How a “sext” can come back to haunt you

As a young, bright, athletic female student walks through the hallways of her school, she notices the sudden hush of people when she goes by. She watches as some stop and whisper and then they begin pulling out their phones. A swarm of confusion hits her, and she tries to hurry to her next class.

When she sits down, the people around her start to smirk, and a few boys begin making lewd comments toward her. One even begins taunting her about some pictures, and then she begins to realize what has happened. The nude pictures she had sent her boyfriend, who had sworn to her never to show anyone, had been sent around.

Today’s generation is gifted with technological advances that no other generation has seen before. With new smart phones and tablets, people everywhere have the ability to take and send pictures. Being able to snap a quick photo of yourself or someone else gives people more opportunities to send or receive nude pictures.

“I think that people don’t realize the impact that it [sexting] could actually have,” junior Danika Kapeikis said. “People do it because it’s easy to press the send button, but they don’t know what it could do to their reputation.”

The pictures and text messages people send may be erased and forgotten, but that doesn’t mean that other people don’t have them saved on theirs. The popular app, Snapchat, is something that teens feel is “safer” to use when sending nude pictures.

Although the app may warn when pictures are screenshotted, it cannot stop someone from taking a screenshot.

“Snapchat is obviously something that everyone uses,” junior Jaxton Wilson said. “It’s like the tightrope safety net, but when it comes time for falling, it’s not going to catch you.”

The ability to save pictures on cellphones makes pictures easier to spread around, and they don’t even have to be sent to another person.

“Nude pictures aren’t for personal pleasure,” Wilson said. “I think they are like a trophy. You show it off to people even though you deny that you did.”

Sometimes, teens are peer pressured into sending a nude picture. Oftentimes, they aren’t pressured but willing to if it is for someone they are in a relationship with.

“My friend was dating this guy for about two hours, and he asked her for a picture, and she said ‘yes,’” junior Erin West said. “She sent it, and he broke up with her like two hours later. It even got sent around in the high school.”

At the time, West’s friend was only in middle school. “I’m pretty sure every boy had it on their phones and computer, and everyone else saw it and knew about it,” she said.

There are times when nude photos surface of people who didn’t know a picture had been taken in the first place.

“We were changing, and the blinds were down, but we didn’t realize you could see them,” an anonymous junior said. “[Anonymous] saw us changing and pointed it out to the two guys with her. The guys were like ‘No, let’s leave we don’t want to see that’ but she took a picture. They [the boys] were the ones who told us she took a picture. The boys were the innocent ones.”

Anonymous states that she didn’t think the picture had been sent around and has never seen the picture but has “heard some people talk about it.”

“It made me feel, like, disrespected and violated,” anonymous said. “I was disappointed that someone would do that.”

The different social media platforms make posting a nude picture a lot easier for the people who have gotten a photo. When people sext, there are so many different ways it can harm.

“We all know [sexting] is bad. We all know its bad when our mother tells us not to sneak a candy from the candy jar, but we do it anyways,” Wilson said. “In the end, it comes back to haunt you. You have to be willing to risk your future aspirations.”

The apps teenagers have on their phones are often overlooked. With things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat all a click away, no one considers the potential consequences social media can bring.

The popular app, Snapchat, is commonly used for sending and receiving nude pictures. The pictures on the app seem to always disappear, but that isn’t always the case.

“Even when something is deleted from a device or a computer, it doesn’t completely delete,” security expert Nico Sell told ABC News. “Your SMS – if you were to delete a text, I could still get it off the phone. It’s in the trash.”

Recently, the nation was blindsided with reports of nude photos leaked of celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. The infamous iCloud hack was talked about for weeks as many photos surfaced and celebrities were either owning up to them or denying that they had taken them. Things like this happen continuously, and people who have sent nude photos are always at risk of others finding their way to them.

On Oct. 16, USA Today reported that 30 students in Rochester, Mich., could face felony charges for “electronically sharing inappropriate pictures of themselves or other minors.” There were boys who were getting nude pictures from other female students and the boys were sharing them with each other, according to USA Today.com.

In Washington State, “individuals who distribute, produce, or possess a sexually explicit image of a minor could be charged with a felony under the State’s child pornography statutes,” according to Mobile Media Guard.com. “If a person is convicted of a felony sex crime then they will generally be required to register as a sex offender.”