Sexting: Flirting or Felony?

"You should have seen the picture on his phone! She was completely naked!"

I overheard this at a party. Someone there was retelling a story about her stepson receiving a picture message on his cellphone. After learning that the recipient of the aforementioned picture message was thirteen years old, I began wonder how many teens were actually getting involved in sending sexually explicit text messages.

I discovered this is not an isolated incident. As cellphones have become more and more popular will teens and young adults, texting and picture messaging has exploded. This has also lead to the strange trend of "sexting"; sending nude or semi-nude photos by cellphone as a way of flirting. The latest studies show that sexing is on the rise. In 2008, between 25 and 30 percent of teens claimed to have engaged in sexting. The most recent study announced in July shows that number has climbed to 43 percent.

As a whole, it doesn't seem like too many people are raising eyebrows about sexting. Many of the teens surveyed commented that "No one gives it that much thought really" and that the photos are usually sent for no reason other than to be "fun or flirtatious." The most recent study also surveyed the parents of the teens and found that 28% of the parents engaged in sexting. Most parents said that sexting was "not a bad thing."

If you are a teen and you are reading this, you may be nodding your head in agreement. I mean, if the parents don't think it's serious, it must not be a big deal. Right?

So what are the risks?
If you are under the age of 18 and you either text or post nude pictures, you could face felony charges of child pornography. Does this sound far-fetched? Well, in 2009 a 14-year-old New Jersey girl posted dozens of sexually explicit photos of herself on her MySpace. She was arrested and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography.

If you are over 18, the consequences become a bit more severe. If you are caught texting or posting pictures of someone under the age of 18, not only could you face felony charges, you also may have to register as a sex offender. You may have heard about Phillip Alpert from Florida. At age 18, Phillip decided that the best way to get back at his ex-girlfriend was to forward an e-mail of her posing nude to dozens of people, including her parents. Phillip is now 20, and will have to register as a sex offender until he is 43 years old.

Phillip's story brings attention to another important point. Just because you text or e-mail a photo to a friend doesn't mean that your friend will keep the photo private. To give you a completely ridiculous example, while Halloween costume shopping with a friend, I snapped a photo on my iPhone of him wearing a giant fur coat and a cowboy hat. I posted the photo to Facebook and tagged him in the photo.

Within a matter of hours, over a dozen mutual friends had commented on the photo. They took the photo and circulated it all over Facebook. People were texting him and laughing about his new look. He also had neglected to shave that day so there was also a wealth of comments pertaining to his bizarre facial hair.

While my friend was in good spirits about this, think what had happened if this had been a sexually explicit photo. Once a photo is on the Internet, it is just a "right-click and save" away from distribution. This is what so many teens (and adults) seem to forget when it comes to sexting.

Even if texted photos never make it to MySpace or Facebook, there is still a possibility that they will get forwarded from phone to phone. It may seem like flirty, harmless fun, but do you really want everyone at school seeing that picture?

And as for the thirteen year old who ended up getting a surprise text? I'm sure the last though on the sender's mind was "Gee, I hope his parents find this picture."

Teen Mental Health A-Palooza!!!

The Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition has been BUSY. Aside from our regular duties of updating all of our social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, we have also been busy with lots of other activities! Here's what we've been up to:

Updating Our Website

*whew!* That was hard work! For the past few weeks we have been building resource pages on the website. Do you want to know more about depression? What do you do if a friend has an eating disorder? Have you ever heard of K2? Do you know how to put on a condom correctly? What should you think about before you come out of the closet?

Did any one of those leave you scratching your head? Check out our resource page on the website to get all the facts. We're just calling it a "Teen Mental Health A-Palooza!"

Chillin' at the South Park Day and Night Festival

On Saturday, August 14, the Peer Leaders headed to Martin Luther King Jr. Park to promote the Peer Outreach Coalition. We handed out dozens of our new stickers, resource lists, and had a raffle for two tickets to Great America! The Festival was a blast too! The food was yummy and the day was full of non-stop music, dancing, and martial arts demonstrations. It was a great day!

