State officials are working with law enforcement and local educators to ensure that students and parents understand how to safely and responsibly use technology after graphic images of young women circulated through the high school population.

While this is the first time an incident like this has been reported in the Granite State, concern over Internet safety for students has generated a cooperative effort between the New Hampshire Department of Education and the Attorney General’s office over the last couple of years, according to Sarah Browning, assistant to the commissioner at the NHDOE.

“The Attorney General has been very proactive in working with Internet providers like Youtube and MySpace to craft agreements around safety for students,” Browning said. “The Internet can be a tremendous resource both for students and teachers in public education, but like any other technology, if it’s used properly it can be a benefit and if it’s abused it can be a detriment.”

Though Browning said that incidents like what occurred at the Salem High School on Nov. 7 – a police investigation following the discovery of three or four sexually explicit photographs of young women, one under the age of 16 – have not been reported in the Granite State before, school administrators in other parts of the country have struggled with similar problems.

In January, the dissemination of several photos of undressed young women and a video of a couple engaged in a sexual act at a Pennsylvania high school prompted local school and law enforcement officials to require students who had the images on their cell phones to delete them or face criminal prosecution for possession of child pornography.

In a similar incident in Michigan last month, local authorities began confiscating cell phones after a nude photograph taken by a 14-year-old female while she was in eighth grade circulated among about 200 high school students.

“What is the trend is that youth are now producers of media, so that a photo once passed around from one person to the next is now a photo passed by one person to a hundred or a thousand people,” said Rona Zlokower, executive director of the New Hampshire based nonprofit group Media Power Youth. “It has more ramifications, legally and for reputations, for self-esteem and for the kids involved. There’s no such thing as deleting a message and most young people don’t understand that.”

Parents need to begin talking with their children about the consequences of using new media and setting up boundaries for what is and what isn’t appropriate, Zlokower said. Just being behind a screen and putting information on the Internet or through cell phones does not make an individual anonymous, something that most children do not understand.

“It’s probably the most difficult part of parenting right now because the media technology is evolving faster than our ability to understand it and control it,” she said. “They have to see this as a regular skill in their parenting tool kit, the same way they talk about drinking and driving or wearing seat belts or how to cross the street. They have to spend as much time on media as they spend on any other aspect of parenting.”

School administrators in Salem stressed this past week that the incident is not unique to Salem and is part of regular adolescent behavior, but Zowolker believes media has distorted what teens and adolescents consider normal behavior.

“It’s quite predictable that they’re going to experiment with at-risk behaviors, but they’re going to do it in an environment where the norms of how they should behave are very different, and they’re having trouble figuring that out in that media-saturated world that they live in,” she said.