Real Life Sexting Stories
Sexting can land you in a whole world of trouble, and these stories are real life stories that could happen to you if you sext. We read all about the consequences of sexting, and adults and teachers are always telling us about it and how terrible it is, but sometimes the reality of how bad sexting is just doesn't sink in until we learn about some real life stories of what terrible things have happened to those people who have sexted and realised what a horrible mistake that was.
Written by an anonymous teenage girl:
I was a normal 13 year old teenage girl, but one day everything changed for the worse. What happened to me I will never forget and will be imprinted on me for the rest of my life. There was this perfect boy in my life at the time, in the end he was one of the worst things that could have happened to me. I thought he was the one for me; we'd be together for a very long time. I was so happy when I was around him; he told me I was beautiful. All the right things a girl wants to hear, he told me and I believed him. After he had told me he loved me, one night he asked me if I would send a photo of my breasts. I took the photo that night, something I regret even now when I'm passed that chapter in my life.
I didn’t send the photo to him, the next day I asked my best friend if I should or not. She said the best thing a best friend could say to me that day, no. She told me I was better than that and that I shouldn’t have to send a photo for him to like me. Which is what I want you girls to know, even if a boy tells you that he loves you and that he won’t show anyone, still don’t do it. If he gets angry at you for saying no, in the end, he was really not worth your time. He should love you for who you are and not what your body looks like.
The day I asked my best friend if I should send it, I did a silly mistake and left the photo on my phone. I will never know why I didn’t just delete the photo right then and there, that is something I will never be able to tell you. That day, mistakes just kept on coming. I was in class chatting with my friends and not worrying about anything but myself, when someone who i thought was my friend stole my phone out of where I placed it in my pencil case, and found the photo amongst other photos in my phone. They sent it to their phone without me realising and before I knew it, the whole school had a photo of my breasts on their phone.
Unlike all the other girls that sent a photo to a guy around the time that I did, mine wasn’t taken lightly. I was called names, people came up in my face and yelled at me, over five people tried to bash me. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it would get better, but it kept getting worse. I didn’t know what to do or who to tell so I lived with being bullied for at least two months. I had no friends; everyone hated me for something I didn’t do. The feeling of being hated so much is hard to explain.
You were once the popular girl and you had a lot of friends and then one day everything changes. I became depressed and I hated my body from then on. I still have trouble trusting boys to this day. If I had the chance to go back and change everything I would. I never would have even considered taking the photo. Today I still have to live with the feeling that everyone knows what my body looks like, sometimes, even someone brings up what happened to me and I still feel disgusted with myself and ashamed of what I did.
I felt alone and not wanted at the time and the even worse thing is when you take a photo and what happened to me, happens to you, your parents find out. The way my mum looked at me, made me feel like I was disowned, she was ashamed to call me her daughter. My dad on the other hand, still to this day, we are and will never be as close as we used to be. This is nothing anyone would want to experience.
The best friend's point of view:
The day I found out what my friend had done. It was the when everything changed; I had found out that my best friend had taken a photo of her breasts and it had gotten around the whole school. Before all of it had happened she was a loud and fun person to be around but when it got sent around she was not herself, she would cry all the time but at the same time acted like everything was okay. She’d put on a smile just so everyone would leave her alone and wouldn’t stare at her.
When i was seeing her she seemed to be getting more unlike herself it scared me because i didn’t know what to do, or how to take her pain away. The humiliation she was feeling was getting to hard for her even to be at school. She even pretended she was sick so she didn’t have to go to school and face everyone and their opinions. I was there by her side through this whole experience, We have been through so much in the past five years and this just made us even more closer then we already were.
I saw everything that had happened to her. When she wasn’t even around I heard people talking about it and how much they hated her. They didn’t even know her and that hurt me a lot. I can’t imagine what she felt and I would never like to either. Watching my best friend go through this made me realize what can really happen if you attempt to send this to a boy you think you love him and he loves you, or even a guy who tells you you're beautiful.
The joke about this all is that we thought this guy who sent the picture around was our best friend. Our friendship wasn’t the same after this happened, and never will be. Sometimes the people you think you can trust let you down. She got through all of this eventually with me by her side acting like we did at the start, before all of it happened. True friends will stick by you know matter what.
Just think before you send that picture of your body, do you really trust him?
