The percentage of youths who send nude pictures of themselves that would qualify as child pornography is very low, one of the studies found. The other found that when teen sexting images do come to police attention, few youth are being arrested or treated like sex offenders.
The results were published in the Dec. 2011 journal “Pediatrics.”
In both studies, researchers found that sexual images of youth rarely were distributed online. Even where the images came to police attention, two-thirds of them stayed on cellphones.
In the Gwinnett County case, nude photos of more than a dozen high school girls, along with their names and schools, appeared on Instagram and moved to the messaging site Twitter. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has shut down the postings and is still trying to find out who posted them, a crime that could result in as much as 20 years in prison.
Kimberly Mitchell, an assistant professor of psychology at the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center and lead author of the studies said, “Lots of people may be hearing about these cases discovered by schools and parents because they create a furor, but it still involves a very small minority of youth.”
Although she has seen plenty of photos of teens in bathing suits, which she considers inappropriate, on social media sites, Harper said she has never seen nude photos and her children say they haven’t, either.