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6 Pennsylvania Teens Face Child Porn Charges For Pics of Selves
mikesd81 writes "MSNBC reports six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones. Apparently, female students at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pa., all 14 or 15 years old, face charges of manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys, who are 16 and 17, face charges of possession. Police told the station that the photos were discovered in October, after school officials seized a cell phone from a male student who was using it in violation against school policy and the photos were discovered at that time. Police Capt. George Seranko was quoted as saying that the first photograph was 'a self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude.' The school district issued a statement Tuesday saying that the investigation turned up 'no evidence of inappropriate activity on school grounds ... other than the violation of the electronic devices policy.'"
on how to screw your enemies. Unlike porn on the Internet, cell phone pictures are *sent*, not *requested* or *received with consent.* Unless you specifically request otherwise from your carrier, you will automatically receive picture messages from whomever decides to send them to your cell phone. This combined with the details of this case make it disturbingly easy to frame someone...
I hope they do not look in our family album. Several images of nude children can be seen. Not only that I was forced to look at other peoples family albums containing nude children as well.
This all while I was underage myself. So who can I sue that has money enough to make me rich? Mmm. Kodak?
Must be all my moms fault for putting that nipple in my mouth shortly after I was born. That turned me into a sex offender.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I wonder if the school administrator who turned them in realized the damage that would be done to these kids. Their lives are ruined. They will fight for a long long time to get this off their record.
The United States has been heading this way for a long while now, at least since Anita Bryant started her "Save Our Children" campaign, when she was under the impression that homosexuals could only increase their number by "recruiting" innocent children. Then John Walsh turned his personal tragedy into a national, and now a global tragedy with his movement that deceived the nation into believing that the thousands of children who run away from abusive homes each year were in fact millions of children who were being raped and murdered by strangers each year. (The quasi-governmental organization Walsh founded, the National Center for Misusing and Exploiting Children, is the king of dubious statistics - at one point they were telling Americans that over a million kids went missing annually. More recently they have been claiming that the non-existent child porn industry is larger than the legal pornography industry and Hollywood, combined.) What started out as an anti-homosexual movement has turned into an anti-child and anti-man movement, and in fact an anti-everything-good-about-the-world movement.
(As a curious aside: Anita Bryant made a name for herself as a singer, and one of her hits was a tune from the 1950's musical "The Music Man", which was set in the early 1900s. "The Music Man" was about a charlatan who deceived parents into believing their children were in danger so that he could sell them the cure. Sound familiar?)
So now we have reached the point where we are putting children who are "doing what comes naturally" in jail, or blacklisting them for life, in the name of "protecting them". Protecting them from what, exactly, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain, but protect them we will, by God, if we have to kill every last one of them!
I feel for both the boys and girls who have been caught up in this situation, in which the only real crimes were those committed by the principal who violated their right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure and those committed by the police and prosecutors who pursued charges.
When combined with such things as The Drug War, it is getting harder and harder every day to do anything but laugh at the notion that the United States is home to the free or the brave.
"And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the fear and the home of the slave!"
Play ball!
Can we just blind the lawmakers instead?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Actually, my last lines spell it all out.
The REAL problem is the disconnect between nature/culture and our morality laws. They are moving in separate directions.
We had similar problems with smoking at one point until laws were create to reign that in... now that we have laws preventing children from smoking and laws preventing its advertisement, we are at least consistent. But laws against sexual expression in advertisement will be a LOT harder to come by and a lot harder fought. Meanwhile these sappy laws "protecting the children" even from themselves are in dire need of revisitation and reconciliation with our present day standards and culture.
Police Capt. George Seranko was quoted as saying that the first photograph was âoea self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude." The school district issued a statement Tuesday saying that the investigation turned up âoeno evidence of inappropriate activity on school grounds ⦠other than the violation of the electronic devices policy.â The statement also said that school officials didnâ(TM)t learn of the charges against the students until Monday.
(Emphasis mine)
To be (somewhat) lenient on the school, it is my impression from the article that school officials didn't go in guns blazing demanding that the perverts be burned. Consider it from their point of view: child pornography is illegal and they found child pornography on a student's person (the legality, morality, acceptability of the search being ignored ATM). Even if they could identify it as a student at the school that tells them nothing, and it would be wrong for them to assume no crime was committed. The only thing they can be sure of at that point is that the girl took a picture of herself nude with her phone and didn't delete it. If someone else had stolen her phone then they could have sent the pictures to the boy they found, the internet, whoever. They can make no assumptions about the circumstances in which he obtained the pictures and for the protection of the girl (who may at this point be a victim) they MUST inform the police so they can investigate. This is to protect the girl in the pictures because the letter and intent of child pornography laws is to protect the child in question. It would have been irresponsible on the part of the school to assume that everything was innocent and not report it to the police. I wouldn't put too much blame on the school.