Taken from: http://www.spafe.com.au/blog/sexting/
The story of Amanda Todd began just like all cyber bullying stories begin. Amanda was born in 1996 in British Columbia, Canada, and was a happy easy going person, until she was introduced to an anonymous person on Facebook who flattered her so much to the point of convincing her to flash her topless body to him. A year later, the same person or another anonymous person sent her the picture and it went viral, creating a mass of bullying and teasing to the point that she had to change schools several times. Her reputation was ruined, she had no friends, she was beaten up by some classmates, and she tried drinking bleach but was saved at the last minute. Months later, Amanda Todd took her own life.
After her death, her YouTube video went viral to the point of reaching more than 17 million views. People were shocked when they learned about the Amanda Todd Story and reached out to her family. The authorities began a mass inquiry especially with the inspiration and the help of Amanda’s bullying video. To the shock of everyone, the hate campaign continued online after Amanda’s passing, people ridiculed her suicide and made fun of the entire story, they even said she deserved what had happened to her. The cyber bullying continued despite appeals for people to see the real tragedy behind Amanda’s death. The famous Anonymous hacking group even went on a massive search to defend Amanda and find the person who tormented and blackmailed her online but the authorities did not see him as a person of interest in the case.
The truth remains that people who bullied and tormented Amanda still walk the streets everyday thinking their hate and actions mean nothing while in fact every comment they have made about her while she was alive or after her death, brings so much pain to the people who loved her. Remember that words do hurt and scar, sometimes beyond repair.
Taken from: http://nobullying.com/amanda-todd-story/
The image was blurred and the voice distorted, but the words spoken by a young Ohio woman are haunting. She had sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls. The girls were harassing her, calling her a slut and a whore. She was miserable and depressed, afraid even to go to school.
And now Jesse Logan was going on a Cincinnati television station to tell her story. Her purpose was simple: “I just want to make sure no one else will have to go through this again.”
The interview was in May 2008. Two months later, Jessica Logan hanged herself in her bedroom. She was 18.
Taken from: http://www.today.com/parents/her-teen-committed-suicide-over-sexting-2D80555048#.UKKddTn3A1g
She was 12 years old, and like most 12-year-olds, she had a crush in her same grade. “I thought we loved each other. He just used me for what he wanted,” said Michaela Snyder, a Woodbury teenager, now a freshman in high school. “I didn’t want to lose him,” Michaela said. “I just wanted to make him happy, I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.” The 12-year-old boy Michaela was “going out with” got more aggressive just one month after they started hanging out together. “He wanted pictures from me. He wanted to see my body,” she said. “He just texted one day and said, ‘You should do it.’ I said no. He said, ‘If you love me, you’ll do it, if not, I’ll leave you,'” Michaela said. Her parents, Grant and Melanie Snyder, said they thought their daughter would be ready for this moment. “We thought we had had enough conversation with our kids that they knew better,” Melanie Snyder said. “It wasn’t enough,” Grant Snyder said. Their daughter said she talked to her group of friends, all seventh-graders, all 12-year-old girls. “They said, ‘It’s normal, we do it,'” Michaela said. According to Michaela, her friends all reported being pressured to send sexually explicit pictures to boys in the same grade. Good kids, bad kids, all kids.
And so Michaela took a picture of herself in her underwear, and tapped send. She said she knew it was a bad idea. “I didn’t care,” she said. “I thought if he’s gonna love me and stay with me, I don’t care.” But it didn’t stop there. “He then started asking for more, more naked pictures,” Michaela said. “I never sent those. I was never going to send that.” Like many parents, the Snyders say they spot check their teenagers’ phones. Melanie found the texts and the explicit picture of her daughter. “Shock. Disbelief. At the time, anger,” the Melanie said. Young people being exploited through explicit pictures is not a new concept to Michaela. Her father is a Minneapolis Police sergeant, who investigates juvenile sex crimes. “That’s the surprising part, even in hindsight. How powerful that magnet of social media and peer pressure was for Michaela,” Grant Snyder said. “If that can happen to a cop’s kid, that can happen to anybody.”
Michaela’s parents went to the boy’s parents, but Michaela said she was the one paying the price. “I was tripped in the hallways, people were talking about me online,” she said. People even told her to kill herself. “For a long time I blamed myself,” Michaela said. “It took me two years to forgive myself. It’s funny, I forgave him before I forgave myself.” And she’s sharing her story, as a warning to parents and to kids her age. “I want girls to realize we are worth more than our bodies,” she said. “I want parents to not be naive and think, ‘My kid is too good, they’re not going to do that.'”
