This is the second post in a Gaggle Speaks series on our Safety Management categories. In this post, we discuss our Nudity & Sexual Content category.
Gaggle Safety Representatives are tasked with identifying nudity and sexual content in student communications and files.
Inappropriate content ranges widely in severity and seriousness. There is a big difference, for example, between professional pornography and self-produced pornography that students create. More than any other category, Nudity & Sexual Content incidents result in some of the highest percentage of serious situations that we report to school and district contacts.
Often, Safety Representatives identify self-produced pornography created and shared by students. In fact, we’ve seen an alarming number of students sharing self-produced pornography, sometimes as early as in fifth grade. We’ve also discovered students sharing images with strangers who turned out to be child predators.
Sextortion—collecting nude or sexual images from individuals and threatening to share them unless certain demands are met—has also become a real threat. Safety Representatives have discovered students in these situations and notified their school or district to ensure they got the immediate help they needed.
Kathy Boehle, Gaggle Safety Management Manager, stresses the importance of having conversations with your students about the risks of sharing sexual content online, whether with strangers or peers. Of course, accidents do happen, so it’s also important to communicate that students should report any harmful situations to an adult or parent, because the dangers of sextortion far exceed any amount of shame in what they’ve done.
Our Nudity & Sexual Content category doesn’t always include images; sometimes it’s a matter of language. Students frequently sext and send erotic messages back and forth about what they want to do with one another. Safety Representatives frequently discover students (sometimes as early as in fourth grade) attempting to sign up for adult websites or connect with individuals through online personal ads, such as Craigslist.
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