By Curt Peterson, Standard Correspondent
A shock wave swept across the Woodstock campus in December after reports surfaced that some Woodstock Union High School students had been exchanging nude photographs of some current and recently graduated female students.
Several concerned students reported the sexting activity to WUHS Principal Garon Smail, and Smail sent a letter home to parents. Woodstock Police also received a report of sexting in December.
By Dec. 22, the matter had been reported to the Windsor County Special Investigation Unit of the Vermont State Police, and Detective Matthew Sweitzer led the investigation.
A lot has happened during the ensuing five months, and on Tuesday, a panel hosted a presentation, “Sexting: A Community Response,” in the school’s Teagle Library to exchange information with parents and teachers, about two dozen of whom attended.
The discussion was led by Julie Gaudette, director of the Special Investigation Unit and Child Advocacy Centers of Windsor County; and included Nancy Theriault, program co-coordinator for Gaudette’s organization; Detective Sweitzer; and Kate Rohdenburg of WISE, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating gender-based violence in the Upper Valley.
Woodstock Police Officer Jessica Ryan-LeBlanc was there in case anyone had questions for local law enforcement.
Gaudette explained that sexting incidents involving minors are first reported to the Vermont Department of Children and Families. A report validated by DCF is passed on to the State Police who conduct an investigation. There is always danger that explicit photographs that are exchanged among adolescent peers will end up in the hands of adult pornography merchants. The photos may also have been obtained through blackmail, coercion or harassment. In any of these cases the crime has become a felony rather than a misdemeanor, and the penalties are very serious.
If the photos have remained among the students and were produced voluntarily, the State Police will often recommend an education program rather than punishment in the form of criminal charges, Sweitzer said.
In Woodstock’s case, education was the chosen strategy, and WISE, Gaudette’s organization, and the state police have worked with the school to manage the program.
Sweitzer said the sexting activity in Woodstock involved at least 50 male WUHS students. He also believes many students had some knowledge that the photographs were being passed around, before it was reported to the administration.
Sexting is an issue in Vermont and throughout the nation. Theriault said there are many reports of sexting by students, and the number is growing quickly. “We confiscate computers and phones all the time and send them to Burlington for review,” she said, by the Computer Crimes Unit.
Although students think they can delete the photos, or use a temporary sending application, and the images will be undetectable, in fact they are not, and once they get outside the original sender’s immediate circle they are out there on the internet forever.
Social media sites send in many of the reports of incidents of sexual photographs, Sweitzer said.
Rohdenburg, of WISE, said, “Girls and boys send out nude photos in equal numbers, but only the girls are asked to send them. Boys do it even though no one asks.”
Sweitzer said prosecuting sexting crimes among adolescents is not a simple matter. In Vermont, he said, it is illegal for a person under 18 to take a nude photograph of himself or herself – so by taking and sending the picture, for whatever reason, a female is just as guilty of sexting crime as the male who solicits and/or receives it.
“We can’t prosecute one gender and not the other – they have both committed a crime,” he said.
“This is often a bitter pill for a girl’s parents to swallow,” Gaudette added. “Legally, their daughter is a perpetrator, not a victim.”
She said parents need to be engaged and proactive with their kids about sexting. They can learn about HIDE apps, which are phone apps that bundle up innocentlooking functions to obscure more sinister and harder to detect abilities. They can also learn about privacy settings on phones and social media sites to make sure their student isn’t hiding risky behavior. Additionally, they should read the licensing agreements on sites such as SnapChat – students think the photos they send are automatically deleted in a short period of time, but the user agreement gives total ownership of them to SnapChat to do whatever they want with them.
Rohdenburg works with kids setting up education and prevention programs all over the Upper Valley, and says they are not as naïve about the risks sexting involves as parents and other authority figures think they are. They know the risks, she said, but they don’t assess those risks the same way adults do.
“Sexting is sexual activity,” Rohdenburg said. “Most girls send their nude photos to their boyfriend or to a boy they would like to have as a boyfriend, then he sends it on to others.”
It’s a cultural thing, she said – girls feel they have to do things they might not want to do in order to get attention from boys. “As if attention from boys was some scarce commodity that is about to run out,” Rohdenburg said.
Boys, on the other hand, see it differently – “A girl is a prude if she doesn’t sext him a photo, and a slut if she does,” Rohdenburg said. She said society needs to teach girls to feel more confident, worthy and in charge of themselves, and to teach boys to have respect for girls as human beings and peers rather than as sex objects.
She said we can tell kids sexting will have devastating effects, but they know lots of their peers who are doing it and nothing bad has happened to them, so they don’t believe us.
Scaring them or punishing them isn’t going to work with today’s teenagers, she said.
“Telling them to just say no doesn’t work,” she said, advising parents to ask their kids questions about things that worry them, such as sexting, drugs and other risky behaviors.
“Tell them you are worried, what you’re worried about, and ask them how they feel about what’s worrying you,” Rohdenburg said. “Ask them what motivates them to take risks.”
There will be two programs for students about sexting and mutual respect at the High School and Middle School this week.
This article first appeared in the April 27, 2017 edition of the Vermont Standard.