Her parents say children are facing challenges today that their generation never faced. They also feel that Michaela’s choice to share her story is incredibly brave. “We need voices of kids saying this is what happened to me, and this is how it affected me and be careful,” Grant Snyder said. Parents who think they don’t need to worry about these things until their kids are older, need to think again, according to Michaela. “At age of 10 or 11, you need to talk to your boys about this is how you respect a girl,” she said. Michaela said she’s lost friends by coming forward. But she’s gained something bigger: self-respect, and a chance to make a change. “I think my stupid choices can help a lot of other people,” she said.
Taken from: http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/11/12/12-year-old-shares-sexting-story-tells-parents-dont-be-naive/
Sexting is really pretty normal at my age. My friends and I talk very openly about our experiences within our relationships and the sort of things we’ve sent each other. It seems like everyone’s doing it.
You do sometimes get a negative reaction to something you send, like people saying they’ve ‘seen bigger’. It’s embarrassing.
I’ve seen images that have been sent to other people, or even sexual pictures of their ex partners, but I’ve never shared any myself – I don’t think it’s right.
My first experience of sexting was with a girlfriend when I was 16. She suggested it as a way to keep in touch when we were apart for a few weeks.
We started by sending sexual texts by Blackberry Messenger, then it progressed to pictures, voice notes and short videos. There are definitely risks involved. Someone saw a video message I had sent to a previous girlfriend took a screen shot and posted it online. They called me a pervert and lots of people I knew saw it – it was clearly me pictured. I was completely devastated and, to be honest, almost suicidal. I got the picture taken down eventually, but by that stage people had ‘unfriended’ me and the damage was done.
I do worry about who is behind the phones of the people I sext with – obviously if you don’t know the person in real life there’s no guarantee that they are who they say they are. There is also a big risk around the ages of the girls you contact. Of course you can ask, but there’s no proof that they’re telling the truth.
I’ve never pressured anyone into sexting, and when any girl I’ve been seeing hasn’t been interested I’ve been fine with that. There are some people though who will put pressure on you. I would say that if someone is pressuring you to do or send something you’re not comfortable with, the best thing to do is to cut contact with them. If you’re still worried then let an adult you trust know what’s been happening. Don’t keep it to yourself – there’s always someone who can help.
Once someone I was sexting said if I didn’t send more pictures they would post those I’d already sent on Facebook. I deleted them as a contact and fortunately didn’t hear any more about it after that. It was definitely a close call.
Names have been changed to protect identity
Taken from: https://www.childline.org.uk/Play/GetInvolved/Pages/James-my-experience-of-sexting.aspx
In 2010, two fourteen-year-old Olympia, Washington Freshmen were flirting by text message one night when the boy, Isaiah, asked the girl, Margarite, to send him a sexy picture. Margarite stood in front of her bathroom mirror while naked, snapped a pic, then texted it to Isaiah.
A few weeks later, the pair had broken up, and a former friend of Margarite convinced Isaiah to send her the naked photo. When he did, the girl forwarded it to everyone in her contact list. Another student, a thirteen-year-old, then forwarded the image to all of her contacts, as well. Before long, the naked photo had gone viral in four surrounding school districts.
The next morning, school officials in several districts had been alerted by angry and concerned parents, and they were waiting for Margarite and Isaiah when they got to school. The parents of all of the affected students were brought in, and due to the widespread public outcry the police were involved. After a thorough investigation, Margarite was declared the victim of the scandal, but three students, including Isaiah and the two girls who had initially forwarded the image, were formally charged with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony.
Though texting between consenting adults is not illegal, when sexually explicit images include a participant (subject, photographer, distributor, or recipient) who is under eighteen, child pornography laws may apply. If these three minor students were convicted of dissemination of child pornography, they could be sentenced to up to thirty-six weeks in a juvenile detention centre. They would also be registered as sex offenders.
After their parents hired expensive lawyers to defend their children, a deal was reached for the three teenagers. The charges were reduced from a child pornography felony to a gross misdemeanour of telephone harassment. Isaiah and the two girls were able to complete a community service program that would keep them out of court, and the case could be dismissed.
The teens each prepared extensive anti-sexting education materials and even gave a public speech about their experiences and the dangers of sending explicit text messages. Margarite transferred schools, but the teasing followed her, and eventually she went back to her old high school to finish her studies. All of the three students who were charged with the offence have apologised to Margarite both publicly and privately, but the damage can never be undone.
Taken from: http://www.oddee.com/item_98690.aspx
Remember that these things can and do happen to real people just like you. Don’t become the next Amanda Todd or Jesse Logan, protect yourself online now so you won’t face the cyber bullying Amanda Todd and Jesse Logan faced. Just one mistake can ruin your life. Remember to think twice before you type and don't end up like those people. Doing something that takes just a few minutes can result in a lifetime of guilt, shame and regret.