Be sure to go to our Facebook page and check out the photos we posted!

Recording Radio Shows

What are you doing Sunday night? Well, if you are near a radio or computer, tune in to KRCB (Radio FM 91) to hear the Peer Outreach Coalition on the hit show Outbeat Youth! Peer Leaders Marcos Garcilazo, Jesús Guzman, and Vanessa Romero (along with group faciliator Shana Friedman) will be discussing their experiences with the POC and helping the LGBTQ community! The show airs at 8pm on August 22, and if radios are just too mid-nineties for you, you can stream the show online at the KRCB website.

So, feed your inquiring mind at our website resource page, check out our photos from the festival, and listen to us on the radio too! It's just another wonderful weekend with the Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition. Have a happy and healthy weekend!

Back to school blues

It's that time of year again. Throughout Sonoma County (and across the nation) children, teens, and college students are heading back to the classroom. Many of the Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition's Peer Leaders are going back to school this week too. Things are about to get busy!

Some of you may be heading off to college for the first time. This is an exciting transition! For the first time you may be living away from home. Independence! Freedom! Partying! Before you get too excited, remember the reason you are going away to school is *ahem* school.

Despite all these feelings of excitement, going to college can stir up some emotions you may not be prepared for. Although college is an opportunity to meet lots of new people, sometimes students find that they are socially isolated and lonely. According to this recent article, mental health problems are on the rise among college students. The students who are most likely to seek counseling or other resources on campus are the ones who feel disconnected from peers or feel like they are not "fitting in" at the school.

According to the study by Hofstra University, "moderate to severe depression increased to 41 percent in 2009, compared to 34 percent in 1997 and 1998." Also, the study reported that impulsive behaviors (such as drinking, fighting, and stealing) were on the rise. The incidence of students exhibiting self-destructive behaviors (such as cutting or other forms of self-injury) doubled during the last decade.

But there is good news! According to the same study, student reports of suicidal thoughts were down by fifteen percent! It has been suggested that this is due to college student's increased access to on campus counseling and health services.

So if you are going away to college, where can you turn for support?

• Your campus health center Check out your college health center. Most have access to counseling and mental health services.



• Your friends Reach out to your classmates and friends. A phone call to a friend from high school who is attending a different school may boost your mood.



• Your family There is nothing wrong with calling home to talk about how you are feeling! Also, if you have health insurance, your family might be able to help you locate a mental health professional under your insurance plan to help with the strong emotions you are dealing with



• Your online social network There is a wealth of information on the internet. On Facebook, the Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition links to a variety of Facebook pages and websites about suicide prevention, depression, and anxiety. There are also numerous online resources dedicated to college students such as ULifeline. Right now you can also check out Psych Central which currently has a back-to-school mental health guide

Remember, it is completely normal to feel depressed and overwhelmed at times. Going to college for the first time is a life-changing experience. If you feel like your enjoyment of this exciting time in your life is being overshadowed by feelings of sadness or hopelessness, then please make an appointment with you campus health center. There is nothing wrong with seeking help for depression or anxiety symptoms. As you can tell by these articles, students are making the choice to get help more frequently.

The Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition frequently uses the saying "Got Mental Health?" Take care of your body, take care of your mind, and when we ask you if you've got mental health you can say proudly, "Why yes, I do!"

What does your Facebook say about you?

When you run an online social media campaign about mental health awareness, you are constantly aware of how you are perceived by the public. You must be careful about your choice of words (i.e. The Baby Seal Club) and make sure that you are providing the best information possible for your readers. The Peer Leaders are constantly sifting through articles, websites, and a plethora of information online about teen mental health, sex, drugs, and occasionally a little rock and roll. We discuss frequently if something is worth posting, if it is "Fact or Crap?" as we have joked on many occasions.

