Is sending racy 'sexts' flirting, or is it porn?

[TechBear_Seattle]

Is sending racy 'sexts' flirting, or is it porn?

Though youth is fleeting, images sent on a cell phone or posted online may not be, especially if they're naughty.

Teenagers' habit of distributing nude self-portraits electronically -- often called "sexting" if it's done by cell phone -- has parents and school administrators worried. Nationally, some prosecutors have begun charging teens who send and receive such images with child pornography and other serious felonies.

But is that the best way to handle it?

In some cases, the photos are sent to harass other teens or to get attention. Other times, they're viewed as a high-tech way to flirt. Either way, law enforcement officials want it to stop, even if it means threatening to add "sex offender" to a juvenile's confidential record.

The full article is available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/398872_sext05.html

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If an underaged year old high school student has nude photos of himself, is he in posession of child pornography? If he sends those images to his high school girlfriend, is he guilty of distributing child porn? Is she guilty of posession?

[Teaser]

1. If someone takes a nude picture of themselves

Who is the victim and who is the perp?

[Fovea]

2. Who profits?

Who is the victim?

[MineralMan]

3. No, it's not child pornography if the kid is doing it

him or herself. For pete's sake! Underaged? Underaged kids are having sex, willy-nilly, all the time. Are we arresting them? I can see the headline now:

15-Year Old Girl Charged with Statutory Rape

Girl Charged with Sex Offence for Allowing Boyfriend to Feel Her Up

Do people not remember their high school days? Is that it?

[arcadian]

29. I remember kids in high school having sex with people much older than them as well.

Kids in H.S. having sex with people in their late 20s, these same kids had fake I.D.s and were going to bars and being served liquor. I also remember at my Jr. high and high school, rumors that the gym teachers were sleeping with students. It's seriously not that hard to believe. And in H.S. the male gym teachers didn't help themselves with these rumors by always having young blond hot students always hanging around them and letting them use their cars.

[Ganja Ninja]

4. It's all in the eye of the beholder.

[ogneopasno]

5. If a 15-year-old takes a nude picture of herself, and e-mails it to her boyfriend,

who posts it on his blog, and some creep downloads it and then sends it out to his asshole child molester friends, who then put it on CDs with other photos of child pornography, is it still not child porn because she took it herself? Would a high-school teacher who didn't know her, who possessed only that photo, be possessing child porn?

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

6. This is exactly why the application of the law cannot be as blind as some would think.

There needs to be some common sense involved here, wouldn't you think?

[MineralMan]

7. Intent is the deal, you see.

The girl, who intended to impress her boyfriend, has nothing to do with child porn. Her boyfriend, who was fapping away over the photo, doesn't either.

If he posts it on his blog, that's another story. How often do you suppose that happens? I'd guess that it's a tiny, tiny minority of such photos that make it out onto the web. However, if he distributes it, he moves into the guilty category, as does everyone else who deals with the photo, once it goes public.

It's not the girl who is a criminal.

We use common sense, or should, when it comes to teenagers experimenting with their sexuality. Why? Because, if we were normal human beings, we did a bit of that stuff ourselves.

Common sense should rule. If the boy distributes the photo, then he's not just fooling around with his girlfriend, is he?

[ogneopasno]

8. Right, I understand. I'm just throwing that out there because a lot of people assume that these

things go on and it's only between the two teens.

[MineralMan]

14. Yes, and virtually all of the time, it is

just between the two teens. Hell, my 16-year-old girlfriend gave me a Polaroid of her in the altogether back in 1962. We broke up a year later, and I cut it up in little pieces so it wouldn't get seen by anyone else.

Nothing new under the sun.

