Joanna McClinton and Dave Sunday: Accountability is key to keeping our children safe

Protecting the public is government’s most fundamental duty. But when new threats to safety emerge and evolve, that duty demands more than awareness — it demands action that keeps pace with reality.

Today’s children are growing up exposed to constant streams of content that can be disturbing, harmful, and frightening. It shapes how they see themselves and their peers in ways no previous generation has had to navigate. That is the reality we face — and it demands urgency and action.

Last month, we served as panelists at an event in Montgomery County concerning the growing issue of AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes in our schools. This discussion stressed the harmful, long-lasting impact that sexualized content can have on victims, but also what we should be doing to better protect our children and to prevent this new form of exploitation.

First, let’s level set. Explicit deepfakes are not a joke, or “kids being kids.” They are serious and illegal invasions of privacy that can leave a victim feeling traumatized, angry, alienated, depressed, embarrassed, shameful, and violated. They need to be taken seriously, and they need to stop.

To set the tone for the event, two courageous students shared their victim impact statements with the audience of parents, advocates, law enforcement officials, and others. Their testimony was simultaneously heart-wrenching and infuriating.

Heart-wrenching because of the cycle of trauma a teenager must endure after having their privacy violated by a classmate. Trauma that does not stop when the school bell rings at the end of the day, but follows our children home. Infuriating because of the ease with which a child can create hypersexualized content of another child.

Deepfake sexualized images in schools is not an issue unique to Pennsylvania, with prominent cases emerging in states from California to Louisiana to Massachusetts, but it is one that the two of us — Joanna McClinton, as a lawmaker, and Dave Sunday, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer — are heavily invested in and are committed to defeating.

In Pennsylvania, we’ve implemented new laws to respond to the growing danger some apps are enabling in our schools and elsewhere.

In 2019, Pennsylvania was a leader in making sextortion — a crime where a perpetrator coerces a victim to comply with demands for sexual acts, images, or videos — a third-degree felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison, if the victim is under 18, or the perpetrator has shown a pattern of engaging in sexual extortion.

In 2024 and 2025, Pennsylvania enacted new laws making it a crime to harass someone by distributing a deepfake nude or sex act image of them without their consent (the offense is more serious if the victim is a minor), or to create a forged digital likeness, a computer-generated image, video, or audio recording of a person, with the intent to defraud or injure someone.

Finally, we learned from recent incidents in Lancaster and Delaware Counties that acting fast is critical to limiting the number of victims, stopping the circulation of deepfake child pornography, and maximizing law enforcement’s ability to investigate.

To speed up the process, an additional measure is pending in the state Senate to require mandated reporters, like teachers, school officials, and healthcare professionals, to report suspected child sexual abuse materials or AI child sexual abuse materials to ChildLine, which will immediately alert law enforcement.

We are also having ongoing conversations directly with students about social media and artificial intelligence, and how these tools make them feel in their day-to-day lives. Those perspectives matter, and they should inform how we approach this issue moving forward.

We can be part of the solution through our offices and in Harrisburg, but it is just as important to hear directly from students in our hometowns and across the commonwealth.

We also recognize that social media is not going away. This is not about banning platforms or telling kids to shut down their accounts, but about ensuring they understand and are aware of the very real dangers that can exist within them, and equipping families and schools to navigate them safely.

While updating the law is an important step in keeping our kids safe, the real solution requires parents, educators, law enforcement, and even tech companies to act and to know what to do.

Students need to know and feel comfortable telling an adult that a sexualized image has been sent to them.

Parents and caregivers need to talk with their children to both understand what they are doing online and what apps they are using, and to reassure them that if they see something inappropriate, they should tell you or another trusted adult.

Schools need to take incidents seriously, alert law enforcement immediately, and, most importantly, support the victims.

Law enforcement needs to treat these cases seriously. They are crimes being perpetrated against children, and they are occurring in communities around the state. If your community hasn’t been impacted yet, it will soon.

Technology today is transformative, and it is evolving at a faster and faster pace. When we were growing up, we didn’t have these powerful tools to contend with. But now that they are here, they need to be used responsibly.

The stories from our brave students should be a call to action for each of us — from elected officials to law enforcement to parents and school leaders — to do everything we can to prevent the use of apps that allow children to create hypersexualized content of their classmates.

We can’t allow hypersexualized content to become mainstream; we need to hold people accountable, from the students generating the deepfakes to the app developers who make the sexualized content possible.

Joanna McClinton is the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Dave Sunday is Pennsylvania’s attorney general.