So when you are looking online at your friends' Facebook profile, can you be sure they are showing you who they really are? Well, now you can. According to a study in the March issue of Psychological Science, Facebook users' profiles accurately reflect who they really are! The study was done by a collaboration of University of Texas at Austin and the University of Mainz in Germany. Research assistants ranked profiles study participants on the “Big Five.” These are the five dimensions of personality often used in psych­ological research. They include extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and conscientiousness.

The research assistants then compared their perceptions with personality tests of the study participants, and the feedback of four close friends of the participants. For the most part, the perceptions were very accurate. In other words, if you were to look at a profile on Facebook and think "Wow, this person sure is extroverted!" you would most likely be correct.

Why is this important? Well, think about everything we do online. We socialize, we date, and we occasionally snoop on other people! The latter is more common than you think, especially when it comes to employers checking up on prospective job applicants. What do you think a potential employer thinks when they see a job applicant's Facebook profile where all the pictures show the applicant drunk on the beach in Cabo? Hmm...maybe it's time to rethink posting those Spring Break photos.

The Sonoma County Peer Outreach Coalition works pretty closely with local LGBTQ organizations such as Positive Images and Outbeat Youth. Over the past few months, we have become increasingly aware of the problem of privacy when it comes to being "out" online. Once you have posted information online, people can access that information. Privacy settings can help, but concerns about safety and security often are at the forefront of the minds of those who have faced discrimination in the past.

Cyberbullying is also a concern regardless of one's sexual orientation. Teens across the country are being bullied by peers via the internet, often resulting in mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Cyberbullying has even been linked to a probable cause of a girl's suicide in New York.

Will knowing that people are (for the most part) pretty honest on Facebook help with this problem? Will this knowledge make it easier to spot a wolf in sheep's clothing? Can we now determine what is "fact" and what is, well, "crap?"

Excuse me now while I go remove my summer vacation pictures from my Facebook...

"Equality: 1, Bigotry: 0." Guest blog post by Peer Leader Marcos Garcilazo

Yesterday was a historic day for LGBTQ rights in the state of California. Since members of the LGBTQ population are often at an increased risk of stress, anxiety, and depression due to discrimination, Marcos has graciously written this post on his thoughts about Prop 8, equality, and discrimination. Thanks Marcos!

Yesterday afternoon, I was one of the millions of people on Twitter who was furiously refreshing their feed hoping that the Fail Whale would not show up. The day before, the judge who had been presented with the case that would rule Proposition 8 (which banned gay marriage in California back in November 2008) was going to release his decision. I was overcome with the same feeling that I felt the night of November 2008 when Americans made history by electing the first African-American man to office: history would be made that day once again.

At 2PM PST, Twitter exploded (it really exploded) with the news: the Judge had ruled Prop 8 unconstitutional, meaning that people in favor of gay marriage had won this round. I have to admit that a huge grin adorned my face as I proudly updated my Facebook status with a link to the ruling and my own little comment - "Equality: 1, Bigotry: 0." I understand this is but the first step in what's surely going to be a marathon, but it's a step in what I believe to be the right direction.

As of yesterday, a very large part of the population got affirmation on a very deep level that there is hope for equality. America has a history of inequality and bigotry, sure, but we also have a history of people moving history along past such things, and yesterday Honorable Judge Vaughn Walker joined those people. His ruling, which is honestly one of the better reads of the summer (and I only read about a fifth of the whole document) very clearly asserts several things. First, his ruling upholds the notion that equality is not something we should be putting up for a vote. Equality in general is not a voter initiative idea - it is an ideal. Regardless of race, gender, economic status, sexual orientation, religion, or any other factor that may differentiate us from a larger group, when we stand in front of a judge or in front of a police officer, we expect that we will all be treated equally. This ruling asserts that Judge Walker heard no argument that was convincing enough to abolish that equality at the marriage license clerk's office.

