Sexting

Sexting definitely exists in the Maldives, though its true extent is not known. From the many incidents of nude photos of Maldivian girls appearing in ‘oriyaan’ sites, it is apparent that sexting is not that rare either in the country. There is at least one reported case in which a young lady lost her government job after her nude photos were leaked by her ex-boyfriend.

For those who are hearing the word for the first time, sexting is a new word recently coined by joining ‘sex’ and ‘texting.’ It refers to the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photos electronically, primarily between cell phones. Sexting was reported as early as 2005 in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and has since been described as taking place worldwide.

In January 2009, a survey of 1200 teenagers in America reported that one in five had sent explicit photos of themselves. A social danger with sexting is that material can be very easily and widely promulgated, over which the originator has no control. It is rather easy for explicit photos to end up in wrong hands because often what was once the right hand could also become the wrong hand, when he turns into an estranged and jealous boyfriend.

According to a CBS report in January 2009, three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves and three male classmates in a western Pennsylvania high school who received them, are charged with child pornography. In October a Texas eighth-grader spent the night in a juvenile detention center after his football coach found a nude picture on his cell phone that a fellow student sent him.