NEWBERRY COUNTY — The Newberry County Sheriff’s Office will present a training session at 6 p.m. May 12 for parents and their children to teach them the dangers of sending sexually explicit material and photos.
The session will be held at the Newberry County Sheriff’s Office.
The sending of sexually explicit material and picture among young people is reaching epidemic rates. Children as young as 11 years old have been discovered sending nude pictures of themselves through the internet or over their telephone in Newberry County and even younger in other places.
Sheriff Lee Foster said the number of incidents continues to rise.
“Parents and teens desperately need to understand the dangers of sending and receiving these pictures,” said Foster. “According to statistics, 25% of the people who get a nude picture of someone shares it with someone else. This means that the nude picture has the potential to spread throughout the school and further rapidly.”
Foster said the goal is to educate parents on the dangers because many times the parents depend on the kids to operate the technology so they do not know what the kids are doing.
“We will only get control of the this issue when parents buy in to education and prevention by creating checks and balances relating to their child’s phone and internet usage,” he said. “We want to convince those attending and reach throughout the community to educate teens that sending such a picture could change their life in a very negative way.”
Foster said the problems worsen because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that sending nude pictures of someone under 18 years old is child pornography even if the person in the picture is who sends the picture.
“This means that sending these pictures could lead to criminal charges and if convicted, they could have to register as a sex offender for the remainder of their life,” Foster said.
Foster also said scam artists are now preying on this activity being illegal. They use a fake name and identification to get teens to send them compromising pictures and then call them and their parents threatening to reveal the pictures if they are not paid a ransom for the pictures.