Sexting, the combination of the words sex and texting, is the
practice of electronically sending explicit images or messages
from on person to another. There has been a lot of media
attention in recent years looking at legal cases involving teens
and sexting as well as cases of bullying or harassment of the
teen who's picture is spread beyond the intended recipient. But
data on teen sexting has been lagging and different authors site
numbers somewhere between 1% of teens to 30% of teens who have
engaged in sexting. There is now some new real data out of The
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston that not only
looks at the prevalence of sexting among high school students,
the study also looked as the relationship between sexting and
sex and risky sexual behaviors. This was a really interesting
study! The study looked at 948 high school students from 7
public schools in Houston area, over a 2 year period.
Participants ranged in age from 14-19 years and were in either
10th or 11th grade. So, 28% (that's