She crunched the cookies in her mouth, carefully mashing them into chunks. She spit. They made a plunk sound as they hit the toilet water. The worst, the absolute worst thing had happened, and now, Maureen was sure, this was her only option. She could not show her face in the seventh grade.
Not my kid!
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Print article. Your tween daughter is so self-conscious about her body that getting her into a dressing room to try on her first bra required the slippery recruiting skills of a veteran MI5 spy. In a logical world, there would be no reason to imagine that any of these kids is snapping photos of their nascent naked naughty bits and texting them to others. Sexting in middle school sounds crazy. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anonymously surveyed more than 1, middle school students in Los Angeles, 20 percent reported having received a sext. And a random sampling of 1, users of the Internet safety tool Bark found that 5 percent of sixth through eighth graders exchanged sexually explicit material electronically with another person. Tweens and teens who send naked pictures may not necessarily be motivated by an interest in sex. Younger tweens may not even understand why anyone would ask them for naked pictures. The desire for peer validation is completely developmentally appropriate, Ayub says. This is a generation that grew up on a media diet loaded with objectifying sexual imagery.
Risky business
In April, residents of Louisa County, Va. When Hanna Rosin asked teens from Louisa County High School how many people they knew who had sexted, a lot of them replied: "Everyone. In her report on the Louisa County scandal for The Atlantic, Rosin set out to address the question, why are so many teenagers sending each other nude photos? How much does teen sexting have to do with actual sex? How should parents, and communities, respond? And how do child pornography laws apply? But by the law any picture of a minor is illegal and so they just ask the girl[s] who they call in for interviews, "Well, do you know anyone else who has naked pictures on their phone? And remember: This is a relatively small town so people are trusting the police officers. They all know each other. So then they call in five people and then they call in five people and then they call in five people and pretty soon the investigator has bins full of cellphones with pictures of naked kids that belong to teenagers.
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