Seven-year-old Henry can’t spell well. Yet there’s one word he’s learnt to spell perfectly. Boob. His mother Vicki discovered this when she gave him her iPhone to play with. He told her he was playing on Disney’s Club Penguin, but when she turned on the phone later, the website that popped up was juggworld.com. When she confronted him, he looked at her very seriously and said, “Well, Mum, I’m extremely interested in the human body.” This made Vicki laugh. What’s not funny is what this incident suggests about Henry’s future. If the ability to spell one slang term at his age can lead him to an explicit site, how blasé will he be about pornography by the time he’s a teenager? And how much of a leap is it to imagine him becoming involved in the latest teenage craze of “sexting”? Sexting – the sending or receiving of sexual text or nude photos via mobile phones or the internet – is growing in frequency and prevalence around the world. How long before Henry turns to Vicki and says, “Mum, it’s no big deal”?

But sexting is a very big deal. Not because sexual curiosity and boundary pushing aren’t normal parts of growing up; they are. But on the internet, nothing ever truly vanishes. It’s possible that a teen’s “special present” sent to her boyfriend stays on his computer or cell phone forever, as precious to him as any 19th-century love letter. It is also possible those photos will be sent to everyone she knows (and many she doesn’t know), will turn up if her name is searched on Google, or, just maybe, will land her in jail.

Generation sex?

Kids as young as 11 have been discovered taking compromising photos of themselves and sending those shimmering pixels over their phones and computers. According to cyber-safety expert Susan McLean, sexting has been a problem for the past five years but incidents are only now being reported in high numbers. It is a global problem, with kids, parents and teachers facing major challenges.

Last year, an 18-year-old US teenager began serving five years’ probation and had to register as a sex offender after forwarding nude photos of his then-16-year-old ex-girlfriend to her friends, teachers and relatives. In Australia, a 15-year-old Perth schoolboy convinced two 14-year-old girls to expose their breasts on a webcam and recorded the images on his cell phone. When the boy’s 15-year-old girlfriend found out, she forwarded the images to at least 12 other children with the intention of embarrassing the girls – both of whom received juvenile cautions from police.

Surely these are extreme examples? Think again. A survey conducted in 2006 among children aged 13-17 in randomly selected schools in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg tells a disturbing story. The Film and Publication Board’s (FPB) report found among children who had cell phones, 33% had been sent pornographic images and 81% reported knowledge of pornographic images on their friends’ phones.

Sometimes, the age of the kids involved upsets other kids. High school student Monica (her name, and those of other minors in this story, have been chang-ed) tells of a giggling girl who took a picture of her friend, 12, vamping naked while changing for dance class. They sent it to a friend as a joke, and the friend sent it to the entire school. A parent saw the image on her son’s computer and called the principal. The girl who sent the photo was suspended.

“But this is what shocked me,” says Monica. “Two months later, the girl who posed was at orchestra rehearsal and put up her hand and said, ‘I just lost a tooth.’ She was young enough to still have her baby teeth!”

There is a me-me-me quality to blogging, Facebooking, Twittering and the like. And what could be more attention-grabbing to a teenager than taking your clothes off?

Seeping into society

Pornography on all levels is becoming widely acceptable, says Kate McCaffrey, a high school teacher and author of Destroying Avalon (a teenage novel about cyber-bullying). “Provocation is the acceptable pose. Reality television and popular culture teaches our kids that you don’t need any specific talent to achieve fame.” Today, making a video and then uploading it to Facebook is as easy as pressing a button.

That’s how one 15-year-old girl got into trouble. “Cheryl was in her bedroom with her laptop,” her mother says. “A friend was sleeping over. I’d seen her do video chats plenty of times and hadn’t ever thought of it as a risk.

“We’d gone to bed when I heard a thump. I go upstairs, and she immediately flips the laptop lid down. The girls – in bed, wearing pyjamas and cami tops – look guilty. I repossess the laptop and go downstairs. There’s a picture of the ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’ variety, only this is creepier because it’s of the two girls and they’d sent it to some teenage boy. There was even a script right out of a porn movie. Plus, she had pictures of some naked boy on her desktop.”

The computer was confiscated but, by that point, it was too late. Those photos could turn up anywhere. Why would kids take this kind of risk? “Teenagers are impulsive, sexual beings,” says adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, author of Real Wired Child. “The teenage brain is not yet fully developed and, as a result, adolescents have an inability to predict the consequences of their actions. There’s not a lot of thought before hitting the send button.”

But there’s another aspect to sexting that many parents haven’t considered, as he explains: “The perception of distance makes them feel bolder and safer. Many young people also believe that the internet affords them a level of anonymity. [It gives them] digital Dutch courage, which results in a level of disinhibition.”

According to McLean, years ago when sexting first started, the images being circulated were obtained under coercion, or often while teenage girls were under the influence of alcohol. “But currently young females are willing to allow images to be sent or send them themselves. Reasons given include to ‘impress a boy’, ‘to feel sexy’ or ‘to flirt’.”

“It’s not unusual for me to see a [sexting] case at least once a month,” says Carr-Gregg. “An example was a girl who had photographed herself inserting various objects into her vagina and then sent the photo via text to her friends – it wasn’t long before almost everyone in the school had the photo on their cell phone.”