[seabeyond]

16. but your wrong. i grew up in earlier decades and that would be what happened

not so much what is happening today with our kids. kids are being hurt by it. it is being used in all kinds of manners for humiliation in schools and ending up on the net. so now what

kids arent being taught the same way we were in the past. their isnt that line of decency as in the past. now what

[MineralMan]

21. Well, that's what I did, but that wasn't what

everyone did. It was sort of a fad to give naked polaroids to your boyfriend, at least at my school back in the early 60s. They'd get their girl friends to take the pictures, and take pictures of their girl friends. Not every boy did what I did, and those polaroids floated around some.

Yes, it's easier for something like that to get wide dissemination now. Bottom line is that the stupid girl who sent her photo to her boyfriend was taking a huge risk, just like the girls in my high school did with their polaroids.

You'd have to be pretty dimwitted not to realize that there was a risk of such a photo getting wider distribution than you intended. I imagine most of those girls doing this know that...and don't give a good damn about it.

Is it embarrassing? You bet. Does it destroy their lives? Nah. Naked photos tend to circulate, and I'm betting the girls who take them and send them to their boyfriends have seen photos of other girls before they did it. I doubt they care.

No doubt my girlfriend's parents would have been horrified if they knew that she had given a naked photo to me. But, they would have been horrified by a lot of things she and I were doing at the time, I'm sure.

As I said, life goes on, and teenagers will do stupid, risky things. Should they be convicted as sexual offenders for those things? Nah.

[ogneopasno]

19. You know, I don't think it is "that simple" "virtually all the time." Standards have changed,

and while there may be just as much fooling around and bullying as in the past, there is now so much more opportunity for it to escalate so much more quickly now. Also, the general tone of social interaction has dropped. People cross lines all the time, and I think these photos are passed on and shared -- or at least held up and shown to friends -- more than you might think.

[MineralMan]

23. Actually, I don't think it's a lot different.

As I said above, those faddy polaroids from the early 60s got shown around, too. Human nature, I guess. Distribution can be a lot wider and a lot faster now, of course. Do you suppose the kids who send photos of themselves over their cell phones don't realize that there's a chance they'll get around? I don't think they're that stupid. I just think they don't really care. That's sorta sad, but it's also the recklessness of teenagers, who are pretty casual with stuff like that.

[murray hill farm]

10. Yes, I agree.

Well said.

[seabeyond]

11. if the kid then takes the photo and distributes around campus, not net

is he spreading child porn?

[MineralMan]

15. Yes. Disseminating the photo by the recipient

to unintended viewers is a different story. I'm not sure child porn should be the charge, but stupidity should be, for sure. Of course, once the image leaves the intended recipient for others, it stops being just a personal thing.

A boy (or girl) who would do that is a creep. Might as well nip it in the bud.

[seabeyond]

18. this is where i agree with you. and i dont just put in on girls sending naked pictures and

boys showing it around. girls do that too. my niece did. took a picture of a male friends penis and then showed to everyone.

seems to be the thing

[MineralMan]

24. Yup. It's the thing, all right.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not all that big a deal, really. Your niece got to shock and amaze her friends with her photo.

Ooo! Gross! Whoa!

The question her parents would ask would be, "What were you doing with your friend's penis hanging out like that?" They probably wouldn't like the answer, either.

Teenagers! Morons on hormones. Weren't we all?

[TechBear_Seattle]

12. What if the girl posts it to the web or otherwise makes it public? n/t

[MineralMan]

17. Then she's a skanky little idiot.

Not a kiddie pornographer, though...just an idiot. Watch for her in a "Girls gone Wild" video in a few years.

Again, common sense should prevail.

[seabeyond]

20. so a child can put child porn on net, but an adult cant. how does that work?

but i had to giggle at you assessment. and agree.

[MineralMan]

25. Child pornography laws are aimed at preventing

the sexual exploitation of children by adults. Stupid teenagers sending photos of themselves to others doesn't really qualify.

[seabeyond]

26. the question is specific. when a child puts her picture on net, it is still child porn.

she is distributing child porn.

[notesdev]

9. The proper response

is to deliver the evidence to the parents of the subject.

These kids may be just playing around, but they don't understand that if naked pictures of you get distributed it can come back to haunt you big time.

