Wait!

Should “sexting” be a crime for kids?

No. This country has gone insane.

-Dave

We have so lost perspective in this country.

The ACLU has a point here. Taking nude pictures of underaged teens exploits them, but if they’re exploiting themselves, prosecution winds up punishing both the perp and the victim.

Much like prosecuting people for using drugs, wouldn’t you say?

What also needs to happen is that a kid or two actually needs to get caught sexting by their parents, and for the parents to notify the other sexter’s parents or forward the sext over to the other sexter’s parents. Enough of that and I bet sexting would lose a significant portion of its popularity.

misslizzi on April 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM

A lttle sunshine can stop a great deal of hidden behavior. Having parents and teachers see what you think is private…

A few years ago some of the girls in our neighborhood posted some inappropriate pictures on MySpace and claimed to be much older, etc. Some parents found out and contacted other parents! These girls were outraged that adults could just “invade their privacy” that way…

Privacy! When you publish pictures for all the world to see… Kids really don’t get it.

I highly doubt cell phone companies would want to go through this hassle – they’d make less money since less texting would happen.

wearyman on April 7, 2009 at 8:07 AM

Great post, wearyman.

Sure, kids who really want texting phones will figure out a way to get them anyway, but why not make it as difficult for them as possible?

What also needs to happen is that a kid or two actually needs to get caught sexting by their parents, and for the parents to notify the other sexter’s parents or forward the sext over to the other sexter’s parents. Enough of that and I bet sexting would lose a significant portion of its popularity.

Don’t get your kid a cell phone with a camera. I recommend blocking text messaging and phone mail as well. (Most good phone companies will have this option available. I know Sprint does.) Better yet, get a plain vanilla pay-as-you-go phone so you can limit how much they use it overall.

Yes, they will whine and complain that it’s “uncool” to carry a phone with no camera, but you will have removed temptation from their path. It is FAR too easy to give in to temptation and send or receive nudie pics. Most young girls and boys (girls in particular) are under TREMENDOUS pressure to become sexually active as early as possible. Sexting is just a first step down that road.

What another poster mentioned about the pics going viral is right. It takes no time at all to spend some time on one of the *chans and you can find self-taken images of teens in various states of undress obviously taken with camera phones and digital cameras. Once posted to the internet the image is on the internet FOREVER as it will be posted and reposted in various places.

I think it’s going to be interesting when, 20-30 years from now, one of these less than bright girls, now a grown woman and married with kids, will find a naked picture of her younger self on her son’s phone or PC. It’s going to happen, if it hasn’t happened already.

Kids are having sex at like 14 and 15, I steered clear of it, but most of my friends didn’t. It wasn’t because their parents weren’t involved, it wasn’t because they were simply immoral kids who lacked a sense of decency, it’s because they wanted to have sex and they could have sex. There used to be a bigger social stigma on it, but times have changed. It’s the business of the government to protect children from predators, but getting involved beyond that is a ridiculous intrusion.

In my day, “sexting” was known by a different name: Polaroid. It took a little more ingenuity and slightly more investment, but teenagers who had the inclination would take pictures of themselves, or their sex partners would do it for them. They got passed around on occasion, too, although the new technology makes that a no-cost affair and a lot easier to accomplish.

The ease and the speed at which one can transfer images is what makes Polaroids and Sexts two totally different things.

I feel sorry for the kids, but, yes, why not brand them for life? It’s not like their self-awareness and sexuality is not already irreparably damaged.

I agree that 16 yr olds exchanging naked pictures is bad but it should result in a lifelong sex offended label. But if it’s 10 year olds then I don’t think anyone would tolerate that. So there’s gonna be some cut off age, which is arbitrary but unavoidable.

Again, judges should have common sense and decide based ont the facts available if they are dealing with a predator and a victim or two stupid teenagers.

There’s an 18 year old man in a Michigan jail for taking nude photographs of his 17 year old girlfriend. She was old enough to have sex with him legally but being a minor, nude photos of her are considered “kiddie porn” so he was prosecuted. When it’s men who are jailed and prosecuted, nobody cares.

In the wealthy Detroit suburb of Gross Pointe there was a high school sex ring with senior boys having sex with younger girls. The prosecutor only charged the boys over 18 with statutory rape. He didn’t charge the boys under 18, though they were just as guilty, because if he charged the minor males for having sex with a minor female, he’d have to charge the females for having sex with minor males.

Since sex crime laws now exist to promote the feminist agenda, we can’t very well have females punished for these crimes.

