By Vanessa Brown
Knowing there are public photos that violated the girl's vulnerability and safety deeply upset Murielle Boudreau. In September, sexually explicit images of a 16-year-old girl, gang-raped by a group of males at a Pitt Meadows, B.C. field party were posted online. Within days, the photos quickly spread across Facebook, leading RCMP officials to plead with students to help stop it. Two Pitt Meadows male students have since been charged with child pornography.
Boudreau, a member of the Greater Catholic Parent Network, cringes at the thought that such photos are out there for her two teenaged daughters to see. But instead of controlling their Internet use and cell phone text messages, Boudreau uses the incident to communicate with them.
"It's just brutal," she said. "It's vulgar, and so we talk about things like that, and I tell them to be careful about what pictures they put out there because they're there forever."
In an attempt to control vulgar text messages, Apple patented an application on Oct. 12 that will allow parents to block unauthorized content sent or received by their children. Although the patent doesn't explicitly refer to "sexting" (text messages of a sexual nature), U.S. tech experts have dubbed it the "anti-sexting app." The application is not yet available.
Dr. Miriam Kaufman, an adolescent health specialist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, likens the control application to spying, which she considers a dangerous boundary for parents to cross.
"I think it's bad for trust," Kaugman said. "Do we want to see that picture that they texted to their boyfriend of them with no clothes on? I don't think most of us do."
The application has helped reintroduce the debate surrounding adolescent sexual privacy. The seemingly limitless rise of technology in the 21st century means adolescents are able to access sexual health information much more easily. By the same token, Kaufman said, they are also inundated with unhealthy images of sexuality, for which they are often not cognitively ready.
"Kids are looking for role models," Kaufman said. "They're thinking, 'How do I behave sexually? How do I approach the idea of having sex with somebody?' If there's a lot of stuff where women are objectified, to them that's how it is... Things seem much more real."
A 2003 study, published in The Journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, found that 80 per cent of Canadian children have access to the Internet in their homes, while almost half that number are online at least one hour every day.
Planned Parenthood Toronto launched its teen sexual health information website in 2002. Cheryl Dobinson, director of community programming and research, said the site encourages adolescents to seek reliable information online.
"Youth have a right to those kinds of services and information," Dobinson said. "We want to be available to meet their needs in that."
Boudreau's daughters both have computers in their rooms, but must relinquish their cell phones before they go to bed. For her, setting boundaries ensures they can function in other areas of life.
"Once they start the conversation, of course they're not going to sleep," Boudreau said. "It could disturb everything... and that I don't like."
Boudreau isn't "friends" with her daughters on Facebook, but tries to remain technologically savvy when it comes to what adolescents are interested in online.
"I don't think parents should bury their heads in the sand and cut themselves off from the Internet," Kaufman explained. "We can find stuff about teens and parenting, and we can connect with people that are going through the same issues that we are with our kids."
She encourages parents to remain sympathetic to their underdeveloped sexual emotions when speaking to their children about sexuality.
"I think it's much better to have open communications and to let your kid know that if you tell them not to sext, and they do, and they realize they could get into trouble for it, you'll be there for them and help them get through it," she said.
Although Boudreau believes her teens are exposed, via the Internet and cell phones, to more potential vulgarity than she was at their age, using a control application on her iPhone isn't necessary.
"You don't have to go overboard," she said. "There are dangers there, but you have to keep the lines of communication open."
"It's weird for us as parents to see our kids interacting so much with people online," Kaufman said. "Figuring out your sexuality... and how you want to relate to other people is one of the primary tasks of adolescence. That's one of the things teens are supposed to be doing."
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