Academy Set to Keep Training Program for School Principals; Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World
The New York City Leadership Academy, a nearly $70 million principal training program that was one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's signature education efforts, will continue to exist as a private nonprofit group, its board announced yesterday.
The Department of Education, however, will pick up its single largest cost: the salaries and benefits of its principal trainees.
New York Times
December 21, 2005
Academy Set to Keep Training Program for School Principals
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/nyregion/21academy.html?pagewanted=print
The New York City Leadership Academy, a nearly $70 million principal training program that was one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's signature education efforts, will continue to exist as a private nonprofit group, its board announced yesterday.
The Department of Education, however, will pick up its single largest cost: the salaries and benefits of its principal trainees.
While the extent of public financing was not clear, the shift would signal the next stage for the program, which was started as a three-year, privately financed experiment for training new principals...
The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.
Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.
Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.
"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"
Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.
So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.
The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money...
posted by Whitney Tilson at 2:54 PM
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