Sextortion in High School
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James Joyner | Friday, July 17, 2009 |
GQ has a rather weird piece about something that may or may not be a trend: High school kids using the Internet to extort sexual favors. This one has a twist, which I’ll lot Conor Friedersdorf summarize:
Tony Stancl, an 18 year old high school senior who created a fake female identity on Facebook, flirted with male classmates by Internet chat, and successfully encouraged hundreds of them to send along naked photographs. These he kept on his computer. The unluckiest victims were subsequently blackmailed. The made up female would threaten to release the photographs unless the boys performed oral or anal sex on “my friend Tony.” Some boys agreed, and allowed that to be photographed too.
Conor has an excellent disquisition on the culture that allows high schoolers to casually get photographed nude and send said pics to complete strangers. It’s worth reading.
My thoughts upon reading his precis, however, were not so much to the issue of the photographs per se but the fact that some significant number of high school boys allowed themselves to be blackmailed into gay sex rather than have nude photographs of themselves revealed. Let’s just say my reaction precisely mirrored that which President Obama would have upon being told additional troops were needed in Afghanistan.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Unless being a high school boy has changed a lot in 20 years, any boy who would (1) let a nude photo of himself be taken and (2) send it to another boy, probably objects not so much to gay sex per se as to being forced into gay sex with Tony.
Ah, but they presumably thought they were sending said photos to a chick. Stancl was posting as "Kayla."
Ah yes, reading would've disclosed that, eh?
Still.
And I'm also with you: given the choice between public humiliation via nude photo and private humiliation via sodomy, the former choice seems pretty easy, ESPECIALLY for a freakin' high school kid. I mean, nowadays, practicing law and married with kids, I might actually have to think about it. Age 17, who cares?
Blackmailed? Whatever happened to the word, choice?
Blackmailed? Whatever happened to the word, choice?
Threatening to engage in criminal acts to coerce slightly less unwanted actions is the very definition of blackmail. "Choice" under coercion is not "choice" at all.
I would also think that threatening exposure in exchange for a specified sex act is a sexual assault.
If this young man were threatening girls, i am pretty sure rape would have been somewhere in the headline.
I do wonder though why one would be willing to send naked pics over the net, but then be willing to do a sex act to keep them secret. I almost wonder what it is about kids and the internet that makes them so stupid.
