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.
The article later states that they continued investigating, and found ten people (eight girls and two adults) who were targeted with multiple images. They charged two boys with creating and distributing the images.
It’s easy to jump on the ACAB bandwagon, but real in-depth investigation takes time. Time for things like court subpoenas and warrants, to compel companies like Snapchat to turn over message and image histories (which they do save, contrary to popular belief). The school stopped investigating once they discovered the kids were using Snapchat (which automatically hides message history) but police continued investigating and got ahold of the offending messages and images.
That being said, only charging the two kids isn’t really enough. They should charge every kid who received the images and forwarded them. Receiving the images by itself shouldn’t be punished, because you can’t control what other people spontaneously send you… But if they forwarded the images to others, they distributed child porn.
At the end of the day, these are children, there is no punishment meaningful that ends with just these boys punished. Justice would be finding the source of who created these images. I’m honestly highly doubtful it was these kids alone. This really should bring into suspect any adult in the life of these boys. An investigation that stops at punishing children for child sexual abuse material is not at all a thorough investigation.
It’s possible these boys were able to generate these images on their own (meaning not with help from anyone in their real life interactions). But, even if that was the case, the investigation should not stop there.