IMO, even if you do grant that the teacher has some small part of the fault (not that I do), she’s been punished more than enough by having these pictures distributed to leering kids in the school. Anything more than that is just piling it on.
Do you really think it would be OK for her to just hand out sexual nudes of herself to the class? If no, then the pictures was NOT just hers to distribute as she sees fit, but something that is illegal or immoral for her to distribute to the kids. Since the kid was not someone authorized to have that information, it’s her job as a teacher not to provide the info for the kid, even if it’s ‘hers’ in some way. If she had taken reasonable steps to secure the info I would not use words like ‘distribute’, but leaving an unlocked electronic device with no physical security is not a reasonable precation.
If so, then I’m glad you’re not actually in charge of a school, and hopefully don’t spend too much time around kids.
As I said above, I disagree completely. If you leave a bottle of whiskey sitting out and a kid takes it, you have provided alcohol to a minor and should (and would) be punished for that. The ‘oh but the kid was so wrong to take and drink the whiskey I left laying on my desk’ isn’t a good defense, especially in light of what else has come up in this thread.
There’s a legal mandate that adults in charge of supervising children do not engage in sexual activities with said children, including things like showing them nude pics of the adult. This isn’t obscure or controversial law.
The agent of the leak was the teacher, who took the pictures and left them easily accessible for the student to look at. Adults who supervise kids have as part of their duties ‘don’t engage in sexual activities with the kids’, and she failed at that.
I dispute your assertion that forgetting your unlocked phone in class is the same as handing out nudes of yourself. To me, the big difference is intention and expectation of privacy.
First, she didn’t intend to give out nudes at all. It was on a personal device that she just happened to have forgotten. If she had intended to give out nudes, she would have done something like email it to the students or show them. She didn’t do either of those things.
And second, I consider a personal phone to be private property. Unless there was some kind of arrangement where the students could use her phone whenever they wanted, then there is an expectation that anything on that remained the property of the teacher and only she can give permission to use it. And even then, if its true in some reports that students did occasionally use her phone, it would be wrong to assume they could do anything they wanted with it. If they had, for example, bought something using her phone and credit card information stored on it, the fault would be the students because she would presumably not have allowed them to buy things using her phone. Looking at, and taking pictures, from her phone is the same thing
I’m sure there are legal nuances we’re not getting. To me, having pictures on a private device like a phone is akin to having the whiskey in a locker that you forgot to lock. There was no intention of dissemination and the teacher took reasonable steps to secure it, only failing once because of forgetfulness. Would you say the same thing if a student broke into a teacher’s car to steal some booze?
No sexual activities were done “with children”. At worse, they were exposed to the sexual activities of others. There’s a difference, as one would be intentional and one would be accidental.
You’re really hard on the teacher for forgetting, you know that? You’ve never forgotten something before? You never left a phone or keys somewhere where someone could pick it up, never left a door unlocked? It sounds like you want to equate the act of forgetting as the same as intentionally doing the action. That’s just silly. Who’s worse: a person who pushes a victim into traffic or someone who accidentally knocks them into traffic? You can say all you want about the result being the same, but who do you think is a worse person?
Having something stolen from you does not make you the initiator. If someone steals money from me, I didn’t “give that money away”, if someone fell off a cliff, they didn’t “jump off on purpose and commit suicide”. The student stole pictures from a phone, the teacher didn’t “hand out nudes to her class”. If I steal your car because you left it unlocked, can I say you gave it to me and keep it?