I’ve read this post or others very much like it about a thousand times on the SDMB, and it’s stupid.
You got a better set of facts than what we have, post them.
Otherwise we deal with what’s on the table. This business of constantly decrying arguments on the basis of some mythical set of better facts or better undrestanding … virtual pie in the sky … is silly. It may well be true that a more complete news story will come along tomorrow or the next day which will resolve the issues dealt with here. BFD. It may not. We deal with the facts we have.
If this is so, how can two teens having (I would assume) consensual sex be convicted of raping one another because they are both underage, as has been claimed earlier in this thread?
Well, I certainly hope she’s acquitted. I don’t see people sharing pictures of themselves as a problem that the law needs to discourage, whether or not those people have reached some arbitrary age.
Unless the girl was coerced into taking those pictures, there is no victim. This is just more knee-jerk Puritanism from the same brand of idiots who brought us all that hoopla over two seconds of halftime nipple.
You could make the same argument about drug prosecutions also. Who is the “victim” in that case? The State is punishing you for harming yourself. Yes, you and I think it’s silly, but the governing majority seems to accept this as a valid exercise of government power.
I didn’t mean to imply that no minor can be convicted of a crime against a minor. Maybe I shouldn’t have said “class of persons.” The better analogy in the statutory rape case would be to charge the girl with being an accomplice to her own rape.
The fact that it might be difficult to prosecute does not mean they could not prosecute it if they felt they had sufficient evidence. My point was that merely saying the girl was the victim and wouldn’t testify doesn’t mean they can’t prosecute.
The victim is the one who was raped or murdered, but the prosecution is on behalf of the people.
Perhaps when we have more than a thumbnail sketch of the facts we’ll know. That’s my point.
That’s just more speculation.
When did I ever say it’s implausible that it was her idea? And there’s a lot more information we don’t know because what we do know is so very little. An eight line story is hardly exhaustive.
Not sure if this is meant for me. I’m not a prude who denies a 15 year olds sexuality. If she did this on her own, for kicks I don’t think that prosecuting her is the most effective means of discouraging this.
But to take a news blurb and then say she did it on her own because 15 year olds sometimes do that sort of thing isn’t a much better approach.
Yes, indeed. It’s always better to jump to conclusions based on limited information.
If you want to do that, have at it. I prefer to have some relevant facts before making conclusions. The media, in my experience, is simply awful in reporting legal news. It’s a lot of fun to get whipped up into righteous indignation. I simply prefer to wait a little bit until I have sufficient information. I guess we have different approaches.
Before I even start this part of the post let me say this: I’m talking about the government’s justifications for making certain things illegal. I’m not necessarily endorsing it or condemning it so there’s no point in any more “Oh yeah, of course all underage kids who fuck are such innocent victims. I fucked when I was fourteen you prude.”
The reasons given for banning child porn are a little different from something like statutory rape. Statutory rape is illegal because it harms the underage participant. That’s about it.
Child porn is illegal because it harms the child used to produce the porn but also because it creates an economic motive for its production and the state has a compelling interest in eliminating the production and distribution entirely.
So the statutory rape victim is considered the only one harmed while child porn is considered to create a larger problem and, thus, more potential victims.
I don’t do criminal law, nor do I know much of anything about child porn law, but there seems to be a distinction there. I don’t know if that’s the approach being used by the prosecutor, though.
What is it when you keep telling me that there’s more evidence out there that I just don’t know about (and that you don’t know for certain exists)?
Isn’t that ‘speculation’?
How do you know there is more information? Because the story’s short? Maybe the story’s short because the facts are actually that simple. Why are you speculating that there’s some grand cache of facts hiding back there?
Well, you did jump to the conclusion that there has to be some kind of major underlying mountain of facts simply because the story was short.
Why was Traci Lords never charged with a single crime despite having made between 70 and 107 porn films and doing two magazine spreads all before her 18th birthday? If child porn is such a problem, and the economic incentive of creating it the reason it’s bad for a 15 year old to make porn of herself, this 15 year old in Latrobe, PA has nothing on Traci.
(BTW, Lords started her porn career at 15 and ended it two days after she turned 18.)
I’m just cautioning against making conclusions without relevant facts. I’ve never said there is some cache of earth-shattering facts. But we’ve already had people saying that it’s more likely a case of an adult exploiting a child and others seemingly implying it’s a prosecutor punishing sexuality. That’s certainly not in evidence here.
