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WAUKESHA - After a judge put a 15-year prison sentence on former New Berlin Eisenhower High School student Anthony Stancl for a Facebook and sexting blackmail scandal involving seven victims, the district attorney who worked the case warns parents about the power of technology in teenagers' hands.

"They have to know that the more capability they give their kids electronically with this stuff, the less control they have over their kid's safety," said Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel on 620WTMJ's "Wisconsin's Morning News."

"They need to know that parents should and can search their kids computers and their phones and what their kids are doing. They should put monitors on their computers so they can find out what their kids are sending or instant messaging. They should think about whether their kids need to have a phone that has a camera, internet capability and all those other things that come with it. Maybe just a cell phone with talking cell phone service is good enough. I don't know, but that's for each individual parent to decide."

Stancl used Facebook to have other teenage boys send him nude photos, then said he would make those photos public unless they had sex with him.

Audio:  • Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel on 620WTMJ's "Wisconsin's Morning News"

Schimel warned that even after the Stancl case broke, more sexting complaints involving high school students came to his office.

"When we talk about what message can be heard with what happened with this case, I don't think that message works on kids," explained Schimel.

"It still is going to happen. The people who need to hear this message are the parents.

According to Schimel, he had two main concerns to focus on - the safety of the public if Stancl was out of prison, and the need to make sure that his victims did not need to testify in court.

"I had two jobs here," said Schimel. "I had a job to get him locked up for some reasonable amount of time to protect the community, but I also had to look out for the welfare of these seven kids, and I think we struck that balance."

That balance came with a 28-year sentence, 15 years behind bars.

"I asked for substantial prison, and 15 years of initial confinement followed by 13 years of extended supervision is a substantial prison sentence that takes away Anthony Stancl's youth," said Schimel.

"The most important aspect of all this is that none of these victims ever had to get on a witness stand in a courtroom. They have struggled a great deal. Some of them have had to be hospitalized in mental health facilities briefly to deal with the very severe problems they're having. Many of them are taking medication. All of them are in various forms of counseling to try to cope with this."

The nature of how Stancl worked also gives a warning to parents of the way sexual assault happens - not with a random act of violence, but a premeditated path to coercion.

"This is how sex offenders work," explained Schimel. "They compromise their victims."

"Very few of the sexual assaults we see involve some sort of person jumping out of the bushes and grabbing someone. Most of the time, it's someone that the victim knows, and they get manipulated into a position where it becomes difficult to say something, to speak out. That's what happened with these kids.

"How do you go to your friends and say, 'I've been sending these naked pictures of myself to other people and I need you to come with me and beat this guy up?' By the time they knew who the guy was, they were in a car for a meeting, and now they've got to make a decision on 'Which direction do I go? Do I let this guy do this one thing to me, and then it's over, or this goes and all these photographs of my exposed genitals all over the school?' We all remember back to when we were teenagers. It's a difficult time.

"I've heard those kind of conversations from people, and it's just been my experience working with sexual assault victims that they don't behave that way. They're terrified of having what's been going on exposed."