Police Taught Courses on Digital Safety May Offer an Alternative Punishment for Young Offenders

Should a teen caught sexting or receiving explicit pictures be charged with a crime like trafficking in child pornography and labeled sex offenders or should there be alternatives? Many adults and police officials, including Yahoo!’s Trust and Safety Team, think there has to be another way to help kids, often caught in some kind of peer pressure, who get involved in these kinds of incidents. To help alleviate the problem, Yahoo has developed a Digital Safety Diversion Program, a police-taught course on online safety that comes in both proactive and reactive versions.

The one-hour proactive version of the course, usually presented at PTA meetings or school assemblies, teaches the importance of building positive online reputations and stopping cyberbullying. The three-hour, discussion-based reactive version of the course covers the same topics in more depth and requires teens to reflect on their online habits. If teens are cited by the police for a digital offense, the reactive course provides an “opportunity to take the infraction off their record,” much like driver re-education after a minor traffic violation, said Connie Chung, policy manager at Yahoo! Trust and Safety. “We’re excited about that happening, because we see it as a win-win situation,” said Chung. Offenders are “appropriately punished while being educated instead of reprimanded.”

Microsoft and Sexting: A Disconnect?

You may have heard about Microsoft’s new cell phone, the Kin, aimed at 15-30 year olds and emphasizing Facebook time and texting. Well it seems that the folks at Common Sense Media got a look at the Kin web site, saw a video where a young man lifts up his shirt, takes a picture of his bare chest and sends it off to a young woman and took Microsoft to task for it for promoting sexting. After receiving many complaints about the video, Microsoft pulled the ad, but it is interesting that Microsoft didn’t think there was an issue in the first place. For more on what happened and the seeming disconnect between the “social generation” and the rest of society take a look at the article on the Common Sense site called Microsoft Gets Common Sense.