Sexting charges ‘too harsh’
Kids need education, not jail, experts say
MONTREAL — Sharing intimate photos might be considered harmless, flirty fun to some teenagers, but authorities take the non-consensual sharing of sexual images very seriously.
Ten teenage boys from Laval, Que., were charged on Thursday with criminal child pornography offences after allegedly sharing explicit photos of girls on their smartphones and laptops. The case illustrates the dilemma that authorities are facing with the rise of sexting.
With sexy “selfies” becoming the norm, lawmakers and educators are grappling with a new reality that raises many social and legal issues.
And there was a strong feeling among some experts who spoke to the Montreal Gazette on Thursday that it is overkill to use criminal laws to punish adolescent transgressions. What’s really needed, they say, is better education to deal with a pervasive and troubling problem that only promises to spread with the ubiquitous use of digital communication.
“There have to be consequences for these actions, but I don’t know that criminal law is the answer,” said Shaheen Shariff, an associate professor in the faculty of education at Montreal’s McGill University who studies cyberbullying and sexting, and helps schools educate kids in digital citizenship.
She said she believes this is the first case of minors being charged in Quebec with child pornography in a sexting incident, although she knows of a couple of cases in Ontario and Nova Scotia. And she urged schools not to overreact.
“They should call in the law only as a last resort,” she said. “What concerns me is harsher punishments for youth when the disciplinary measures should be educational.”
Officials of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board, which oversees the schools the boys attend, did not return a call from The Gazette.
Amy Adele Hasinoff, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Colorado Denver, who was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill and has studied the repercussions of sexting, agreed that the “very harsh” child pornography laws are “designed to address adults exploiting children,” but shouldn’t replace better sex education and consent training that is needed for teens.
Schools need to discuss the importance of consent and privacy as part of digital literacy programs, she said. But there have been calls for tougher laws in Canada in light of some highly publicized cases of cyberbullying that hinged on the non-consensual distribution of photos and videos of sex acts, and which resulted in suicides.
In Quebec, Bill 56 was adopted in June 2012, prompted by the suicide of a 15-year-old girl from Gaspesie in November 2011 who was repeatedly bullied.
Rehtaeh Parsons was a 17-year-old from Nova Scotia who took her own life after photos of her alleged gang rape were distributed online. Her father, Glen Canning, was in Montreal recently, and he denounced her school’s lack of action as the situation unfolded. “When kids finally have the guts to come forward and the school doesn’t do anything about it, it’s heartbreaking,” he said.