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.