Now the police... Well, suffice it to say that their stance at the moment is rather absurd and ignore the intent (and possibly the letter) of child pornography laws. But I'll let others handle that point better than I.
http://angryee.blogspot.com
I've been shouting about this for some time. The best answer I have found is that the following chain happened:
We don't like child molesters, someone do something about them!
Laws are passed, people are happier.
Politicians need a rallying cry, and who can resist "I'm doing this for the Safety of the Children"?
Snowball begins...
When you're super-conservative, nudity=thinking forbidden thoughts=sin. Logical solution? Remove sources of nudity to prevent sin. As an added bonus, Think of the Children will garner votes.
It is ridiculously stupid. Ban nudity, and you ban most of the Renaissance painters. Those dirty, sinning pornographers.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
When you're super-conservative, nudity=thinking forbidden thoughts=sin. Logical solution? Remove sources of nudity to prevent sin. As an added bonus, Think of the Children will garner votes.
I hope I don't get arrested for the back issues of National Geographic in my bookcase. Check issues from the 1950's and 1960's where photos of natives in far away places often included nude children playing.
The truth shall set you free!
Just for grins, I flipped through a few old copies. An example of nude women and children making pottery is in the FEB 1964 issue page 174. Now you can get arrested for photos like this? Who knew we would become that crazy.
The truth shall set you free!
Given the teacher immediately turned everything over to the police I would think there is no risk of being charged... Its not, after all, illegal to report a crime..
It is illegal to be in possession of child pornography, regardless of knowledge of possession or intent. That's the law.
If I secretly copy some to your computer and then anonymously turn you in, you can be arrested and go to jail; your life forever destroyed.
Like it or not, agree with it or not, minors do not legally have civil rights so they can not be infringed upon.
Gonna need a source on that one. I can't find anywhere in the constitution that civil rights only apply to non-minors. In fact, the US Supreme Court has famously found that: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." (Tinker v. Des Moines). If the first amendment applies to students, that would suggest that minors do have Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, and therefore that the rest of the constitution applies to minors as well.
I am not a crackpot.
so does it mean that if two minors has sex .. legal their both child molesters? i mean .. ire meber being 16 .. and eating that one thing we used to eat when we were kids ... thats what being 16 is all about!! GIRLS!and i mean cmon.. what 16 year old guy wouldnt want naked pictures of his 16 year old girlfriend ... there kids .. I just dont see how its child pornography if they are the same age ..
btw .. im too lazy to sign in
- WINDOWS_NT
in a different direction. the pictures were discovered by the school administration confiscating one of the male's cellphones. what then gave them the right to go poking around at the data on the phone? if the student was using a phone during class time, i can understand taking it away. but i don't see how that allows an invasion of privacy? what if we were talking about a laptop instead of a cellphone. does the school have the right to go through all that data as well? access to bank information (that some 16-17 year old's could have) going through old emails, etc. with today's cell phone capabilities, in many ways there isn't a difference between what you store on your laptop and your phone.
My experience with High Schoolers has been that:
1. Teens today are quite easily manipulated into many things that earlier cohorts may have resisted. Perhaps a changing of the times, where a media-driven culture sends out messages of 'everything is cool, the more 'kinky' the better...'
2. Don't understand the ramifications of a compromising photograph.
When 'everything goes', then who cares about a photo taken without a thought of its unintended usage. Not to mention, how easy it is for someone to pass the photo around. In one of my classes, I invited an HR person who explained how easy it was to take a picture and massively publish it... and pop up just at the wrong time for when a job offer may be at hand.
3. I deal with law enforcement at times and they say that the #1 way to entrap kids, especially girls, is to have them either do something (e.g., nude webcam, pics etc.) for which they know they will be in trouble with their parents. Once a predator has established this sort of blackmail, the poor kid will end up forced into far worse things.
I don't like this porn law being used this way because it detracts from the real issue(s) at hand. Yet, I can see that law may not fit the bill entirely in such cases. I would instead favor a system which educates kids/teens better and a social system that encourages kids towards greater self-esteem and understanding of such things by informing them of the bad and very real consequences for teens who made reckless choices.
Wouldn't be the first time. A 16 year old girl has been sentanced to years in prison, and put on the sex offender list, for taking a nude photo of herself. The DA tried her as an adult. His argument was going to trial at all that she doesn't know what's she's doing since she's only a kid, and doesn't realize that she might be up for a nice job in 10 years, but oops, that picture comes out and her chances are ruined. His argument for trying as an adult was the heinous nature of crimes against children. ya rly. She blew her brains out I think.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Not just the DA at fault. What about the 12 ordinary citizens? Why did they find him guilty?
SJW n. One who posts facts.