Sexting threat comes from peers

16 May 2012 Last updated at 13:42 Teenage girls are coming under increasing pressure to text and email sexually explicit pictures of themselves, a report suggests.

The report, commissioned by the NSPCC, suggests the demands come from peers rather than from adults or strangers.

So-called sexting, the sending or receiving of sexual images by text or email, is thought to affect more than a third of under-18s.

More needs to be done to address the issue, the report concludes.

Sexual abuse

Entitled A Qualitative Study of Children and Young People, the study was conducted by researchers at King's College, London; the Institute of Education; and the London School of Economics.

"Up until now, e-safety campaigns have focused on preparing young people to face dangers posed by strangers online," said Professor Rosalind Gill from King's College, one of the authors.

"Our report suggests that the focus needs to shift to include the much more complicated issue of peer-to-peer communication and the difficulties and isolation young people experience in negotiating this," she added.

Jon Brown, head of the sexual abuse programme at the NSPCC, said the revelations were disturbing.

"What's most striking about this research is that many young people seem to accept all this as part of life. But it can be another layer of sexual abuse and, although most children will not be aware, it is illegal."

Cyberbullying

The in-depth interviews with 35 teenagers at two London schools found that girls as young as 11 were being asked to send "special photos" to boys who they knew.

In some cases, the girls had to write a name in black marker pen on a part of their body to show it was the "property" of a certain boy.

The teenagers also faced a "barrage" of messages from boys demanding for intercourse or oral sex.

"Even while we were interviewing them they were being bombarded with these messages," said lead researcher Jessica Ringrose, from the Institute of Education.

Such sexting is an extreme form of cyberbullying, the report concludes.

The study was launched at the House of Commons by Conservative MP Claire Perry.

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Crazy Ants Posing a Threat to Louisiana

Crazy ants of a hairy and biting variety, millions of them, are invading southern United States, from Texas to Florida. These crazy ants, known for their swarming, are now posting a threat to the local industry in the region.

Millions of hairy, crazy ants moves from Texas to Louisiana, Mississippi causing damage from beehives to agriculture and even industrial equipments.

The ants’ scientific name is Nylanderia pubens, and they’re first seen in Florida in the ’50s and in Texas in 2002. Now they are moving and posing a threat to Louisiana.

A pest control agency in Sulphur sent a sample of the “hairy crazy ants” to the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum, where curator Victoria Bayless identified the species for the first time. She said that the speed of these ants’ migration into the rest of Louisiana is unpredictable because of the new climate.

Bayless said the main difference between these species and other ant species is the size of the colonies. A single colony can contain millions of the pests because there are multiple queens, or head ants, that work together.

Hairy crazy ants have also been reported in walls of houses, she said. They can cause electrical shortages as they accumulate in large numbers. Its bite also cause similar allergic reactions to other ant bites.

Bayless further said that controlling these ants can be tricky as these crazy insects reproduce rapidly and do not respond to normal pest control methods and researchers have not yet found a way to prevent or get rid of the ants.

Photo Credit: AP

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Letterman Threat – Jihadist Website Warns David Letterman

An article from a Jihadist website encourages Muslim followers to “cut the tongue” of late-night host David Letterman for a joke he has made on his show about their religion.

The contributor of the article in the Muslim forum identified himself as Umar al-Basrawi. He was reacting to David Letterman’s reference to both Osama bin Laden and Kashmiri after the US drone strike in Pakistan on June 5 by putting his hand on his neck and demonstrated the way of slaughter.

“Is there not among you a Sayyid Nosair al-Mairi … to cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever?” Al-Basrawi wrote, referring to El Sayyid Nosair, who was convicted of the 1990 killing of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane. Letterman is not Jewish.

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