Opinion | A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse

Heitner pointed out that although artificial intelligence adds a new dimension, kids have been passing around digital sexual images without consent for years. According to a 2018 meta-analysis from JAMA Pediatrics, among children in the 12 to 17 age range, “The prevalence of forwarding a sext without consent was 12.0 percent,” and “and the prevalence of having a sext forwarded without consent was 8.4 percent.”

In her book, Heitner offers an example in which an eighth-grade girl sends a topless photo to her boyfriend, who circulates it to his friends without her permission. After they broke up, but without her knowledge, “her picture kept circulating, passing from classmate to classmate throughout their middle school,” and then “one afternoon, she opened her school email to find a video with her image with sound effects from a porn video playing with it.”

That kind of situation is already sickening, but the creation of fake nude images adds another layer of transgression. In the Beverly Hills case, according to NBC News, not only were middle schoolers sexualizing their peers without consent by creating the fakes, they shared the images, which can only compound the pain.

“If you’re creating an image of someone else and doing it without their consent,” Heitner told me, “whether it’s real or fake, you are violating that person and violating their privacy, violating their safety.” In these situations, she said, girls may feel that their sense of social acceptance has been lost. They may feel a sense of torturous humiliation from not knowing who among their peers has seen these types of images and who hasn’t. In her book, Heitner describes situations in which girls stop going to school altogether.

But Heitner also cautioned against over-punishing the perpetrators when they are younger children. “It’s important to understand that a 12- or 13-year-old is developmentally different than an adult,” she said. While it may be appropriate to suspend that child or move them to a different school if their victims no longer want to be around them, they shouldn’t be indefinitely barred from all participation in school or cast out of society. They are redeemable; they can make amends and become adults who know better. (It should be noted that in the Beverly Hills case, according to NBC News, the superintendent of schools said that the students responsible could face suspension to expulsion, depending on how involved they were in creating and sharing the images.)