Danny Hellman illustration

It's a sultry early Friday night in downtown Fairfield and a pod of teenagers has converged at the local 7-11 for the free Slurpees being given away in celebration of July 11, aka 7/11. The teens are armed with all the tech you'd expect from suburban kids of some means, raised in the age of cell phones and the Internet. Instead of riding Razor Scooters, they're talking on Razr V3 fully-loaded phones and listening to tunes on their iPods. As the new tech has taken hold, it's been accompanied by a spike in amateur, do-it-yourself exhibitionism. It's a sexual revolution that's trickling down to teens, who are experimenting with sexuality in a way that's more public than ever before. And it's getting a whole lot of them into trouble.

"As soon as there's a new technology, it's used for sex," says Sarah Jacobs, curator of the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, which explains why people of all ages and persuasions send out naked pictures via cell phone, Craigslist and MySpace and post their sex videos on sites like YouPorn.

That's all legal. It can be fun—and it's eating into the adult industry's profits. But what about when minors get involved? An emerging trend of DIY teenage sex imagery raises questions about the limits of technology and the appropriate legal response. Should kids be facing criminal records for taking naked pictures of themselves?

In the past six months alone, there's been a deluge of news stories about middle- and high-school students getting into trouble for sending around naked pictures and sex videos of themselves or classmates. The disposition of the cases has been wildly disparate: Some kids are arrested, some punished at school and others are lectured about online safety.

Just how widespread is this trend, and how should officials handle it when students make their sex lives public?

There are endless MySpace profile pictures, taken in the mirror or at arm's length, of teenage girls in bras and boy shorts, eyes lined in black and lips slightly parted. Friendships nursed online often come with requests for nudes—or n00dz.

"Nine out of 10 kids I see have had experiences where they have put provocative photos of themselves on MySpace or Facebook," says Sonya Rencevicz, a clinical social worker and therapist in Greenwich who deals with adolescents.

The stories come from all around the country, including Connecticut, where the cases seem to involve the younger limits of the sexually active. Rencevicz says she has two clients who have sent or received pornographic material through the phone. "Looking back, I can't say that either one of them is happy about it; it just kind of exploded like a computer virus," she says.

In Westport, a 12-year-old girl was arrested last June for breach of peace for e-mailing a naked picture of a classmate, snapped during a video chat.

In New Britain in May, two eighth-graders were charged with breach of peace for having oral sex in a classroom while being filmed on a cellphone camera. School was in session; other students blocked a substitute teacher's view.

In Milford, police said a high school freshman, expelled for lighting her teacher's hair on fire, had been in trouble before for having sex in a school bathroom and filming it on a cellphone.

(Most of these cases involve students distributing pictures of each other without the subject's permission or knowledge, which is far different from an adult couple making their sex tapes available on the Internet.)

The 7-11 teens we talked to were puzzled about why their peers would consent to let it all hang out via cell phone and the Internet. Sarah, a 16-year-old from Westport, says, "I don't get it, I don't know why anyone would do it. I would be so embarrassed if my friends or my parents found out. I think for the most part girls my age are smart enough not to do it. But the ones who do, I guess they're just looking for attention."

Sixteen-year-old Meghan says she's not aware of any of her friends in Fairfield sending pics of themselves via text message, but the Internet is fair game. She says several friends have posted revealing images of themselves, either in bikinis or little clothing, on MySpace. "I don't think it's about sex or anything like that," says Meghan. "MySpace is like this place where you can accept friends and be friends with everyone. The girls with those pictures, they have so many friends and most of them are people [they're] never going to meet."

But Meghan also says that it's not just girls: "Guys I know do it too—they have pictures with their shirts off and it does attract people."

But texting explicit pics, Meghan says, "is just retarded. In, like, a second, everyone in school is going to see you naked." Jacob, a 17-year-old from Fairfield, adds, "I look at the pictures, sure, but I definitely wouldn't try to contact [the girl]," he said. "I wouldn't send her a message or anything like that, but I mean, come on, if she's hot, hell yeah I'll look."

Nationally, children have been charged with crimes like defamation and even child porn for sending explicit pictures (and sometimes videos) of each other to friends. A quick Google search produces dozens of instances where kids have had a little too much risque fun with modern technology.

Consider, for instance, the case of the two Santa Fe Junior High School students in Texas who took nude photos of themselves and sent them to their boyfriends a few months ago. Those boys in turn forwarded the pictures to friends, who passed them forward until they went viral. Also that same month, a middle school girl in New Jersey reportedly sent a picture of herself, featuring full frontal nudity, to her boyfriend, who then sent it to several of his friends. Soon the photos were in the hands of half the student body (we're pretty sure we know what the other half of the hands were doing). In Wisconsin, a 17-year-old boy has been charged with exploitation and child porn after his 16-year-old girlfriend sent him sexually explicit pictures, and he posted them online.

Technology guarantees that lurid photos will be widely circulated, and parents understandably imagine that they'll end up in the hands of child pornographers. Westport schools superintendent Dr. Elliot Landon responded to the circulating picture of the 12-year-old by sending a warning letter to parents. "The images that have been transmitted have then been transmitted and re-transmitted to countless others," he said. "We believe that these transmissions and re-transmissions have been so extensive as to have spread well beyond the borders of the Westport community.

"We know not who these strangers are nor where they lurk nor which of them are computer sex offenders," the letter adds.

Westport Lt. David Kassay says it's "the only incident" police there have dealt with, but adds, "I am not saying it doesn't happen."

So where do authorities draw the line?

A state police spokesman says an increasing number of these reports have been surfacing, and adds that they need to be looked at individually. "We certainly hope it would not reach the level of criminal investigation and prosecution," says Lt. J. Paul Vance.

"This is all new territory for prosecutors, investigators and the police, and I think it's appropriate for them to handle it on a case-by-case basis," says Mark Sherman, attorney for the 12-year-old Westport girl. "Certainly, in my case ... they didn't over-charge. I think state's attorneys tread very delicately with those kinds of [felony] charges."

But Sherman does object to any charges being filed against his client, whom he says is at a "very delicate age," at which being accused of a crime can do serious damage.

"It should be dealt with by the schools and the parents," he says. The girl's charge, breach of peace, is a misdemeanor for publicly distributing "offensive, indecent or abusive matter." It's unlikely that a first-time juvenile offender would get jail time, or even a mark on her record, Sherman says.

The state Department of Education has seen more of these incidents in the last school year, according to DOE spokesman Tom Murphy. "We have heard, anecdotally, that this is becoming much more common," Murphy says, adding that the DOE doesn't keep records of how many reports it gets. In Connecticut, the school boards have sovereignty over the discipline of their students, so the DOE can't hand down policy, either.

The board can, however, try to keep schools up to date on trends. In an example of how teens' tech savvy often wildly outpaces that of their authority figures, the DOE sent out a memo to school boards early last year warning against "a popular Internet chat room/weblog named MySpace.com."

But can you call teens exposing themselves using technology a trend, with Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and the dreaded and all-corrupt media to blame?

Rencevicz, the Greenwich teen therapist, says technology is outpacing intentions. Since the latest technology is instant, she says, kids are seeing the repercussions that come with posting a nude or provocative picture of themselves to friends almost as quickly as the image is sent.

"These kids have grown up with everything being instant and they quickly learn, with instances like this ... all about the consequence," Rencevicz says. "There is a natural progression. Teenagers push limits and experiment. And this is that limit to the nth degree."¦

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