IF you have a 14-year-old daughter, there's about a one in three chance that she has stripped off, posed for a selfie, and passed it onto someone else.
That figure hasn't been plucked out of the air. For months now, I've been researching a book on 14-year-old girls, and speaking to about 200 of them, as well as parents, principals, and teen experts, including police, across Australia.
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Schoolgirl website is 'disgusting'
Girls are urged not to share nude photos online after the discovery of a website featuring 2,000 indecent images of school age girls. Nine News
And universally that is the conservative figure provided. The first time I heard it, I didn't believe it. The second time, I shuddered. And the third time, I wondered why.
Principals have told me how they are forced to deal with the fallout of weekend parties where girls swap selfies of themselves in various states of undress.
Parents have told me how they've answered the phone to be told that their sweet, academic teen has succumbed to peer group pressure and joined the pack.
And police have revealed that they now spend more time than they should warning students, and investigating those - principally school boys - who pass on photos.
That distribution is a criminal offence. To this point, police have used cases where teen boys have forwarded on photos as the content for school talks; they've simply warned teens not to do it.
The sickening revelation that at least 70 schools in Australia have been targeted in an Australia-wide pornography ring, involving young people, will change that approach. And so it should.
These teen girls should not have allowed naked or half-naked photographs to be taken. And today, many of them will feel sick to the stomach, knowing their young bodies are forever the public property of anyone who cares to look, across the globe.
But the real menace here are those whose sickening comments, requests and wishes of violence by those swapping photos and driving this massive off-shore website.
They should be tracked down, each and every one of them, and shown the full force of the law.
So much has been done in recent times to draw attention to the scourge of domestic violence; and yet we have school boys who see pornography as sex, and girls as objects.
One police officer told me that many teen boys' sex education was derived purely from pornography; they saw nothing wrong with wrapping their hands around a girl's throat, as part of sex. Others questioned the meaning of consent, because it didn't happen on the online sites they visited.
Domestic violence campaigner and 2015 Australian of the Year Rosie Batty spoke to a Brisbane audience recently, and the star question came from a school girl, who had come along with her mother.
Many of her friends had started dating boys, she said, and some of the boys spoke horribly to them. At what point, should a friend intervene?
Every mother turned from the school student to Rosie Batty, who handled it beautifully. But it's that question that I struggle to forget.
Have we missed the mark here?
We can ask why our daughters are taking off their clothes, and forwarding on photos. And the one in three girls who do, need to stop. But, even more importantly, we need to find out why so many intelligent young men are treating their female peers as second-rate sex objects, to be rated and used. That's the real poison here.
(Madonna's book BEING 14 will be released early next year).
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