[Justyce]

22. Thank you. The consequences are the bigger picture.

Teens don't always think of future consequences, like when they break up with their boyfriend/girlfriend & find the photos have been sent to everyone they know...

[MineralMan]

27. Exactly. It's a parental deal.

Given the news on this subject, I imagine an awful lot of parents had a little talk with Brittany and Jason about the wisdom of sending naked photos of themselves around. I hope so, anyhow. And, if memory serves, Brittany and Jason ignored them.

As for future consequences, they're probably not as bad as you might think. Kids who post drunken photos of themselves or photos of themselves smoking dope or something on their MySpace pages are more likely to face consequences, since admissions boards and employers seem to be checking such things these days.

Think of the naked photos of famous people that have surfaced. Ahnuld? Dr. Laura? Our President's mother? Doesn't seem to have done them a lot of harm. Such things happen. Most of us remember our youthful transgressions and forgive those in others.

When those out-of-focus cell phone photos make it out onto the greater tubespace, they tend to become anonymous, with no names attached any longer. The potential for serious consequences is really minimal, and gets more minimal the more of it's out there.

Nevertheless, sending naked photos of yourself around is a pretty dumb thing to do, and should be actively discouraged. Making criminals of the kids who do it is beyond absurd, though.

[snake in the grass]

13. Not no,

but hell fucking NO!

How typically stupid and prude of these idiots.

[TrogL]

28. As soon as it's on the intertubes, it's kiddy porn (probably before)

I think of these images as a ticking time bomb.

Suppose I build a nuclear bomb out of spare junk and keep it in my garden shed. I think I know it won't go off and I think my garden shed is secure because I bought a $50.00 lock instead of a $2.00 cheapie. Instead somebody breaks into my shed wanting to steal my lawnmower to pawn it for drug money and sets off my bomb instead. :nuke: Oops.

I do computer and network security as part of my living. In a few minutes I'm going to make a phone call and chew somebody a new asshole for a very similar situation.

The girl and boy in question may think their computers are secure (I'll bet they're running Windows. Yes, I'll stop giggling now) and they may think their network connection is secure. It ain't. Unless they're going to extraordinary lengths (which is probably beyond their level of expertise) to establish a secure connection (which even I won't swear in court is possible) I can snoop that picture just fine, thank you.

If they've managed to catch themselves a virus or trojan, it could be rummaging around through their hard drives looking for interesting pictures. It could even have an algorithm to pick out the jpg's with lots of pink and pass them along or just broadcast them to the world for the hell of it. To quote Alfred "some men just want to watch the world burn".

How do I know all this? I'm the one who gets to sit on the intertubes watching the packets flow in, figure out which employee is violating the corporate computer use policy, break into his computer, see what disgusting images he's managed to download (one manager had nearly a gigabyte of anime porn) and watch his face turn all sorts of interesting colours (red to white to "I'm gonna puke" green) as I give "the speech".

Some of the worst images are scans of photographs taken decades before digital cameras. It may have started out in the 50's as some hubby shooting a naughty picture of his wife for his own use, but now it's crossing my corporate network, sitting on my expensive file server and wasting my time when I'd rather be doing useful work.

Should I be building a bomb in my back yard? (Agent Mike, piss off - it's an analogy)

To quote Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility" (gee, two movie quotes in one post).

If I have the power (ie. intelligence, mechanical expertise) to build a bomb, and that's what I want to do to get my rocks off, I have the responsibility to go work someplace where that's what you do for a living. Failing that, I have the responsibility to either not do it or take my lumps if things go awry.

If little miss chickie has "the power to cloud mens' minds" (oh crap, that's three) by flashing her titties over the intertubes, she (and her recipient if he put her up to it) need to take their lumps as well.

Incidentally, "Romeo and Juliet" laws have no precedent here. If the happy couple were flashing each other out their adjacent bedroom windows and visible from the street, the same would apply.