Logan, a Cincinnati high school student, sent a nude cell
phone photo to her boyfriend. But after their relationship ended, he sent the
image to 100 students at four different schools.
Afterward, she endured a barrage of harsh treatment.
“She was harassed. She was called names — filthy names,”
said Jessica’s mother Cynthia Logan. “Things are thrown at her. Her reaction to
all this was — when she would come home — anger, snapping. And I would ask her
what was wrong and she wouldn’t… she wasn’t divulging everything, just that she
was having a hard time.”
Jessica tried to combat what was happening to her by
speaking out about her personal experience. With her voice disguised and her
image obscured, she spoke to a local television station about her ordeal.
“She said to me it was the stupidest thing that she did,”
Cynthia Logan said. “She said, ‘I do realize I made a mistake and I wanted to
talk to the parents.’ And she started to cry.”
Jessica Logan Commits Suicide
The fallout from her sexting experience proved too much for
the 18-year-old to handle. Just two months after her interview with a
Cincinnati television station, Cynthia Logan found that her daughter hanged
herself in her bedroom in July 2008.
“Sexting” — where a user sends sexually explicit images or
messages via text on a cell phone — has parents struggling for a way to address
the situation.
“We’re seeing 14, 15 and 16-year-olds and up are very
commonly sharing naked pictures or sexual pictures of themselves,” said
Internet safety expert Parry Aftab, of Wired Safety. “We’re talking about kids
who are too young to wear bras who are posing in them, and then topless and
then actually engaged in sex or even in masturbation. So we are seeing a lot of
kids who are sexually active.”
“It’s all about immediacy for them, and it’s so much about,
they’re building their hormones and sexuality,” said educator Dawn Russell.
“It’s so much about getting the opposite sex.”
Aftab is concerned at how widespread the problem of sexting
has become.
“We found that 44 percent of the high school boys that we
have polled have seen at least one naked picture of a female classmate, and the
boys are sharing their pictures too,” Aftab said.
The results of this sexual file sharing can be devastating,
as in the case of Jessica Logan.
Now Cynthia Logan has made it her mission to educate people
about the dangers of sexting, using her daughter’s tale as an anecdote.
“The challenge is, if you see someone that has a nude photo,
you walk up to that person and you say that, ‘You know, why don’t you just
delete that photo instead of spreading it?'” she said.
This week, Ohio legislators, with the support of Jessica’s
parents, introduced a bill that would make sexting a misdemeanor for minors.
Compile by Angela
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