A solution to the sexting problem: Bcc the parents
Sexting is the term used to describe all forms of sexually related content sent via SMS or MMS.
I won’t get into whether sexting is inherently good or bad but I see it as inevitable. As teenagers approach sexual maturity they are going to express themselves sexually through every medium available to them.
Of course the problem is that said teenagers have not really reached intellectual or social maturity and so they don’t really think through the consequences of electronic media. The adage “information wants to be free” is even more true of sexually related content.
The parent of a teenager has a particularly challenging job. They need to let their children make mistakes, learn from their mistakes but act as a backstop and buffer for said mistakes. There are some mistakes from which recovery is deemed too costly. Killing yourself in a car is the canonical teenaged mistake but apparently so is sending a naked picture of yourself. Parents have the impossible task of drawing the line and coming up with practical measures to buffer these mistakes (beater cars with airbags).
So what tools can we give parents to cope with sexting? The problem with internet activities and teenagers is that they lack the transparency of “real” world activities. It’s hard for teenaged kid to stay out late or drive home drunk without their parents seeing at least some of the results. With the internet the common approach has been to try to increase the visibility of these activities. I think this is the right way. I will give my children internet access but I will openly tell them that I am auditing (via my router) all traffic. Obviously my children can go to a friends’ house or the library or even an itnernet cafe and bypass my audits but that remains consistent with “real” life as well. The challenge with cell phones is that they are independent computing devices. At least that’s the case today.
My proposal is that cell phone providers should provide auditing features to parents. It’s just not that hard. If they can do it for the government they can turn it into a profit center with parents.
More specifically, if all text messages (in or out) wer Bcc’d to the parents email address the entire sexting problem would disappear overnight.