Bellows Free Academy (BFA) in St. Albans recently discovered it had a problem; and the Champlain Valley office of Voices Against Violence, has been brought on board to facilitate an ongoing conversation about that problem.
In February of this year, a sexting ring at St. Albans’s hometown high school briefly fluttered the news before slipping away from public attention.
States Attorney, Jim Hughes didn’t press charges and no disciplinary action appears to have been taken by the school.
Someone at least had the good sense to recognize the need for intervention.
The message carried by Voices educators to BFA students has focussed on the meaning of “consent,” and how the principle of consent was violated when those photos were distributed, just as surely as it is in an actual rape.
AndVoices is taking this opportunity to remind students that consent does not ever exist when the subject is impaired by alcohol or drugs.
Voices educator Amanda Rohdenburg observed that
“Boys and girls take these pictures at the same rate,” she said, “and then the pictures of the girls go viral.”
At least one BFA student had an explanation for the difference.
“She was really clear boys felt entitled and could share these like baseball cards,” said Rohdenburg. She explained that in the student’s analysis the boys saw the girls’ bodies as their property, as something they could trade like commodities.
Quite apart from the violation of privacy committed by the male students is the under reaction of BFA officials and law enforcement, which suggests that this behavior falls within their expectations of “boys being boys.”
According to Michelle Monroe of the Messenger, Hughes felt there was no evidence of coercion.
Vermont’s teen sexting law allows teens caught with photos of an underage romantic or sexual partner to be sent to a court diversion program. However, as assistant state’s attorney Diane Wheeler acknowledged, the law was not intended to cover situations in which those recipients forward the photos to others without the consent of the person in the photo.
How far removed really is this exploitive behavior from that which resulted in the recent suicides of girls in Nova Scotia and California? And what does this say about the culture of our community?
I can’t believe that after all the decades of struggle to eradicate it, this kind of gross sexual objectification and humiliation of women is still treated like a harmless prank.
In not unrelated news, we learn that sexual assaults in the U.S. military have been increasing at an alarming rate, and now average 70 per day!
This announcement followed quickly on the heels of the Sunday arrest of Lt. Col Jeffrey Krusinski, head of the Air Force SAPRO program…the guy in charge of preventing sexual assault… for himself committing a sexual assault.
Proof enough for me that it is the culture of command that makes the military an unsafe place for women.
It’s just more male backlash to feminism and equality for women as boys continue to be bo…assholes. But now, with our gadgets, women as ‘products’ are a money-making enterprise. Call it ADVENTURES IN CAPITALISM EXPLOITATION.
Good one, Sue. If full grown men were out on the street hooting and hollering and taking pictures of women, people would pay attention and react. But with this ‘gadget’ sexism, it’s like “Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ or be ‘politically correct’–don’t do it OUT LOUD.
I have no problem with teenagers taking nudes of themselves and sharing those with a select few (usually just one). I feel that their freedom of self expression has already been suppressed enough by school boards and the government. I am therefore glad when prosecutors don’t go crazy after these kids that take the photos. (is it really child porn when the kids take their own pictures?)
The problem arises when these photos are shared beyond the intended recipient. The girls trust the boys they send the photos to, but I’ve known only very few trustworthy boys that don’t run directly to their friends to brag about their most recent interactions with their GFs.
If a girl shares a nude selfie with a boy and he never shows it to anybody else, then good for him for he is trustworthy and she chose well. We never hear about these simply because they never are known outside the duo that has them.
I don’t want to have to tell girls that they can’t trust boys, but clearly most boys simply can’t be trusted at that age. Girls need to be taught to be wary of boys, to know that is it possible that the boy they like will run at top speed to tell his friends every detail of her deepest secrets, and be told not to share those nude selfies. Boys need to be taught to respect girls, secrets and privacy.