Written by an anonymous teenage girl:
I was a normal 13 year old teenage girl, but one day everything changed for the worse. What happened to me I will never forget and will be imprinted on me for the rest of my life. There was this perfect boy in my life at the time, in the end he was one of the worst things that could have happened to me. I thought he was the one for me; we'd be together for a very long time. I was so happy when I was around him; he told me I was beautiful. All the right things a girl wants to hear, he told me and I believed him. After he had told me he loved me, one night he asked me if I would send a photo of my breasts. I took the photo that night, something I regret even now when I'm passed that chapter in my life.
I didn’t send the photo to him, the next day I asked my best friend if I should or not. She said the best thing a best friend could say to me that day, no. She told me I was better than that and that I shouldn’t have to send a photo for him to like me. Which is what I want you girls to know, even if a boy tells you that he loves you and that he won’t show anyone, still don’t do it. If he gets angry at you for saying no, in the end, he was really not worth your time. He should love you for who you are and not what your body looks like.
The day I asked my best friend if I should send it, I did a silly mistake and left the photo on my phone. I will never know why I didn’t just delete the photo right then and there, that is something I will never be able to tell you. That day, mistakes just kept on coming. I was in class chatting with my friends and not worrying about anything but myself, when someone who i thought was my friend stole my phone out of where I placed it in my pencil case, and found the photo amongst other photos in my phone. They sent it to their phone without me realising and before I knew it, the whole school had a photo of my breasts on their phone.
Unlike all the other girls that sent a photo to a guy around the time that I did, mine wasn’t taken lightly. I was called names, people came up in my face and yelled at me, over five people tried to bash me. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it would get better, but it kept getting worse. I didn’t know what to do or who to tell so I lived with being bullied for at least two months. I had no friends; everyone hated me for something I didn’t do. The feeling of being hated so much is hard to explain.
You were once the popular girl and you had a lot of friends and then one day everything changes. I became depressed and I hated my body from then on. I still have trouble trusting boys to this day. If I had the chance to go back and change everything I would. I never would have even considered taking the photo. Today I still have to live with the feeling that everyone knows what my body looks like, sometimes, even someone brings up what happened to me and I still feel disgusted with myself and ashamed of what I did.
I felt alone and not wanted at the time and the even worse thing is when you take a photo and what happened to me, happens to you, your parents find out. The way my mum looked at me, made me feel like I was disowned, she was ashamed to call me her daughter. My dad on the other hand, still to this day, we are and will never be as close as we used to be. This is nothing anyone would want to experience.
The best friend's point of view:
The day I found out what my friend had done. It was the when everything changed; I had found out that my best friend had taken a photo of her breasts and it had gotten around the whole school. Before all of it had happened she was a loud and fun person to be around but when it got sent around she was not herself, she would cry all the time but at the same time acted like everything was okay. She’d put on a smile just so everyone would leave her alone and wouldn’t stare at her.
When i was seeing her she seemed to be getting more unlike herself it scared me because i didn’t know what to do, or how to take her pain away. The humiliation she was feeling was getting to hard for her even to be at school. She even pretended she was sick so she didn’t have to go to school and face everyone and their opinions. I was there by her side through this whole experience, We have been through so much in the past five years and this just made us even more closer then we already were.
I saw everything that had happened to her. When she wasn’t even around I heard people talking about it and how much they hated her. They didn’t even know her and that hurt me a lot. I can’t imagine what she felt and I would never like to either. Watching my best friend go through this made me realize what can really happen if you attempt to send this to a boy you think you love him and he loves you, or even a guy who tells you you're beautiful.
The joke about this all is that we thought this guy who sent the picture around was our best friend. Our friendship wasn’t the same after this happened, and never will be. Sometimes the people you think you can trust let you down. She got through all of this eventually with me by her side acting like we did at the start, before all of it happened. True friends will stick by you know matter what.
Just think before you send that picture of your body, do you really trust him?
Taken from: http://www.spafe.com.au/blog/sexting/
The story of Amanda Todd began just like all cyber bullying stories begin. Amanda was born in 1996 in British Columbia, Canada, and was a happy easy going person, until she was introduced to an anonymous person on Facebook who flattered her so much to the point of convincing her to flash her topless body to him. A year later, the same person or another anonymous person sent her the picture and it went viral, creating a mass of bullying and teasing to the point that she had to change schools several times. Her reputation was ruined, she had no friends, she was beaten up by some classmates, and she tried drinking bleach but was saved at the last minute. Months later, Amanda Todd took her own life.
