Swapping Nude Images Spells Trouble for Teens

[amigocabal]

Swapping Nude Images Spells Trouble for Teens

More than 40 students were involved in distributing teen pornography, police said. Few understood that just having the photos in their possession could have landed them in prison — and on the sex offender registry for life.

"For most of these kids, it didn't even seem like a big deal to them. It was just something they did, something they thought everybody did," Hook said.

When the investigation was over, Oneida County officials declined to prosecute. Instead, students and parents attended informational sessions meant to stop the behavior from happening again.

"We could have kept on investigating. We could have, I'm sure, found much more," Hook said. "We stopped, because what was really clear to us was that we had a problem."

The situation in Rhinelander is not uncommon in Wisconsin.

Many teens send sexually explicit photos on their cellphones believing the image will stay private, police and prosecutors say. Yet increasingly, the images are finding their way into the hands of sexual predators, and the teens themselves can be faced with harsh, lifelong penalties for their behavior.

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[Borgholio]

I'm glad they were smart enough to decline prosecution. Having a naked picture of yourself when you're 17 could be considered child porn as well and that's just stupid. It was a good call to go with education instead of mass-prosecution.

[Grumman]

I'm glad to hear the authorities didn't ruin everything for a change. Warning teenagers about the risk of their naked photographs falling into the wrong hands is the right way to handle it. It is only a shame that the biggest danger they face is still the government deciding to fuck them over for no good reason.

[amigocabal]

We all know that the purpose of these laws is to deter grown adults from sexually exploiting underage persons, and that the chances of reducing the legal porn age to 16 (let alone 13) is nil (largely due to the fact that the vast majority of legislators in legislatures want to be re-elected).

But then image a couple who, at the age of 16, took sexually explicit photos of each other- and then,about a decade or so later, they get married. Should their possession of their own underage explicit photos be a crime?

More generally, how can such statutes be narrowly drawn to fit its goal, without creating new loopholes which could be used by creeps to exploit underage persons? Underage persons sending explicit photos to underage persons (while foolish for a wide variety of reasons) is clearly not as exploitative as an adult giving underage persons cash for explicit photos of themselves. O what about adults distributing sexually explicit photos taken of themselves when they were underage? The whole exploitation factor is not there, either.