News Alert: 5 High School Freshman Arrested

Sexting. Arrests. Felonies. Teenagers. I wrote about this topic 2 weeks ago when 12 teenagers from New Trier High School were arrested in Winnetka, IL Sexting at New Trier.

Here we go again. It started on Nov. 6th as 3 high school freshman boys, 14 years old, were taken out of Warren Township High School in Gurnee, IL in hand cuffs. As of today, this incident has grown to 5 teenagers being arrested across 3 high schools.  All 5 kids are potentially facing felony charges of distribution of child pornography, serious consequences to their actions. Here is a Chicago Tribune article that provides the details of the incident.

In the past 2 weeks, I have met with 2 high school superintendents and the Winnetka Police Department. The question posed in every meeting has been the same: What do we need to do to get kids to understand the seriousness and consequences of sexting? The frustration expressed by the school administrators is immense. They feel that they are doing their best to educate the students on the dangers of the internet, specifically sexting, and yet the problems continue to plague them. My response to all of them is to keep talking to the students. Once is not enough. Twice is not enough. We have to continue the conversations with them in as many ways as we can. We need to show kids the news articles and engage them in conversation about it. Instead of saying things like this to  your child:

• Do you sext?
• Have you ever sext?
• If I ever catch you sending pictures like that, I’ll ______. You can fill in the blank.

Try asking your child this:

• What do you think about this?
• What would you do if someone sent you a picture like that?
• How scared do you think those kids are right now?

Let the conversation go where ever it goes. Don’t necessarily have a set agenda to the discussion. Let your teenager control it and take it where he is comfortable. I ran the experiment on this approach with my 16 year old. One comment he made was ‘I wonder how this will affect their chances of getting into colleges.’ Wow! Perfect! Great question! Now the topic is relevant and relatable to my kid. He’s thinking. He’s connecting the dots between actions and consequences. That’s the goal. It actually did not matter what I had to say about it. He got a really big point that we are trying to impress upon the kids and that is that there are serious consequences to these actions. But he made that connection to it by thinking about what is going on in his life, college choices, and how the sexting might affect that.

I am fortunate to work closely with one of the country’s leading experts on High Technology Crimes, Detective Rich Wistocki of the Naperville Police Department. Take a second to listen to his interview by Chicago Fox 32 about sexting and the laws around it. Rich is responsible for creating the Illinois laws that provide law enforcement with options other than felony charges for sexting.