LACEY, Wash. » One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend.

Both were in eighth grade.

They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite’s. Around 11 o’clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.

"Ho Alert!" she typed. "If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends." Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed "send."

In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.

In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate.

Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who "sext," an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.

But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: The primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.

Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.

"Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status," said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. "It’s an electronic hickey."

In the fall of 2009, Margarite, a petite, pretty girl with dark hair and a tiny diamond stud in her nose, was living with her father, and her life was becoming troubled. Her relationship with her father’s new wife was tense. Her grades were in a free fall.

Her mother would later speculate that Margarite desperately needed to feel noticed and special. That December, just before the holidays, she took the photo of herself and sent it to Isaiah, a low-key, likable athlete she had recently gotten to know.

After the winter break, Margarite was preparing a fresh start. She would move back in with her mother and transfer to a school in a nearby district.

But one night in late January, a few days before her transfer, Margarite’s cellphone began vibrating around 1 a.m., waking her. She was being bombarded by texts — alerts from worried friends, leers from boys she scarcely knew.

The next morning in her mother’s car, Margarite lowered her head, hiding her reddened eyes, her terrible secret.

"Are you OK?" asked her mother, Antoinette, who like other parents and children who agreed to be interviewed asked to be identified by only first or middle names to protect their privacy.

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

But her mother knew otherwise. Earlier that morning a parent had phoned Kirsten Rae, the principal of Margarite’s school, Chinook Middle, complaining about a naked photo sent to her child. The child knew at least a dozen students who had received it.

The principal then called Antoinette. The police wanted to question Margarite. On the drive to school, the girl sobbed uncontrollably, feeling betrayed and degraded.

Meanwhile, another middle school principal in Lacey had begun investigating a sexting complaint that morning. Rae realized that Margarite’s photo had gone viral.

Students were summoned to Rae’s office and questioned by the police. Their cellphones were confiscated.

By late morning, Isaiah and Margarite’s former friend had been identified and pulled out of class.

"I was in shock that I was in trouble," he recalled during a recent interview. "I didn’t go out of my way to forward it, but I felt responsible. It was bad. Really bad."

Peters, the county prosecutor, had been hearing that sexting was becoming a problem in the community. In a recent interview, he said that if the case had just involved photos sent between Isaiah and Margarite, he would have called the parents but not pressed charges.

"The idea of forwarding that picture was bad enough," he said. "But the text elevated it to something far more serious. It was mean-girl drama, an all-out attempt to destroy someone without thinking about the implications."

He decided against charging Margarite. But he did charge three students with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony, because they had set off the viral outbreak.

After school had been let out that day in late January, the police read Isaiah his rights, cuffed his hands behind his back and led him and Margarite’s former friend out of the building. The eighth graders would have to spend the night in the county juvenile detention center.

The two of them and a 13-year-old girl who had helped forward the photo were arraigned before a judge the next day. (Margarite’s former friend declined to be interviewed, as did the girl who helped her.)

WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE

Sexting is not illegal.

Two adults sending each other naughty pictures, dirty language? Just garden-variety First Amendment-protected speech.

But when that sexually explicit image includes a participant — subject, photographer, distributor or recipient — who is under 18, child pornography laws may apply.

"I didn’t know it was against the law," Isaiah said.

That is because culturally, such a fine distinction eludes most teenagers. Their world is steeped in highly sexualized messages. Extreme pornography is easily available on the Internet. Hit songs and music videos promote stripping and sexting.

The prevalence of under-age sexting is unclear and can often depend on the culture of a particular school or circle of students. An Internet poll conducted for The Associated Press and MTV by Knowledge Networks in September 2009 indicated that 24 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had been involved in "some type of naked sexting," either by cellphone or on the Internet. A December 2009 telephone poll from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 5 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had sent naked or nearly naked photos or video by cellphone, and that 18 percent had received them. Boys and girls send photos in roughly the same proportion, the Pew survey found.

But a double standard holds. While a boy caught sending a picture of himself may be regarded as a fool or even a boastful stud, girls, regardless of their bravado, are castigated as sluts.

"The majority of states are trying to put something in place to educate kids before and after the event," said Justin T. Fitzsimmons, a senior attorney at the National District Attorneys Association who specializes in Internet crimes against children. "We have to protect kids from themselves sometimes. We’re on the cusp of teaching them how to manage their electronic reputations."

PENALTIES AND PREVENTION

Rick Peters, the prosecuting attorney, never intended for the Chinook Middle School students to receive draconian sentences. But he wanted to send a scared-straight message to them, as well as to the community.

Eventually a deal was brokered for the three teenagers who were charged. The offense would be amended from the child pornography felony to a gross misdemeanor of telephone harassment. Isaiah and the two girls who had initially forwarded Margarite’s photo would be eligible for a community service program that would keep them out of court, and the case could be dismissed.

Those three students would have to create public service material about the hazards of sexting, attend a session with Margarite to talk about what happened and otherwise have no contact with her.

After Margarite and her mother approved the conditions, Peters signed off, pleased.

In October, Rae, the police, prosecutors and Fitzsimmons of the National District Attorneys Association held separate forums about sexting for Lacey’s teachers, parents and student delegations from the four middle schools.

The students then returned to their homerooms to teach classmates what they had learned.

Elizabeth Colon taught a session with Jon Reid. Both are eighth graders at Chinook.

"Most of the questions were about penalties," she said. "Kids wanted to know if they would get into trouble just for receiving the picture."

Jon spoke about long-term consequences. "I said that people may look at you differently," he said. "They’ll know what kind of person you were, even though you changed."

THE VICTIM

When the police were finished questioning Margarite at Chinook in January 2010, her mother, a property manager, laid down the law. For the time being, no cellphone. No Internet. No TV.

Margarite, used to her father’s indulgence and unfettered access to technology, was furious.

But the punishment insulated Margarite from the wave of reaction that surged online, in local papers and television reports, and in texted comments by young teenagers throughout town. Although the police and the schools urged parents to delete the image from their children’s phones, Antoinette heard that it had spread to a distant high school within a few days.

What advice would Margarite give anyone thinking of sending such a photo?

She blushed and looked away.

"I guess if they are about to send a picture," she replied, laughing nervously, "and they have a feeling, like, they’re not sure they should, then don’t do it at all. I mean, what are you thinking? It’s freaking stupid!"

© 2011 The New York Times Company