Responding to The Scarlet Cord work, Judge Patricia Gardner said, “Today kids are producing their own pornography.” Unfortunately, it’s true. One of The Scarlet Cord works called Targeted—portraying a child, a bull’s eye, and a roll of film—pictures how childhood innocence is destroyed through erotic material.
“Sexting” is sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit messages, photographs or images, primarily between mobile phones. In our high schools, students routinely text naked images of their bodies to other students. It happens. One West Michigan freshman girl confided that a group of male seniors texted her their naked selfies and then demanded that she pay back by returning nude images of herself.
But we can have a positive influence on our children when we talk to them about the link between pornography and sex-trafficking. During ArtPrize 2014 at The Scarlet Cord exhibit, one visitor said, “After learning about how pornography and trafficking, like destructive parasites, feed off each other, a group of male—and female—students threw their iPhones into the bonfire because their phones were full of pornographic images.”
