I took this story from another message board. Mods can delete thread if this is a repeat
feel free to share how reading this article makes you feel,
i’m not planning to post in this thread, other than to say right now that this is so ridiculous and I spent a lot of time trying to see if I was on a spoof msnbc website, because this story
could not be real.
but as far as general questions, I have three:
Can you you manufacture child pornography by yourself?
If the answer to #1 is yes, what other kinds of defenses will we see here?
Is the prosecution going to even try to win this case? or are there times when charges are filed, but only to send a message to the community etc…??
Being that anyone between the ages of say 6 to 17 can most certainly operate a digital camera’s self timer and therefore take nude pictures of themselves, then yes, what meets the legal definition of kiddie porn can be made by themselves.
Its an example of the myriad problems that occur if you try to have a strict, zero-tolerance policy in regards to child pornography. Remember when they tried to make even simulated kidde porn a crime? Because Kate Winslet was playing a 17-year-old then her sex scenes in Titanic could have been considered illegal!
Hopefully the Feds won’t even get involved in this case, and the local DA will just use the threat of kiddie porn charges as a scare tactic to discourage kids from doing this kind of thing. On one hand its just teenagers being teenagers, but on the other, we didn’t exchange nude photos of each other when I was a kid and its would still be a very very bad thing to become a trendy fad amongst them now.
I thought that nudity of minors is not necessarily pornographic. Of course, I haven’t seen the photos but by the description in the article this case could get awfully flimsy.
i respect respect the tone and thoughtfulness that Hail Ants wrote. but i agree with brujaja, it doesn’t seem that bad to me, probably a lot healthier than most of the things i was thinking about at that age.
there are a lot ruder ways to rephrase this post, and i am glad i have stayed out of the gutter. but i have to attempt humor.
Is is legal for a 17 year old male to insert his 15 year old girlfriend’s telephone into her vagina (sexual intercourse), but illegal to use said phone to share sexy photos with each other? and, you know, just think about sex?
It is kind of a weird situation where the age of consent for sexual activity can be lower (in some cases much lower) than the age of consent for being filmed in a “pornographic” manner. I think if the laws regarding age of consent (for example, in some places people younger than a certain age are OK to have sex with someone a specified number of years older, but not no older than X years older) were taken into consideration when it comes to images like this.
On the other hand, I can understand the rationale behind banning such material; somehow this stuff always seems to end up on the internet, and pedophiles will seek it out. I guess it’s another argument entirely if it’s better to keep a pedophile stocked up with something like “virtual” child porn rather than frustrate them to the point that they would rape a child. I don’t know enough about the topic to form an educated position on this, so my instincts tell me that banning the underage photos is a case of “better safe than sorry”.
It’s worse than that. I remember when they were cracking down on cartoons and comic books that had underage characters having sex. These were drawings!
I have an anecdote that quasi fits into this conversation. I used to work at a Girl Scout camp. We had campers as young as six years old come to the camp. During my first year on staff, 2002, we got a phone call from parents of a six year old who recently attended for a weekend. They had dropped the disposable camera that their daughter had taken to camp with her at the drug store and were later visited by the police for producing child pornography. The child, along with her three tent mates, had decided to have a photo shoot with camera.
I was a first year staffer who wasn’t directly involved in the situation (I wasn’t the campers’ counselor), so all of my information came second hand. I know that the camp director had to make a statement to the police, but the situation was pretty easily worked out. The photos weren’t too explicit, just had the girls in their underwear and apparently it was pretty obvious that the photos were created by children being children, and not a secret Girl Scout camp porn ring. I wonder if the situation would have been cleared up as easily now, just seven years later.
FWIW, the council the camp is in now has a policy requiring campers to leave cameras in the counselors care when there isn’t adult supervision around.
There was a case, a few years back (I’ll let someone else dig up the threads about it), where a teenaged girl had made movies of her masturbating, and when the authorities discovered the movies (which the girl had uploaded to the internet), they charged her with molesting herself! I don’t know how the case resolved itself, and clearly there were some emotional problems with the girl, related to the circumstances in which the videos were made/uploaded (she apparently sought out adult males to give the videos to, rather than sending them to one of her peers), but the conscensus here was that the charges were more harmful than good.
Its clear that none of these things comes close to what, IMO anyway, is the true intended definition of ‘child pornography’. That is, photographs or videos, made by adults, of children engaging in sexual acts, for the obvious and implicit purpose of sexual gratification.
Problem is, in a free society its all in the details and ‘intended definition’ can’t really be written into law…
I was going to ask jessesheehan why he wouldn’t be responding to anything in this thread, but then I saw he had, and that he’s been banned, so never mind.
Right – you strike “made by adults”, and between “children” and “engaging” add: “posing in a lewd manner or”, and you have the* legislated *definition of “child pornography”. Add to this, the creation, possession and distribution thereof has been made into a “strict liability” offense, no flexibility.
From the quotes published in these and other cases, the authorities very, very strongly want to send a message to the youths of DON’T DO THIS and they’ll use every means possible up to and including accusing them of a heinous crime. The teens probably thought that at most they were incurring in indecent exposure and the authorities would say , “oh, kids will be kids”. Joke’s on them, I guess :(.
Sigh, why are we so bloody uptight about sex, nudity and all things related to both?
While I respect what child pornography laws set out to do, why aren’t there reasonable exemptions built into law? Photos/vids taken by yourself should obviously be exempt. Photos taken by another minor with your consent should be exempt.
Child nudity in general is such a big no-no, but what’s the big deal? Yes, maybe a few pedophiles will get off on it, but as long as they’re not stalking or hurting the kids or taking pictures without consent, who really gives a fuck? Pedos will get off on pictures/vids of kids period, and they can get all the bikini/swimsuit pictures of kids they want legally anyway.
Obviously laws are in place to avoid sexploitation of kids, but America’s way too paranoid about this stuff.
This is insanity! At the very least there should be a “Romeo & Juliet” excemption for underage people when there are no adults or coercion involved. An accusation of child pornography carries the harshest penalty, and even if you are tried and found innocent, your life can be ruined.
When I was a kid, my family had a cabin at a nudist camp. By current standards, our vacation films would be considered child porn and my parents, and all the parents at the camp child molesters! This country is monumentally screwed up!
