The misguided war on sexting: America is taking a punitive approach to teens who send each other explicit messages--and it's backfiring.

• Author: Berlatsky, Noah
• Position: Book review

To save kids from the dangers of sexting, we should stop trying to save kids from the dangers of sexting. So suggests Amy Adele Hasinoff, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Colorado, Denver, in her counterintuitive but convincing new book, Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent (University of Illinois Press).

Hasinoff argues that the current political and social approach to sexy texts is a well-intentioned mess. Currently, sexting is seen by the right, by the left, by parents, by schools, and by courts as a danger in itself. Teens--especially teen girls--are seen as lacking impulse control and/or self-esteem. Awash in hormones and lacking in judgment, they send naked digital pictures of themselves out into the ether, where said shots are inevitably distributed far and wide, resulting in humiliation and irreparable damage.

Sexting isn't really all that new; teens have been exchanging explicit messages at least since the invention of language. But up-to-date smartphone technology makes the old seem unusual and frightening. Sexting has been framed as an issue of pathological identity: There is a certain person who sexts, and that person is broken, ill, undeveloped, wrong. Authorities try to deal with sexting, therefore, by dealing with the person who does it. Sometimes, as Hasinoff documents, this is done through various kinds of treatments. Programs focus on trying to boost girls' self-esteem so that they won't feel the need for validation from their boyfriends and thus won't text naked pictures.

Such programs have demonstrated very little success, but at least they don't directly harm teens. Other responses are more dangerous. Teen girls can be prosecuted under child pornography laws for taking nude photos of themselves. As one judge said, incredulously, "It seems like the child here [is] ... the victim, the perpetrator, and the accomplice. I mean, does that make any sense?"

If sexting is framed as dangerous in itself, girls who sext become perpetrators. And that means the state can target them for punishment. Among other consequences, this means sexting laws become a way parents can use law enforcement to squash relationships they don't like. (Hasinoff points to instances in which parents used sexts to prosecute their children's same-sex boyfriends or girlfriends.)

Law enforcement has shown little ability to punish, or interest in punishing, the people who distribute teen sexts, or who...