I recently attended a seminar where I was talking to another attorney about whether more marriages are ending because one or the other spouse is involved in an extra-marital affair. It was her position that she sees almost all of her clients coming in to seek a divorce based upon one or the other spouses’ infidelity. I thought about this for awhile. My response was that I have seen every possible reason for a divorce imaginable. There are possibly more affairs now, but I still see a lot of marriages ending for many other reasons.
Her position was that the internet has had a tremendous impact upon relationships. I believe it has. Twenty or thirty years ago, when people would have an affair, it would often evolve gradually over many weeks and months — sometimes years. Co-workers would often become involved starting with chats over coffee, or at the water cooler, and then going to lunches and gradually going from talking to something more. With the rise of instant communication, the attorney I was speaking to believes that things happen much faster. Rather than relationships gradually evolving over many months, people today text, e-mail, and communicate at a much more rapid pace. This enhances and speeds up the romance and expectations. Everything is intensified with the click of a computer key. People used to get to know one another gradually over months. Now people think that they know one another in hours or days, especially with our high-speed technology that increases the need for instant gratification. Just like everything else, relationships seem to speed up in our fast-paced cyber society. With the stroke of a key, or by touching the send button, things can evolve almost instantaneously.
After thinking about it for awhile, there is no question that e-mail, texting, Twitter, and perhaps sexting — along with phone sex and every other high-tech convenience — has not only sped up our daily life and peoples’ expectations, but has also led to quicker encounters. This means more affairs, and perhaps an increased number of marriages breaking up due to technology.
I believe that human frailties are the same, but the temptations and the speed at which everything happens is clearly far greater than it was before the rapid changes in our means of communication. Perhaps people are more easily tempted and get into trouble more quickly than they used to. What do you think?
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Most parents know to monitor what their children are doing on their home computers; but what about on their cell phones?
“Everyday these cell phones get more sophisticated, have better capabilities and you can basically use them just like a laptop,” said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Colleen Moss.
Moss oversees the Charlotte FBI office’s effort to eliminate cyber crime, including crimes involving pornography and children who predators will attempt to meet on-line.
“The child basically has full time, 24/7 access to the internet through their phones,” said Moss.
That means ready access to Facebook and all the other social networks where a predator could be lurking.
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Hundreds of teenagers have been charged over producing or distributing child pornography amid growing concern that “sexting” has reached epidemic levels.
In the past three years, more than 450 child pornography charges have been laid against youths between the ages of 10 and 17, including 113 charges of “making child exploitation material”.
More than 160 charges were laid in 2010 alone – 26 more than in 2008.
Parents and communities continue to grapple with the issue of “sexting”, where sexual images are exchanged via SMS.
Teens who engage in sexting not only risk child pornography charges, but can also be listed alongside serial pedophiles and rapists on sexual offender lists.
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Another politician has done it again. Except, well, has he? Nude photos of New Jersey local politician Louis Magazzu have appeared on the website of questionably named GOP activist Carl B. Johnson. Magazzu allegedly sent the photos to a woman with whom he was having an online relationship.
Before you file him away in a folder with former Rep. Anthony Weiner, Magazzu’s situation is different. Reportedly he’s been separated from his wife for two years; Weiner was married only a short time and his wife announced her pregnancy shortly after the scandal broke.
The bigger issue in this case is not that a grown man sent a grown woman a compromising picture. The question is how it arrived in the hands of the blogger and whether that blogger has the right to post it.
With the recent News of the World hacking scandal, electronic privacy demands attention. We do not know what measures the blogger may have undertaken to obtain the photo, but if it involved any hacking, those actions are firmly barred by U.S. law.
But if he didn’t use any hacking or wiretapping to get the photo, if someone sent it to him, does he have the right to post it?
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If your spouse has been “sexting” or maintaining a relationship with someone else online, is that person just looking for an Internet ego-boost, or on the hunt for a real life affair? The answer appears to be the latter, according to a paper on infidelity and cyberspace published in the journal Sexuality & Culture. Authored by University of Nebraska at Kearny professor Diane Kholos Wysocki and Washburn University associate professor Cheryl Childers, the paper examines the behaviors of those who frequent an online dating site dedicated to extra-marital affairs. The authors find that, although many people do seem to enjoy maintaining online sexual relationships with those who are not their partners, most participants’ main goal is indeed to hook up in real life.
