Morris prosecutor reminds students at anti-bullying session: 'Your life is being filmed'

JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP — Members of the Morris County Prosecutor's Office wanted to grab kids’ attention in an anti-bullying and cybercrime presentation Tuesday at Jefferson Township High School.

It’s an age of oversaturation online, Morris County Prosecutor Robert Carroll said, and his office has been using face-to-face assemblies to connect with middle and high school students in an effort to “stress how important it is to exercise good judgement online and in school.”

Across the U.S., 22% of students ages 12 to 18 reported being bullied at school in 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Now is a time unlike others, the presentation stressed. The stakes are higher, and there’s little room for errors in judgment for today’s students.

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Jefferson Township High School is well below that mark, said Assistant Principal Michael Lonie, who is the school’s disciplinarian. Its 880 students typically see "a couple dozen" bullying instances in any given year, and that number hasn't varied much in spite of the challenges the pandemic brought.

“You have to recognize your life is being filmed,” Supervising Assistant Prosecutor Samantha DeNegri said. “You don’t have the luxury of making mistakes.”

Many in DeNegri’s generation would not have the jobs they have today if social media and cellphones existed when they were young. They were more likely to get away with making mistakes.

The time when kids could get away with doing foolish things that didn’t come back to harm them is over, she said: “Every school fight, there is a video. Someone is filming it."

The point wasn’t lost on senior Gabriella Meltzer, 17.

“The speakers definitely caught my attention," Meltzer said. “You have to be mindful of what you do, because it can ruin your reputation for the rest of your life."

Take the case of a high school girl who took a picture of herself and sent it to her boyfriend, DeNegri said. He “airdropped it to the whole school.”

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“You think 'it’s my body and I can do what I want.' Wrong: You’re a child. You cannot legally take pictures of yourself,” DeNegri said. “I don’t mean a selfie. I mean intimate body parts. If you take a picture of yourself, your intimate body parts, you are creating child pornography, and the second you show or share you are distributing child pornography."

Don’t learn these lessons the hard way, DeNegri said, noting that the girl tried to kill herself. “If you take a picture it is going to be shared. Don’t find out the hard way. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but it never stays with the intended recipient, never."

Presentations like these are effective, she said. Cases like this have decreased since the Prosecutor's Office put together the program. Students are getting the message.

Mistakes made online may come at a cost later. That was the point Sgt. Patrick LaGuerre of the Prosecutor's Office wanted to hammer home.

“Everybody, repeat after me: delete, delete, delete,” he said, and his audience repeated the mantra. Then he threw them yet another curveball.

“If we are doing an investigation, everything you have deleted on your social media or your cellphone will be retrieved,” he said. “We can retrieve everything: pictures, tweets, everything you’ve done on your computer. You cannot hide behind an IP address. From the IP address we get the location, and then there are video cameras everywhere."

Students are used to sitting in presentations like these, said senior Ashton Karim, 17, but this one did a good job of “illustrating how everything is tracked.”

“I found it surprising that they can get everything that was deleted from your snaps and messages,” he said.

Gene Myers covers disability and mental health for NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: myers@northjersey.com

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This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Morris prosecutor looks to make an impression on Jefferson NJ students