A new, dangerous trend is growing among teenagers: text messaging explicit photos of themselves, also known as sexting. Students as young as 12 are exchanging salacious pictures and messages through their cellphones. It's known as sexting or sex texting, sending lewd messages and pictures through a cellphone. Nude body pictures, topless, bottomless, poses, inappropriate lewd acts.
Its invaded middle schools as well. A seventh grader was quoted as saying "It's not usually strangers. It's just somebody you've been talking to lately and they want to see more of you... literally."

This risque game has very real consequences. The phones these days can just send it to the Internet and post it on MySpace and other people can save it and resend it so it's all over the place before you know it.

John Shehan from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said, "Once it's out there, while they might think it's just their classmates looking at these images, well, it's also the dirty old men. It's the pedophiles. It's those that want to sexually prey on children who take these images, who collect them and spread them worldwide."

It's a very real fear for parents. "It's alarming. They're not protected." "It's really disappointing! It's hard to be a parent today."

The kids said very often it starts as a girlfriend sending a boyfriend a picture, but then they break up, he shows a friend and it quickly gets forwarded around. It's a felony for children under 18 to not only receive one of these pictures on their phone, but taking a photo and sending it could lead to pornography production and distribution charges.

As a parent you should look at your childs phone often if you allow them to have a picture phone. The best way to avoid this is to not even have a picture phone.