Sexting scandal at US school sparks concerns

New York: In a shocking incident, a group of high school students as young as eighth-graders shared explicit photos of hundred of other students online in the US, prompting police to launch a probe into the scandal.

Nude pictures of many of the students of Canon City High School in Colorado were traded online like baseball cards, the CBS news reported yesterday.

This has turned into a widespread probe because this doesn’t entail just a small group of friends, many of the kids are doing this. Students as young as eighth grade are involved in passing around these nude pictures.

The principal of the school said this became a contest among the kids collecting nude photos. Even if parents and guardians of these kids kept a check on what was in their children’s’ phones, they wouldn’t have seen these pictures, they were kept hidden.

There’s not just 10 or 20 kids involved in this, the police are dealing with “hundreds” of nude photos of the kids in this school.

“It’s hundreds, and I mean it was flooring to us how many photos that we were finding on the phones that we confiscated,” the principal said.

The investigation is on-going and they are looking into possible felony child pornography charges for students. With this scandal involving at least half of school’s football team, the team’s final game is cancelled. The school did not want these boys to represent their community, the report said.

There are an equal number of girls and boys involved in this scandal leaving parents wondering how to properly supervise their sons and daughters when it comes to this new technology.

Meanwhile, police has distributed a bulletin to parents telling them about apps that can be used to hide photos on phones and asked them to talk to their children about the risk of explicit photos being shared through social media.