The researchers posted a survey at AshleyMadison, a site dedicated to helping individuals hook up outside of their marriages. The goal was to discover what role the Internet plays when it comes to finding sex partners, and how common activities like “sexting” are. (The researchers defined sexting as sending sexually explicit texts or e-mails to another adult in order to increase the likelihood of a sexual relationship, either online or offline. This could include text or photos, or both.)
Of the 5,187 adults who answered the survey, women were more likely than men to engage in the researchers’ definition of “sexting” with people outside their marriage—almost 83 percent compared to almost 67 percent—with the female 25-29 age group having the highest incidence of sexting. (After age 30, women seem to slow down on the sexting.) And, among those groups, women were 1.3 times more likely to send nude photos of themselves than men.
But does all this sexting mean that people are actually cheating? More than two-thirds of respondents said they had “cheated” with someone solely online, while three quarters confirmed that they successfully cheated in real life as a result. There appeared to be no gender differences when it came to real-life cheating rates, though the researchers found some age discrepancies in both genders.
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An NYPD officer in charge of mentoring teens who want to become police officers was arrested yesterday for allegedly carrying on a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old girl who volunteered in his precinct. Kevin Louther, 30, met the unidentified girl when she participated in the NYPD’s Explorer program, which “encourages young people to pursue a law enforcement career.” But prosecutors say that this time Louther was pursuing the Explorer—with erotic text messages, images, and emails.
In addition to the sexting, Louther allegedly made out with the girl in Sunset Park. “It didn’t appear to be anything forced,” a source tells the Daily News. But at some point the girl’s mother found out about the affair and notified the police. Louther, who joined the NYPD in 2005, was arrested yesterday morning and charged with sex abuse, harassment and endangering the welfare of a child. He was quickly released on bail, and when a reporter approached him outside his Bed-Stuy home, he had no comment (perhaps because a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell).
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Meet Brittni Nicole Colleps, English teacher, high school girls’ basketball coach, and alleged sexual predator.
Accused of having sex with 5 male students at Kennedale High School in Arlington, Texas, the 27-year-old is now facing 5 felony counts that carry decades worth of jail time and $50,000 in fines.
There’s visual evidence of her alleged crimes, too.
According to one of the male students, he began trading “sexts” with Brittni Nicole Colleps, eventually ending up in her bedroom reports the Star-Telegram. Somewhere along the line, 4 other male students were drawn into the mix.
In addition to the text messages, police found explicit photographs and videotape of the sexual encounters, which the paper reports occurred on “multiple occasions” at her home.
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Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members’ whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop “sexting” from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids’ phones and when those apps can be used.
Personal Security is Big Money Maker in Location-Based Services Market
For those who grew up before the era of mobile phones, these type of “mom and dad are your Big Brother” services may strike you as a bit disconcerting with the level of access they provide. But for mobile operators and the service providers, that access has proved both valuable in retaining customers, as well as quite lucrative (to the tune of a $50 billion personal securities market, no less.)
According to the CEO of one such service provider, Tasso Roumeliotis, founder and CEO of Location Labs, there’s a high willingness to pay for “Family Locator” services like AT&T’s FamilyMap, T-Mobile’s FamilyWhere and Sprint’s Family Locator, for example.
Carriers like selling such services, too. When a mobile operator is able to convert an account to a family plan, it reduces its churn rate by 75%, Roumeliotis says. Currently, 65% of subscribers in the U.S. are on this type of plan. Within this market, there are now millions of users who are happy to pay for Family Locator solutions at a cost of $5 to $15 dollars per month, generally speaking.
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A Texas teenager has taken a major step toward winning her privacy lawsuit against an assistant middle school principal who searched the contents of her cell phone, finding a nude photo of her.
Alexis Mendoza, then an eighth-grader at Kimmel Intermediate School in Spring, Texas, admitted sending the photo to a boy because he had sent similar photos to her. She sued the principal, assistant principal and school district in December 2009, alleging the search of her cell phone went beyond what was reasonable to determine whether she had been using it during school hours to send text messages.
