Isn’t this one of those times we can invoke the “reasonable person” clause? I mean, I was a pretty reasonable 14 year old, and if one of my classmates had sent a nude picture of themselves, chances are I wouldn’t have tossed it out and given her a lecture on the legalities of the situation.
It is reasonable for the kid to be in possession of this item. It should be deleted, obviously, and the kids are kind of asses for sending the pictures around. But, in the way that all kids that age are asses. But, honestly, I probably would have shown it to some of my stupid friends too.
If we’re talking over 18 with the same picture, way different ball game of what’s reasonable.
Uh, sailor, this is precisely a case of not equating nudity with pornography. The pictures are not pornographic because she’s wearing as much as she would at the beach; they’re pornographic because they’re intended to cause sexual gratification.
For those who would say that this is harmless and that the kids shouldn’t be prosecuted, if that’s the case, then we need to change the laws. But the laws as they stand are pretty clear that this is child pornography, and are also pretty clear on the range of penalties for it.
Myself, though, I’m not at all convinced that the law here is incorrect. With as many people as these pictures are being sent to, do you really want to bet that they’re not getting sent to any adults? And if we make it legal (or at least, less illegal) for minors to take sexual pictures of other minors, what’s to stop some perverted old uncle from prompting his nephew “Your girlfriend’s kinda cute… Got any pictures of her?”? I just don’t see any good way to let the kids off the hook here, without defeating the entire purpose of anti-child-porn laws.
Punishing a girl for taking a photo of her breast is of exactly the same nature as punishing a girl for not wearing a burkha and showing her face. It is just as barbaric. It can be explained by the customs of the society they live in but those customs are fucked up.
The reason this has any consequence is because of society. The acts themselves have no consequences. The kids will be marked because society makes such a big deal. At least we do not expect their own families to stone them to the death in order to clean their honor. I suppose that’s a step in the right direction.
We do need to change these laws and the sooner the better. The reasoning behind these laws had to do with the idea of the pedophile. As I was taught in college,this is the pedophile the laws supposedy were adopted to target:
That was the story at least that was used to shoehorn the laws into place. This story was out there before the molesting priests were items on the evening news. Add to this rumors of child snuff films and a huge criminal conspiracy to abduct children and make porn for the insatiable appetites of the pedophiles, and you make the matter seem beyond urgent.
The sex crimes registry stem from the idea that repeat offenses were going to happen no matter what. Harsh sentences stem from an attempt to keep them from harming children for a long time, and also to match the severity of warping children so severely that they were ruined for life. It makes no sense at all to use such laws to actually ruin the lives of children by putting them on the sex offenders list.
Doesn’t really sound like you WANT to let the kids off the hook. My feeling is, when the law and basic morality conflict, as is CLEARLY the case here, it is the law which must yield. Otherwise, respect for the law goes straight into the toilet.
wow… this is twisted right back in the wrong direction now isn’t it?
And why will these kids lives be ruined? Because North American society has a serious hangup on nudity and sex… they are both “bad things.”
[sarcasm] I see no reason to change the status quo, really, I mean what’s another generation of youth with warped self images and huge chasms of ignorance in knowledge about relationships and sex really gonna cost us? I doubt much.
Yup. We should just keep on being ignorant and terrified of our own bodies… it really seems the safest course.
C’mon… sex is a sin, and sins lead to hell doncha know… someone should get right on terrifying these children with that… that’s probably the root issue right there… not enough terror in their upbringing. [/sarcasm]
The way we deal with sex and body image as a society is stupid and immoral. It is a system built from collective fears and the sooner it is corrected the sooner we will stop making idiotic mistakes like our society is making in dealing with these kids.
Huh? He’s not responsible for her inability to give consent, he’s responsible for taking picture of an underage girl and then passing them around to his friends. The age of the person taking the pictures doesn’t matter. In this case, that person was also underage. Legally, this is production of an distribution of child pornography. There was a case a I read a while back about a girl who took nude pics of herself and posted them on her Myspace page, and was arrested for the the exact same thing.
Of course there are consequences. The entire point of the law is to protect people from doing things they don’t fully realize the consequences of. The theory, one that doesn’t hold up to well in my opinion, is that once a person reaches they’re wise enough to know the consequences and so the actions are legal.
So this girl has nude photos of here floating now. This isn’t something you can change your mind about, they’re everywhere now. Will those photos come back to haunt her later? I can think of at least several cases where sexual things done early have hurt people later in life. The big issue normally cited in these cases, psychological problems from being exploited, etc. probably isn’t something we have to worry about, but there are consequences.
The problem with cases like these is that the laws that were written for child pornography weren’t meant for cases like these. The laws were meant to keep adults from exploiting children. When it’s a kid taking a picture of another kid (which is only going to become more and more common given today’s technology), I think that while it has the possibility of turning bad (spreading via the internet) it’s definitely not the same as a ring of child pornographers forcing kids to pose naked. What’s even more ridiculous is when a minor takes a nude picture of themselves and gets charged with manufacturing child pornography. That’s utterly ludicrous and just shows how terrible the laws are written.
