A new study has found that teenage ‘sexting’ is rising in Australia despite being declared illegal and almost every secondary school in the country has dealt with it.
Almost every Victorian secondary school has been faced with at least one incident involving graphic pictures of students being circulated on mobile phones or the Internet, cyber safety experts and teachers have told Fairfax Media.
Teachers from a range of Melbourne government and private secondary schools have said that they know of cases in which naked or topless photographs of students have been shared throughout a year level or the entire school.
“At the moment everything schools are doing in response to these incidents is pretty random, is uninformed and leaves them wide open to potential litigation”, said Robyn Treyvaud, a former head at Wesley College who now runs a cyber consultancy.
“There is not a secondary school in Australia that hasn’t had to deal with it”, the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Susan McLean, a former Victorian policewoman turned cyber safety expert, as saying.
The Fairfax investigation has also revealed that girls send sexts more than boys.
However, many schools have chosen to handle the matter internally and have not notified police - despite child pornography laws being broken. Teachers have confirmed that in many cases schools prefer to use counsellors and cyber consultants to talk to the students and parents involved rather than contacting police.
Under Victorian child pornography laws, it is a crime for anyone to transmit or possess naked pictures of a person aged under 18. Those found guilty of making or possessing child pornography face a 10-year prison sentence and possible registration on the sex offender registry.
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