After her death, her YouTube video went viral to the point of reaching more than 17 million views. People were shocked when they learned about the Amanda Todd Story and reached out to her family. The authorities began a mass inquiry especially with the inspiration and the help of Amanda’s bullying video. To the shock of everyone, the hate campaign continued online after Amanda’s passing, people ridiculed her suicide and made fun of the entire story, they even said she deserved what had happened to her. The cyber bullying continued despite appeals for people to see the real tragedy behind Amanda’s death. The famous Anonymous hacking group even went on a massive search to defend Amanda and find the person who tormented and blackmailed her online but the authorities did not see him as a person of interest in the case.
The truth remains that people who bullied and tormented Amanda still walk the streets everyday thinking their hate and actions mean nothing while in fact every comment they have made about her while she was alive or after her death, brings so much pain to the people who loved her. Remember that words do hurt and scar, sometimes beyond repair.
Taken from: http://nobullying.com/amanda-todd-story/
The image was blurred and the voice distorted, but the words spoken by a young Ohio woman are haunting. She had sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls. The girls were harassing her, calling her a slut and a whore. She was miserable and depressed, afraid even to go to school.
And now Jesse Logan was going on a Cincinnati television station to tell her story. Her purpose was simple: “I just want to make sure no one else will have to go through this again.”
The interview was in May 2008. Two months later, Jessica Logan hanged herself in her bedroom. She was 18.
Taken from: http://www.today.com/parents/her-teen-committed-suicide-over-sexting-2D80555048#.UKKddTn3A1g
She was 12 years old, and like most 12-year-olds, she had a crush in her same grade. “I thought we loved each other. He just used me for what he wanted,” said Michaela Snyder, a Woodbury teenager, now a freshman in high school. “I didn’t want to lose him,” Michaela said. “I just wanted to make him happy, I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.” The 12-year-old boy Michaela was “going out with” got more aggressive just one month after they started hanging out together. “He wanted pictures from me. He wanted to see my body,” she said. “He just texted one day and said, ‘You should do it.’ I said no. He said, ‘If you love me, you’ll do it, if not, I’ll leave you,'” Michaela said. Her parents, Grant and Melanie Snyder, said they thought their daughter would be ready for this moment. “We thought we had had enough conversation with our kids that they knew better,” Melanie Snyder said. “It wasn’t enough,” Grant Snyder said. Their daughter said she talked to her group of friends, all seventh-graders, all 12-year-old girls. “They said, ‘It’s normal, we do it,'” Michaela said. According to Michaela, her friends all reported being pressured to send sexually explicit pictures to boys in the same grade. Good kids, bad kids, all kids.
And so Michaela took a picture of herself in her underwear, and tapped send. She said she knew it was a bad idea. “I didn’t care,” she said. “I thought if he’s gonna love me and stay with me, I don’t care.” But it didn’t stop there. “He then started asking for more, more naked pictures,” Michaela said. “I never sent those. I was never going to send that.” Like many parents, the Snyders say they spot check their teenagers’ phones. Melanie found the texts and the explicit picture of her daughter. “Shock. Disbelief. At the time, anger,” the Melanie said. Young people being exploited through explicit pictures is not a new concept to Michaela. Her father is a Minneapolis Police sergeant, who investigates juvenile sex crimes. “That’s the surprising part, even in hindsight. How powerful that magnet of social media and peer pressure was for Michaela,” Grant Snyder said. “If that can happen to a cop’s kid, that can happen to anybody.”
Michaela’s parents went to the boy’s parents, but Michaela said she was the one paying the price. “I was tripped in the hallways, people were talking about me online,” she said. People even told her to kill herself. “For a long time I blamed myself,” Michaela said. “It took me two years to forgive myself. It’s funny, I forgave him before I forgave myself.” And she’s sharing her story, as a warning to parents and to kids her age. “I want girls to realize we are worth more than our bodies,” she said. “I want parents to not be naive and think, ‘My kid is too good, they’re not going to do that.'”
Her parents say children are facing challenges today that their generation never faced. They also feel that Michaela’s choice to share her story is incredibly brave. “We need voices of kids saying this is what happened to me, and this is how it affected me and be careful,” Grant Snyder said. Parents who think they don’t need to worry about these things until their kids are older, need to think again, according to Michaela. “At age of 10 or 11, you need to talk to your boys about this is how you respect a girl,” she said. Michaela said she’s lost friends by coming forward. But she’s gained something bigger: self-respect, and a chance to make a change. “I think my stupid choices can help a lot of other people,” she said.