The concept of equality is not new, but the fact that now we should be applying it to more people apparent is. If "marriage" continues to be something recognized by a government, which thereby grants certain legal benefits (e.g. hospital visits, tax breaks, etc) then marriage should be something every single American should be able to get. Throughout this whole debate opponents of gay marriage have brought up the religious interpretation of the word "marriage", and that's something that needs to be said: this debate is not about "religious marriage" - it is about the legal, government-recognized and government-benefited union between two people. In order for equality to be equality, it needs to be applied to everyone, not just to those the majority deems appropriate.

Second, this decision carried a deeper message for the greater queer community. This decision sent a loud and clear message that their relationships are just as valid and that their relationships carry the same intrinsic value as opposite-sex relationships. Through years of anti-gay messaging, it has been my experience that people do not carry the same level of respect for the word "partner" as they do for "husband" or "wife," and what this decision does is tell all those people that in fact there is no difference, that the love in a relationship is not dictated by the genders of the people in it.

Third, this decision was really heartening because it struck down discrimination, and as a "minority" discrimination is an issue. As I said, if people will discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation, how can I know that it won't be because of their race the next day, or because they have an accent, or are of a certain religion? Discrimination is a disease as far as I'm concerned and to allow any kind of discrimination is a violation of the principle that our nation so often touts: that all men are created equal. If we are to uphold that notion, then we must do all that we can to make sure that every single person in this nation is an equal in the eyes of the law.

Again, this is not about the religious institution. This is about the legal marriage. Yesterday amongst the flurry of joy around this decision there was a lot of hate. Some people see this as an attack on tradition, and some see it as an attack on the will of the people. Appealing to tradition is one of the many techniques employed in arguments, and to that I say, just because we've been doing something in a particular manner for years doesn't mean we've been doing something right. As far as an attack on the will of the people, well, this is called a "minority rights issue" for a reason - this affects the minority, and the implication here is that simply because 52% of Californians have an issue with gay marriage we should embed discrimination into our state constitution. Minority rights would never advance if we waited for the majority to work through its concerns with any particular issue.

I hope that when this reaches the Supreme Court of the United States (and I have no doubt it will) I will see a repeat of yesterday. It is comforting to know that a community that so often has to deal with hatred finally gets a break, even if it's just a small one.

Sonoma County Mental Health Controversy: Lunatic Binge, anyone?

On Saturday I was strolling through downtown Sebastopol with a friend for high school. We were reliving our days at Analy High School and marveling at how much the town has changed since we graduated. As I was walking past the entrance of the Sebastopol Cookie Company, the following poster caught my eye....

I particularly was fascinated by the idea that bathrobes, pajamas, and straight jackets were encouraged. As much as I have always wanted an excuse to wear a straight jacket in public, I think it may be a little difficult to enjoy a diet coke with my arms strapped to my sides.

All sarcasm aside, this event caused quite a stir. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) released a statement that the event reinforced "stereotypes about people suffering serious ailments and should be cancelled." In the end, NAMI and the band Baby Seal Club were able to reach an agreement on the event. The evening of the show a one-person picket line marched out in front of Hopmonk Tavern in Sebastopol.

On the Baby Seal Club website, the band composed an open letter to NAMI. Here is an excerpt:

"To clarify, what we are presenting is akin to a cartoon using recognizable reference points elevated to illustrate the ludicrousness and absurdities of the stigmas attached to mental illnesses and their treatments. We seek to spoof the stigmas themselves, not to perpetuate them, and certainly not to insult those who suffer from a serious mental illness. We will let the attendees decide for themselves if we have succeeded."

In all honesty, I am a little confused at how an evening of straight jackets, bite-guards, and restraints (according to the band's website), along with calling the event the "Lunatic Binge," does not perpetuate the stigma of mental illness. I am happy that NAMI and the show organizers were able to make peace, but I wonder what, if any, harm was done by allowing this event to take place.

What do you think?