About once every two weeks, school officials in northern new Jersey catch students “sexting” racy pictures of a young teen over their cellphones.

the officials call police, who show up at the school and deliver a stiff notice: Lose those photos immediately, or face prosecution for child porn.

It’s a scheme that is working well to curb the growing problem of “sexting,” law enforcement officials say.

“It is a serious and growing problem,” Bergen County, N.J., Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said. “Next thing you know, half the people in the school are getting it, and then people outside the school are getting it. It is the origin of child pornography.”

but a federal court is now considering whether teens can be prosecuted at all for taking their own photos and sending them to their friends.

the ruling could be the first in the country to determine whether “sexting” — the cellphone messaging of either explicit photos or words — is constitutionally protected speech or a public safety concern serious enough to alarm law enforcement.

Civil liberties groups and some juvenile welfare firms have a different view than prosecutors.

“Research on adolescent sexual development suggests that teens often use technology to express themselves,” Riya Shah, an attorney for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center, wrote in court papers opposing prosecutors’ involvement in “sexting” cases.

“‘Sexting’ is merely the newest form of doing this,” Shah said. “Prosecuting

these cases as child pornography misapplies the law, using it as a sword and not a shield to protect exploited child victims.”

the case pending before a federal appeals court in Philadelphia arose from a school district in northern Pennsylvania, where administrators called police after finding images of three teenage girls on 16 students’ cellphones.

the district attorney there threatened to charge the students with child pornography unless they participated in a “re-education” program. All except three families agreed.

the three families filed lawsuit, arguing that the case did not amount to child pornography, and that the district attorney had no business forcing their children to be “re-educated.”

according to court papers, one picture shows two girls from the waist up, wearing bras. Another photo showed a 16-year-old girl stepping out of a shower wrapped in a towel with her breasts exposed.

the photos do not show any sexual activity, but the district attorney held that they amount to child pornography because they were provocative and were sent to students for purposes of sexual gratification.

“I do think this is rooted in (the district attorney’s) personal disapproval of conduct,” ACLU attorney Vic Walczak said. “It’s one thing to prosecute someone for lascivious sexual activity. It’s another to prosecute kids over photos that you find ‘provocative.’”

the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to issue a ruling within the next few months. the court’s rulings apply in new Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Virgin Islands.

About 20 percent of teenagers have sent nude or semi-nude photos of themselves over a cellphone or the Internet, according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

“Usually it’s an innocent but ill-advised decision by a teenage girl to take photos of herself and send to a boyfriend,” Molinelli said.

still, taking the photos and saving it to a phone or sending it to someone else amounts to creation, possession and distribution of child pornography — all of them serious crimes that carry stiff prison terms and Megan’s Law registration requirements, he said.

but he said police often give the students “sexting amnesty,” requiring the students to delete all messages within a certain deadline or face charges.

“Once they realize that they could be treated just like the creeps in some of our press releases, they usually delete the images,” Molinelli said.

Passaic County Sheriff’s spokesman Bill Maer, whose department deals with about three dozen “sexting” cases a year in the schools, said his office follows a similar approach.

“We do not want to criminalize this behavior but we don’t want to encourage it, either,” he said. “We are going to enforce the laws but where there is flexibility, we would utilize that.”

Law enforcement officials say that “sexting” poses a twofold threat to teenagers. Nude and semi-nude photos of children attract child predators, they say.

Michael Donohue, a lawyer representing the district attorney in the Pennsylvania case, cited an instance in which a teenage girl who had “sexted” photos of herself was eventually targeted by an adult predator.

an inappropriate photo posted on the Internet during teenage years will also be on the Web for good, possibly damaging the child’s prospects in college, work and beyond, he said.

“There is a general concern to protect kids from their own immaturity and recklessness,” Donohue said.

Juvenile laws prohibit underage drinking, for instance — an offense in which victim and perpetrator are often the same person.

but Shah, the attorney for the Juvenile Law Center, argues that there is nothing abnormal, let alone criminal, about “sexting.”

“The usual purpose and motivation of ’sexting’ is normal adolescent sexual exploration,” Shah wrote. “In the practice of ’sexting,’ there are often no exploited victims as there are in conventional child pornography.

'Sexting': Teenage indiscretion or child pornography?

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