1. Have some sort of penalty for “sexting” for minors but don’t label them as “sexual offenders”. The behavior should be discouraged but a “sexual offender” label could ruin their entire life and that seems a little harsh for a kid who doesn’t really understand what they’re doing.

2. Keep, or increase, penalties for adults who possess any such material.

Not to mention the Streaking fad in the late ’70s when small groups of us would run butt nekkid through town at midnight; and the skinny-dipping partys (all participants underaged) at Lamar Park…

Thank God we live in a much more proper and decent world now.

/sarc

I’ll buy into the “Oh, but we have to protect the children” deal when teenage girls have to start wearing sack cloth and are forbidden to wear bikinis in public.

Fundamentally, the Government has waaaaay too many ways to put people in jail for a myriad of trivial reasons. Meanwhile, the next shooting massacre or 9-11 is looming on the horizon, and they’re booking people for not having their vehicle registrations squared away, having some weed on them, the IRS has thousands of agents to harass people and be the envy of any Cosa Nostra mobster…

But, golly gee, they just never seem to have the ‘resources’ to stop violent offenders, control illegal immigration, stop Madoff types from ripping off people, etc.

Because they’re busy with junk like this.

I sympathize with DarkCurrent, by the way. As a woman myself, I think it would be somewhat strange for a teenage boy in the USA not to have porn.

Also, unlike those poor oppressed females in Islamist countries, American girls are usually not defenseless victims. When the virile sons of American men exploit them, it is usually with their permission. ;)

Dukeboy01 on April 6, 2009 at 7:54 PM

Interesting points well thought out.

I’m glad the photo can be used later to prosecute adults who may use them. That is a good reason to contact police.

Usually in those cases I obtain copies of the offending photos, sit down with both sets of parents, and tell them that I could charge both sets of kids for manufacturing and distributing child pornography. that usually calms everybody down and that’s the end of it. The pictures get submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as known victims of child pornography. That way they can be used against the real adult predators who are just as happy to collect the awkward amateur teen porn as they are to collect the commercially produced stuff. They need both kinds to trade for more.

However, there are juvenile predators who use subterfuge and blackmail to obain these photos from other kids. I’ve seen kids create fake profiles on MySpace in which they posed as members of the opposite sex to get photos of their classmates. I’ve seen videos filmed with camera phones in which the kid on the video asks why the phone is out only to be told that the suspect was “just sending a text.”

A one size fits all rule that decriminalizes the possession of child pornography for juveniles fails to recognize that we do have child predators in our society who are children themselves. Harsh as it sounds, we need the ability to punish the kids who need punishing in the hopes that their behavior can be corrected while they are still juveniles.

You might even consider death threats: premarital sex will kill you. Not “you might get AIDS, which is fatal,” but “If I find out you’ve been having sex, I will kill you.”

philwynk on April 6, 2009 at 5:48 PM

Making death threats is illegal and is a gross overreaction to sexual activity. It’s also a great way to alienate yourself and abolish any line of communication you thought you had with your kids.

How long does it take for traditions to establish? One generation? Two generations?

petunia on April 6, 2009 at 6:52 PM

A tradition would likely need more than two generations and would gain weight over time.

To the question in this thread, I think stopping kids from sexting falls with the schools and parents–not with police officers who should focus on violent offenders.

AaronGuzman on April 6, 2009 at 6:36 PM

America grew up from the Moral Majority over-reaction.

This is a case of where the law is being screwy with mismatched ages of consent. That in turn creates the strange social situations where consent exists – but where there’s the opportunity for overly litigious folk to smack people with the law.

I’d say fix the laws so that it is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If you’re going to be playing with forces such as scarlet letters, you might as well save them for the actual predators – not the ones created by clever lawyers.

neuquenguy on April 6, 2009 at 3:06 PM

To think there was a time that wasn’t exactly less moral in the past. They got along just fine without going Falwell on morals. The standard was more of “what the community would tolerate” over some predefined line. Less “off by a day, branded for life” and more of the practical age limits. Even those lower limits kept the ne’er do’ells in check.

No thanks, but let’s keep Falwell, Bakker and the overreacting Moral Minority back in the 1980′s.

AaronGuzman on April 6, 2009 at 3:55 PM
AaronGuzman on April 6, 2009 at 3:58 PM

What the parent doesn’t know is that their kid has taken up a certain interest in electronics that has that GPS part of it made useless and the number-restrictions lifted off the phone. They only see a stock phone.

Besides, it’s quite hard these days to get a camera-less phone anyhow. You can, but you’re going to pay a lot more for it.

It’s a shame kids don’t use proper cryptography to keep these things private(where age of consent is under 18). Much more that it’s not simple enough to easily teach that to the average teenager.