In a series of recent cases, school teachers and administrators have asserted the defense of qualified immunity to claims that they violated the Fourth Amendment rights of students by searching cell phones. The defense applies if “clearly established law” did not prohibit the search.
No appeals court has so far addressed the legality of a search in a school “sexting” case. But a trial court judge broke new legal ground in a March 16 opinion by finding that Kimmel assistant principal Stephanie Langner was not immune from liability for scrolling through Mendoza’s text messages.
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I just recently performed an archaeological dig on my childhood closet, which has been perfectly preserved in the state it was in when I flew the nest. Amid all the empty bottles of Smirnoff Ice and aimlessly doodled-on binders, I found a stockpile of what might be referred to in court as “child pornography” — but it was self-made with my high school boyfriend. The first thought I had when I saw the images — black-and-white printouts from a webcam — was how sweet the shots were, despite being mildly explicit. Here were two teenagers safely and lovingly exploring their bodies and sexualities — and because the images were kept strictly for our eyes only, they maintained that innocence.
That’s why I’m encouraged by news that late yesterday New Jersey approved a bill that would allow teenagers caught “sexting” to avoid being prosecuted as child pornographers. The bill is based on the wacky notion that teens shouldn’t be labeled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives for taking dirty self-portraits, or possessing X-rated photos of their sweetheart who, in many cases, they are legally allowed to have sex with. (Although, that was not the case for me, as the age of consent in California is 18. Whoops.) This measure is a great step toward a saner adult attitude toward teen sexuality, and other states should look to it as a blueprint. But there’s also room for improvement.
The bill gives teens the option of paying for an educational program as a way to avoid a damaging criminal record. Assemblyman Jon Bramnick told NBC that the measure “sends a clear signal to the Judiciary that when young people make a mistake, this Legislature is saying, ‘give them a chance, give them an option other than a criminal past.’” He’s absolutely right — it is absurd for “sexting” to land a teen on the sex offender registry — but Bramnick, and the measure itself, would be more right if they allowed that sometimes it isn’t a mistake or wrong when teenagers take sexy self-snapshots, that it can be part of normal sexual development.
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An 18-year-old boy in the US has been charged with threatening to kill his father after their telephone tussle over ‘sexting.’
The incident happened when Christian Rider’s father refused to pick him up from a friend’s house because he found nude photographs Rider had sent to his girlfriend via his phone, according to MyFoxTwinCities.
Neighbours said Rider had spent part of the previous summer learning how to shoot a bow and arrow with his father, but his dad probably never expected that his son would threaten to use the weapon against him, reports Fox News.
Rider sent a text message to his father saying, “I’m going to kill you if you come anywhere near me. One of us will be going to the hospital when u get home.”
According to investigators, Rider then knocked an arrow on a compound bow and waited for his father to come home. However, the father avoided a confrontation when he arrived and instead called the police.
Rider was released on 50,000 pounds bail and is still living with his family.
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The news coming from the Hackensack school district earlier this month was unsettling: Circulating among students’ smart phones were nude and sexually oriented pictures of a sixth-grader — yes, that’s right: a child of about 11 or 12 years old.
This was just the latest, but perhaps the most disturbing, of the seemingly continual stories about sexting, revenge photos, pictures taken covertly, and other incidents of great concern that are emerging as school districts deal with the proliferation of powerful tools of technology among their students.
A recent survey revealed that 75 percent of middle- and high-school students own “smart phones.” As any adult who counts an iPhone or a Blackberry as a beloved possession could attest, these phones are more than just tools of communication — they are a huge part of the students’ lives. Like adults, kids use them to organize their calendars, responsibilities and contacts. However, most adults are allowed to freely consult their phones at work, in full view, using them to guide their day, but most schools require students to keep theirs under wraps.
In fact, it seems that only occupants of two places — airplanes and schools — are prohibited from using their smart phones. Since the accepted rationale behind the ban on cell-phone use while a plane is in flight is that cell phones could potentially interfere with the aircraft’s instruments, and since my primary objective while flying is for the plane to return safely to the ground, I have never had much of a problem with that policy.
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