Taken from: http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/11/12/12-year-old-shares-sexting-story-tells-parents-dont-be-naive/
Sexting is really pretty normal at my age. My friends and I talk very openly about our experiences within our relationships and the sort of things we’ve sent each other. It seems like everyone’s doing it.
You do sometimes get a negative reaction to something you send, like people saying they’ve ‘seen bigger’. It’s embarrassing.
I’ve seen images that have been sent to other people, or even sexual pictures of their ex partners, but I’ve never shared any myself – I don’t think it’s right.
My first experience of sexting was with a girlfriend when I was 16. She suggested it as a way to keep in touch when we were apart for a few weeks.
We started by sending sexual texts by Blackberry Messenger, then it progressed to pictures, voice notes and short videos. There are definitely risks involved. Someone saw a video message I had sent to a previous girlfriend took a screen shot and posted it online. They called me a pervert and lots of people I knew saw it – it was clearly me pictured. I was completely devastated and, to be honest, almost suicidal. I got the picture taken down eventually, but by that stage people had ‘unfriended’ me and the damage was done.
I do worry about who is behind the phones of the people I sext with – obviously if you don’t know the person in real life there’s no guarantee that they are who they say they are. There is also a big risk around the ages of the girls you contact. Of course you can ask, but there’s no proof that they’re telling the truth.
I’ve never pressured anyone into sexting, and when any girl I’ve been seeing hasn’t been interested I’ve been fine with that. There are some people though who will put pressure on you. I would say that if someone is pressuring you to do or send something you’re not comfortable with, the best thing to do is to cut contact with them. If you’re still worried then let an adult you trust know what’s been happening. Don’t keep it to yourself – there’s always someone who can help.
Once someone I was sexting said if I didn’t send more pictures they would post those I’d already sent on Facebook. I deleted them as a contact and fortunately didn’t hear any more about it after that. It was definitely a close call.
Names have been changed to protect identity
Taken from: https://www.childline.org.uk/Play/GetInvolved/Pages/James-my-experience-of-sexting.aspx
In 2010, two fourteen-year-old Olympia, Washington Freshmen were flirting by text message one night when the boy, Isaiah, asked the girl, Margarite, to send him a sexy picture. Margarite stood in front of her bathroom mirror while naked, snapped a pic, then texted it to Isaiah.
A few weeks later, the pair had broken up, and a former friend of Margarite convinced Isaiah to send her the naked photo. When he did, the girl forwarded it to everyone in her contact list. Another student, a thirteen-year-old, then forwarded the image to all of her contacts, as well. Before long, the naked photo had gone viral in four surrounding school districts.
The next morning, school officials in several districts had been alerted by angry and concerned parents, and they were waiting for Margarite and Isaiah when they got to school. The parents of all of the affected students were brought in, and due to the widespread public outcry the police were involved. After a thorough investigation, Margarite was declared the victim of the scandal, but three students, including Isaiah and the two girls who had initially forwarded the image, were formally charged with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony.
Though texting between consenting adults is not illegal, when sexually explicit images include a participant (subject, photographer, distributor, or recipient) who is under eighteen, child pornography laws may apply. If these three minor students were convicted of dissemination of child pornography, they could be sentenced to up to thirty-six weeks in a juvenile detention centre. They would also be registered as sex offenders.
After their parents hired expensive lawyers to defend their children, a deal was reached for the three teenagers. The charges were reduced from a child pornography felony to a gross misdemeanour of telephone harassment. Isaiah and the two girls were able to complete a community service program that would keep them out of court, and the case could be dismissed.
The teens each prepared extensive anti-sexting education materials and even gave a public speech about their experiences and the dangers of sending explicit text messages. Margarite transferred schools, but the teasing followed her, and eventually she went back to her old high school to finish her studies. All of the three students who were charged with the offence have apologised to Margarite both publicly and privately, but the damage can never be undone.
Taken from: http://www.oddee.com/item_98690.aspx
Remember that these things can and do happen to real people just like you. Don’t become the next Amanda Todd or Jesse Logan, protect yourself online now so you won’t face the cyber bullying Amanda Todd and Jesse Logan faced. Just one mistake can ruin your life. Remember to think twice before you type and don't end up like those people. Doing something that takes just a few minutes can result in a lifetime of guilt, shame and regret.