They Grow Up So Fast

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a case that was bizarre if only for the fact that it had to reach the Supreme Court at all. The case is apropos due to the recently-reported trend of what the media are calling “sexting”: the phenomenon of teenagers sending nude or semi-nude photographs of themselves to each other. It is another front in the War on Sexuality that parents and politicians have been fighting for years. The crux of the argument is this: teenagers should not be having sex, despite the fact that they’re probably in the sexual prime of their lives. It’s like trying to hold back the Colorado River with a wooden, beaver-made dam. It’s not that teenagers didn’t have sex in the past; certainly they did, but it just wasn’t discussed. Sexuality, for everyone — adults included — was something to be ashamed of. We’re just more open about it now. And that’s not a bad thing.

Earth to parents, teachers, and politicians: teenagers will have sex. They are having sex, probably right now. They are programmed to have sex. You can’t stop them. The most you can do is give them the information they need to make good decisions. If you deny them that information, you’re not preventing them from having sex; you’re just denying them information and ensuring that they will probably make bad decisions, instead.

Moving on.

Yesterday’s case involved 13-year-old Savana Redding, who was strip-searched because the principal heard a rumor (”an uncorroborated tip from the culpable eighth-grader,” says the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) that she might have brought prescription-strength ibuprofen to school. The school has a zero-tolerance policy for any drugs, whether outright illegal, prescription, or over-the-counter.

Let’s put aside for right now the tired arguments about how zero-tolerance policies don’t work, create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens, and provide no room for human beings to make mistakes of varying degrees.

Let’s also put aside the fact that ibuprofen is not a narcotic and is not to be found on any of the five schedules of the Controlled Substances Act. The only reasons a kid would try to abuse ibuprofen are: (1) she’s really in a lot of pain; or, (2) she’s an idiot. Not only will ibuprofen not alter your mind in any way, taking too much of it will give you tremendous pain and cause stomach bleeding. I’d love to think that Safford Middle School was only looking out for the best interests of its students in preventing an overdose on prescription-strength ibuprofen, but sadly, I don’t really think that’s the case. I think what’s far more likely is an overzealous administrator cracking down on anything and everything that appears to be “drugs.”

In case the summary of this case isn’t disturbing enough and you’d rather have the play-by-play, just read the “Background” section of the Ninth Circuit Court’s opinion. For one, Savana didn’t refuse the search because she said that she felt as though she would be in more trouble if she didn’t comply. If this isn’t the very reason for the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable search and seizure” — namely, the threat of punishment for people who don’t agree to warrantless searches — then I don’t know what is.

If Savana were an adult an not in school, her constitutional rights would clearly have been violated, the authorities would be in a world of legal hurt, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Not to mention that the uncorroborated testimony of a suspect would not have been sufficient evidence for a search even in the Real World. (By the way, the girl who was caught with the ibuprofen, the girl who fingered Savana as the supplier, was not punished.)

But since Savana is in school, and the doctrine of in loco parentis is in play, she suddenly has greatly reduced constitutional rights. Civil Liberties Lite, specially designed for children. Naturally, the principal could have obtained permission from the girl’s parents to perform such a search. For some unfathomable reason, he didn’t, apparently unaware, in his quest to save children from themselves, of the kinds of torts he could be exposing (no pun intended) the school district to. One man’s “reasonable search” is another man’s “assault and battery.”

For a great analysis, check out Slate’s evaluation of the oral arguments, which includes this wonderful sentence about the cognitive dissonance between “school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.” (Please read this transcript of the oral arguments.)

Then again, should we be surprised the depths to which our police powers are going? And isn’t it surprising that we shouldn’t be surprised? Though I hate to harp on the damage that the George W. Bush administration has done to this country, it’s harping that must be done because the damage is real, significant, and pervasive. The average American’s expectation of privacy has gone down in this Post-9/11 World. Intrusive, unlawful searches are now expected and have become normalized as we are told that these are necessary trades for a gain in security. It would be one thing if there were empirical data indicating that, say, a 10% decrease in liberty causes a 10% or greater increase in security. At least then we could have a debate (even though it still wouldn’t be ethical to trade in that liberty). But as it is now, we have no data indicating that an increase in surveillance cameras yields a decrease in crime, or that warrantless wiretapping is more effective than lawful wiretapping, or that unreasonable strip searches of 13-year-olds yield drug possession convictions. (Well, actually, we have some anecdotal evidence for the last one: Savana had no drugs on her person. One wonders if the principal contemplated a body-cavity search.)

Sorry for the rant. Back to my original thesis: teenagers occupy a nebulous zone between children and adults. Biologically, they are “adults,” even though mentally they are not quite adults, or at the very least, lack the experience of adults. Yet, what qualifies one as an “adult”? There are plenty of adults — cf. global financial crisis — who act like children, and yet we afford them the right of adults, not of children. It was quite brave for the court to admit, in Tinker v. Des Moines, that humans who are defined as children are as capable of profound thought and understanding as humans who are defined as adults, and in so recognizing, that the speech of those so-called children ought to be just as protected as the speech of so-called adults. Unfortunately, the court has continued to shoot itself in the foot over the years, eroding the rights of schoolchildren because, hey, they’re just kids! What do they know?!

We routinely ask teenagers to take on adult responsibilities — President Obama has emphasized volunteering, for example — and yet we fail to consider that they have adult minds, adult thought processes, and adult opinions. Show me a teenager who has made a bad decision and I’ll show you an adult who has made an equally bad decision — or possibly a worse one, since adults are afforded more rights and thus the capability to screw up more in degree than a teenager can. (A teenager sure can’t get a mortgage that he knows he can’t pay for!)

Nevertheless, the brains of humans in the midst of puberty are chemically different from the brains of children or full adults, and it is for this reason that teenagers do a lot of stupid things. But sometimes, teenagers do great things that are on par with the great things that adults do. There’s no reason to assume the worst when it comes to teenagers, as the assistant principal at Safford Middle School did.