-convervative lobbyists don't have nearly as much influence as they used to.

Frazzled wrote:Bah! You people aren't seeing the golden goose here. Its an excuse to quit paying for teenager cellphones. After all, the parents are just doing it for the children!

QFT.

When (actually IF is probably the more appropriate) I have kids, you can bet your arse that they're getting pre-paid phones - and a purely functional one at that.

They're also gong to enjoy dial-up, and only dial-up until they know not to type in their password whenever a window pops up telling them to "log-in".

This comes as a surprise how exactly?

Some 45% of teenagers who had received explicit content said it had come from another teenager, and 23% said it was from their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Are these being counted as different sources, or is the later a subset of the former?

If it's the second option, combined with 2% being by adults, it would look like most of the messages are by some unknown spammer with unlimted texting.

The whole article is really vague with how this study was done, not that that's surprising in this day and age. It's a study! It was done by experts! Ooooh!