A 13-year-old girl at a Louisiana middle school got into a fight with classmates who were sharing AI-generated nude images of her
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
Your question was answered in the article but you clearly stopped at either the outrage bait headline or the outrage bait summary.
“Ultimately, the weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, uncovered AI-generated nude images of eight female middle school students and two adults, the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.”
That was the investigation by the police not the school.
What we’re asking is why the school didn’t investigate given that the police had already been contacted.
I mean, the police are the proper individuals to be investigating csam. The school bringing them in immediately would have been the correct action. School officials aren’t trained to investigate crime.
Perhaps the cops are the proper investigative arm, but the school system had an obligation to assist in that investigation, and not ignore it, then deny it, then cover it up.
The entire leadership of the school should be fired, and the principal should be prosecuted.
Agreed
Because a school can’t compell Snapchat to release “disappeared” images and chat logs. So perhaps in this case it was best left to the police.
It wasn’t left to the police she’d already gone to the police. It sounds from the story like the school did literally nothing at all.
Also you don’t need to compel Snapchat to release the images they’re 13-year-old boys they absolutely have permanent copies on their phones.
How can the school compel the boys to show the permanent copies then? I think you are overestimating the power of the school in this scenario.
The school doesn’t even need to do that to effectively squash suspected behavior in the short term.
Maybe they can’t dole out a substantive punishment, but when I was growing up they absolutely would lean on kids for even being suspected of doing something, or even if they hadn’t done it yet, but the administration could see it coming. Sure they might of wasted some time on kids that truly weren’t up to anything, but there generally weren’t actual punishments of consequence on those cases. I’m pretty sure that a few things were prevented entirely, just by the kids being told that the administration sees it coming.
So they should have at least been able to effectively suppress the student body behavior while they worked out the truth.
Saying there is nothing they can do is the standard cop-out for lazy administrators.
They are minors in school, under the legal supervision of the school. There are LOTS of things a school can do, and courts have been finding mostly on the side of schools for decades.
Without even trying, I can think of a dozen things the school could have done, including banning phones from the suspects until the investigation is over.
But they chose to do nothing, them punish the victim when she defended herself, after the school refused.
Banning phones during the investigation does not give the administration evidence to work with. Even if they took the phones, the school still couldn’t force the students to unlock them. The only way to get the evidence needed was through the police.
Okay, then permanent expulsion.
Which you need evidence to do. Evidence the school could not get.