It’s been my experience that quick blurb news stories can be very misleading. Especially when dealing with legal issues. How did the reporter get the information? Did the reporter see the charging documents or hear it from a source? Does the reporter/source understand legal documents enough to get the gist of what’s happening?
Did you read my disclaimer? I’m not going to debate about the economic implications. I was repeating the Supreme Court’s explanation for why child porn is illegal.
I have no idea why Traci Lords wasn’t prosecuted. I don’t know enough about the facts.
I know that at least one case in Wisconsin had nullification argued to the jury as the only just course of action, and that jury did decide to nullify, despite the obvious guilt of the accused.
The jury in that case was asked to make a statement about the reasonableness of the procecutors decision to bring the suit in the first place (do they as citizens feel that his/her decision to prosecute is in their best interest.) The judge allowed this line of argument as the closing of the case.
(we saw it in evidence as an example of the prosecutors function.)
Quite frankly Zoff, the reporter doesn’t have to understand anything about it to write down a list of facts in sentence form.
It’s a lot better, IMO, when they don’t, because then they don’t editorialize and spin everything. The longer the article, the more of the reporter’s opinion we’re going to see.
If you have some kind of other facts, post them. Otherwise, you’re contributing nothing whatsoever to the discussion.
Right now you’re doing nothing constructive by continuing to say that you think (but don’t know) that there are more facts that somehow change this story. If you’ve got such a hardon for only posting about the facts, then quit your speculations.
Anyway, I’m just going to try to clear up my own position briefly here.
Actually, I think you missed the part where I explained why I thought it was bad for a 15-year-old to distribute naked pictures of herself. Anyway, it’s because pictures like this can affect the person photographed for a long time after they’re taken if they someday come to light again. Remember those pictures of Dr. Laura? Someone who takes naked pictures at 14 or 15 may, 10 years later, want to have a career or lead a life that would be quite damaged by the existence of said nakeypictures. Of course, an 18-year-old might end up in the same situation, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to set SOME arbitrary minimum age on nakeypicture distribution, 18 or 16 or 15 or whatever, below which we presume that the individual is unable to fully understand the consequences of those actions.
There are, of course, the same problems with having sex at a young age before you really understand the possibility of diseases and babies and whatnot, and I actually feel the same way about age of consent things as I do about naked pictures, but that would take a while to explain.
Then I guess that you feel that Traci Lords did absolutely nothing wrong?
In my view, pretty much everyone involved in the Traci Lords… problem… was somehow culpable, including Lords herself. Still, I am NOT interested in tracking down former underage porn stars in order to punish them somehow, just as I’m not interested in tracking down underage girls who show their boobies in order to clap them in irons. The point of any legal punishment for this ought to be more educative than anything else, IMO - a little bit of “When we said not to do that, WE REALLY MEANT IT,” and a lot of “This is why you really shouldn’t do that.”
When I was 16, I emailed explicit naked pictures of myself to a 35 year old woman I had met online. I had cybersex and phone-sex with her numerous times between the ages of 16 and 19. (I never had any face-to-face encounter with her, since she lived very far away.)
It’s possible (although unlikely) that I still have one or more of those pics on an old harddrive or floppy disk somewhere. What would happen if someone found a picture of a naked 16 year old me on one of my floppy disks? Could I be charged with posessing child pornography of my earlier self?
If, by some chance, she still has one of my earlier pictures, I don’t think there is any reason whatsoever to charge her with anything. If, by some chance, she were to be prosecuted for posessing such pictures I would gladly testify on her behalf.
Ok, since she wasn’t coerced or exploited, do you think that the various agents, producers, distributers, and whatnot involved with the issue got what they deserved? Was it right that they were prosecuted when it was discovered that she’d been underage, even though she told them she wasn’t?
Well, in this interview with Ron Jeremy, he says that “Traci Lords turned in her friends so they didn’t go after her.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I can’t find a better source at the moment.
IIRC, only one producer, Ginger Lynn Allen, was ever prosecuted, and she was acquitted very handily. Fact was, everybody including her had a defense, i.e., Traci Lords had fake documents, apparently pretty good ones, to establish her age. IIRC Lynn said she was only prosecuted because they were pressuring her to roll on other members of the industry, and she wouldn’t roll.
So only one person got prosecuted, nobody got convicted.