Sexting Ring Ensnares 100 Students, Hundreds of Photos

Teen sexting is increasingly normal behavior, and kids have developed Internet shorthand to keep their parents in the dark about it. (Photo via Shutterstock)

School administrators and prosecutors are grappling with a teen sexting scandal that may involve 100 students, while some parents charge that cell-phone sharing of nude photos has been a problem in the Colorado community for years.

At least 100 Canon City teens, some as young as eighth grade, reportedly traded images that legally are deemed child pornography. That makes it a felony to possess the images on a cell phone.

But, authorities have been told the teens willingly shared the images in an illicit contest to see who could garner the most risqué photos. So prosecutors say they will use discretion in deciding who, if anyone, will face criminal charges. The boy “winning” the contest was dubbed the “pimp of photos.”

George Welsh, the superintendent of the Cañon City school system, told The New York Times that high school traded 300 to 400 nude photographs of an estimated 100 youths.

Players on the Cañon City Tigers football team may be at the heart of the sexting ring, the newspaper reports. As a result, the school forfeited its final football game of the season rather than take the field.

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Someone tipped police to the photo sharing via the state’s “Safe2Tell” website that lets students report unsafe behavior in their schools or communities. School officials were alerted to the problem on Monday.

“It’s hundreds, and I mean it was flooring to us how many photos that we were finding on the phones that we confiscated,” Cañon City High School principal Bret Meuli told the FOX Denver TV station.

“We’re not dealing with a bunch of adults who made a bunch of bad decisions, we’re dealing with kids that made bad decisions,” parent Michelle Barnes said at a Thursday meeting for parents covered by the FOX station.

School administrators and law enforcement officials told parents how to talk to their children and how to report possible victims or photos.

But several parents, including Heidi Wolfgang, who no longer lives in the district, told The Times that their complaints about sexting have been ignored for several years.

She reportedly told a middle school counselor in 2012 that her then 12-year-old daughter had received nude photos on her cellphone from another student.

“He told me there was nothing the school could do because half the school was sexting,” Wolfgang told the newspaper.

As a result of the district’s inaction, she decided to home-school her daughter.

No arrests have been made, local police say, and parents have been notified about the apps that can be used to hide the images.

»Read the full New York Times story here.