As far as pictures coming back to haunt, well that should be fairly easy to deal with. What stigma should we attach to there being a nude photo of someone out and about? How about nothing? All we have to do is decide that it is not a reason to be stigmatized. Are we really going to say in coming years, well we were going to approve your nomination to be a supreme court justice, but these nude pics of your hot 14 year old self turned up, so no justice for you?
The original OP indicated that this was a debate on “boys will be boys” or child pornography - NOT whether or not the degree of punishment is suitable for this situation & the psychological/social impact due to the laws set forth.
As for letting kids off the hook , you dont. I’m pretty sure that when you take a photo with the camera , there is not much you can do about it from a practical point, but should that kid send it to another , then if I search the fine print , I would imagine that the phone companies could pull the phone service for violations of its end user agreement.
With every kid in sight having a phone ,losing it probably would put a crimp in their lives. Since , no one under eighteen can sign a contract , its probable that either they use paygo phones ,or they are under a parental contract agreement.
If its a paygo , you force the kids to get another sim chip if its a gsm , sucks if they are using a cdma.
Parental plans , you could probably go after the parents for their kids violations, hopefully enough that it is mild enough to not attach a sex offender stigma to the kids and vigourus enough that the parents are going to be having a come to jesus chat with the little urchins.
Agreed. And even though the laws are written poorly, the police and prosecutors can use a little common sense and realize that this was never the intention of the legislature.
What if they prove that the boy was sleeping with her? Is that child rape punishable by 25 to life?
Fine. The fact remains though that everyone should have known better. This was not “boys will be boys”, this was “hormonally charged teenagers will be hormonally charged teenagers.”
Placing all of the blame on the boys and saying the girl is an innocent victim is a giant crock of shit. Secondly, everyone involved is over the age of 13, so this is not a case of child pornography anyway, so calling it that is also a crock.
I’m sorry, was that directed to me? If so, I certainly do not recall ever saying this was the fault of boys and only boys and that the girl is completely innocent so please do not put words into my mouth.
According to the defination of pornography (please see post #2), and the fact that the ones involved are considered children (am i still in the dark ages to consider anyone under the minimum age of 16 to be children?), I do believe this is in fact, per the legal defination, Child Pornography. Do I agree with the defination? Not necessarily.
When I got my kids camera phones one of the things I stressed was that they are not to take, send, or receive any inappropriate material. Specifically nude/sexually - natured photos. They understood that I had the right to view their phone contents at any time and you better believe I used that right. Did it stop them completely? Probably not. I found a couple of inappropriate jokes, but luckily no pix. Of course, I cannot be 100% certain that they did not send or receive any porn. But I sure as hell didnt have the “oh my child isnt capable of doing that” syndrome either. I’ve been lucky, I guess. oh, and just because I did that doesnt make me a prude either - i dont have any hangups about sex or nudity, but I am wise to some of the decisions that young folks make that can be damaging - which is what I would rather deter.
Maybe, just maybe, there will be some new laws requiring cellphone companies to send copies of text messages to an email address or allow the acct holder to view them online. The downfall is that prepaid services would not fall under that category unless they decided that you cannot sell a camera phone to anyone under the age of 18. Maybe if kids knew this was an option for parents, they wouldnt be taking such risks. I dont recall anyone (I knew of personally) taking nude or semi-nude pics with a standard film camera, and maybe it was because the pics weren’t all that private when you have to take them in to be developed.
She voluntarily posed for the pictures. The fact that she wasn’t smart enough to realize that other people might see them means that she’s not a victim.
I know that teenagers are not adults yada yada yada, but it is ridiculous to punish the boy and not the girl in this scenario. If you think he did something, then she did something wrong too.
Well that’s my point. We have a double-standard. If a young person is too young to give consent they should be too young to be considered a pornographer.
I think the excuse is called puberty - and the very early stages of it. But hey, let’s hyper sexualize society but at the same time stigmatize sex in our society and act shocked when 13 or 14 year olds take nudie pictures or give blowjobs on the school bus.
Not to be too much of an old fart, but I worry for the future. I mean a dirty magazine or two was mana from heaven back before this interwebs you yungun’s have. If you were lucky you might see what a vagina looks like aside from a mound of pubic hair.
Nowadays that’s so far beyond tame that I doubt a 13 or 14 year old would really be interested in it. It doesn’t take much effort to find hard core porn on any sexual activity or fetish, even the ‘extremes’ like scat, peeing, bestiality, you name it. Believe it or not, early pubescent teens that have lived their entire lives with computers won’t have much trouble finding these things.
Anyway, charging a 14 year old boy with child pornography is pretty fucked up. If he stuck a camera down his pants, would he be both a child pornographer and the victim of it?
