If you haven’t heard, an 18-year-old high school student named Anthony Stancl from New Berlin, Wis. used Facebook to coerce classmates into sex acts. Since he’s 18 years old and the other students are younger, it takes and already horrible/illegal act into a relm where phrases like “sexual assault of a child” are used.

• An 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.
• "The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation," Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said Wednesday.
• The students go to New Berlin Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, which is in Waukesha County about 15 miles west of Milwaukee.
• (From the AP, read the rest.)

This is serious stuff. After just hating this guy, my next (and possibly unfortunate) reaction is that I can’t believe his classmates fell for the scam. But upon further thinking … wow. Let’s say you actually sent the naked pictures, let’s just get past that part. Then you are faced with a really awful decision for a 15-year-old kid: do you let all your classmates see you naked and humiliated, or do you go through with the horrible blackmail request? Seven kids when through with it. What a disturbing situation.