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ACLU Sues Penn Prosecutor For Empty Threat of Child Porn
TechDirt is reporting that the ACLU has stepped in on behalf of several teens facing the threat of child pornography charges in Pennsylvania for sharing nude pics of themselves. Unfortunately for a girl in New Jersey, she is facing much more than just a threat, as she was arrested yesterday for posting almost 30 explicit pictures of herself on MySpace for her boyfriend to see. "...the ACLU has sued the prosecutor on the girls' behalf, saying he shouldn't have threatened them with baseless charges — which haven't yet been filed — if they wouldn't agree to probation and a counseling program. The prosecutor says he was being 'proactive' in offering them a choice, but the ACLU says he shouldn't be using 'heavy artillery' to make the threats. As its attorney points out, teaching kids that this sort of behavior can bring all sorts of unwanted and unforeseen ramifications is a good idea, but threatening them with child-porn charges isn't the best way to do it."
The girl yesterday was apart from her distribution charges was also charged with possession of child porn. So any child may not have pictures of themselves naked. Hope everyone has burned all their photo albums with the pictures of themselves or children in the tub as infants. Because if you have not, then you are next.
... so you don't miss the part about the 14 year old girl in New Jersey who has been charged with possesion of pictures of herself.
IANAL, esp. a constitutional one: However, this seems to get into 5th Amendment territory. You can't be underage, post pictures of yourself on the internet, and be charged with child pornography distribution as a minor. The act of distributing lewd material inherently assumes that you are not a party in the material itself, or at LEAST, that you are not the ONLY party in the material. If anything, you could charge the minor with public nudity or something, but not a pornography charge. That's ludicrous.
Only today can someone be sent to jail and put on a sex offender's registry for sexually abusing themselves. Clearly, she is a danger to children and shouldn't be allowed to live within 2000 ft of a school building or daycare for the rest of her life. And certainly, every time she applies for a job this should come up on her background check. Oh, and don't forget to force her to notify her neighbors that she's a sex offender.
I am so tired of the "let's make an example of them" mentality that is used to justify this crap.
Really? Teenagers having sex and taking naked pictures of themselves is now a nationwide problem?!
No. Millions of people losing their jobs is a nationwide problem. Teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves is a non-issue. These aren't exploited kids being molested or stripped against their will. And I guarantee you at least one of these prosecutors streaked, went skinny-dipping, etc. in their youth. This is just ridiculous. Don't we as a nation have better things to be worried about than a teenager getting naked for another teenager?!
What kind of world do we live in when the children won't think of the children?!
Noone under 18 is supposed to think sexually about anyone else. Didn't you get the memo? Neither did the world's teens...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Following this same logic, if a teenager masturbates they should be charged with sexually molesting a minor...
When I was a child and growing up, seems like everybody had pictures of the kids in the tub or whatever, and it was fairly common to see a neighbor's 2-year-old running around naked. There was absolutely nothing sexual about it and nobody even thought twice about it.
I think the real perverts are the people who have turned this into something naughty and sick.
My children will not and would not do such a thing with their phone or facebook because I monitor what they are doing daily as well as other parents and kids. Any real parent would not let this happen.
Teens have been having sex since time immemorial, it's built into us as a species and it's why we are all here. Parents have only been trying to stop it since the onslaught of religion. The parents will inevitably lose in the long run. The sex drive is second only the hunger drive so if the teen has a full stomach then what do you think the next priority is?
Of course children need to be protected but they also need to be respected as fellow humans. Teach your kids birth control and responsibility but also realize that when they mature sexually they are sexual creatures just like everyone else. Let them grow up for chrissake.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Actually, some kids do tell their parents everything, and it can be very dangerous as there is such as thing as "too much trust". I'm no child psychologist, but in my limited acquaintances, those who were the closest to their parents were also the ones most likely to be dangerously gullible and taken advantage of by others, because they have not learned the risk inherent in (careless) honesty.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
All I can say is good luck with that. I commend you for trying and I'm sure doing a very good job, but there can/will always be things your children are doing that you will not be aware of. I had two very involved parents who did a fabulous job of raising me; they were very involved with my life, knew all of my friends, attended the same church, knew many of my teachers, I was excited to share my life with them, etc.
However, there were still many things that I did that they never found out about that would have gotten me in MAJOR trouble had they discovered them. And it wasn't that they were bad parents or I was a bad kid; rather, I was a kid and needed time grow up. Part of that maturation process is doing stupid things and discovering exactly who you are. Hopefully along the way you also discover that you are not a stupid person who enjoys doing stupid things, which I definitely discovered about myself. But if you never have the opportunity to do stupid things, you might not be able to discover that you don't like them until you are out of the developmental period and you are expected to not do stupid things.
Your understanding is incorrect but very understandable. The problem is that what is and isn't pornographic is highly subjective. Generally, as far as child pornography is concerned, it is merely enough that the pictures are of someone under 18 years of age and "intended to arouse sexual desire". Which does seems appallingly vague. In this case though, it seems pretty clear that the pictures were intended to excite her boyfriend.
The questions here are:
1) Can a person sexually abuse his/her self?
2) Is the purpose of child pornography laws to punish for the harming of the particular child in the photographs or to shut down the child porn network itself? I can imagine an argument that although she wasn't harmed in the taking of these pictures, these pictures do harm society by supplying material to a network of people that do harm children.
3) If she's to young to consent to the pictures because she can't make rational decisions regarding her sexuality, why can she be charged for making a poor decision regarding her sexuality?
A girl, 14, did the deed with her boyfriend, 13. Due to the state's laws, the girl was classified as a victim of sexual abuse. However, as she was the one who initiated the act with another minor, she was also classified as a sexual predator.
There's nothing to figure out there: morons were writing the law. For one, having sex with within a few years of your age someone should't count (with consent of course).
Also, having a law that allows a girl to be classified as both victim and predator for the same act is seriously fucked up. Someone didn't think of the children.
Best possible way to get this law stuck down - get a high school student to go nude in front of the city hall security camera, and then file child pornogrpahy charges against city hall, and a lawsuit.
Your handle suits you well (maybe just not in the way you think it does).
Nothing should be done about this, because nothing wrong was done (at least by the defendants).
The issue against child pornography is that it damages the minor (psychologically or physically, or both). People in their later teens posting nude pictures voluntary isn't and shouldn't be any sort of issue.
The government response to this, as usual, is totally whacked.
Thanks for asking the question. Most people just assume that child porn has always been illegal and never give a thought to the basis for those laws.
I'm old and I've viewed porn since long before videotape existed as a consumer product. I'm also from the U.S., so my experience is limited to the laws in my country. I'll take a stab at answering your question because it's a very important one.
For most of the history of the U.S., child porn was legal. (Some will argue that child porn has always been illegal because obscenity has always been illegal and child porn is obscene. They have a point but not a practical one. There was negligible prosecution for obscenity in child porn cases in the past because they were hard cases to make and you couldn't be sure of a conviction. Thus,) Until the 1970s, child porn magazines and 8mm films were easily available in any large adult book store in any large city.
This bothered people for good reason. In those days, there was no amateur child porn. Film photography (no digital back then, remember) is expensive and developing film isn't easy. Almost no one took pictures of child porn unless they were doing it as a business. Further, there was no (essentially) cost-free distribution medium in those pre-internet days.
The bottom line is that back in those days, child porn was a business. If you possessed child porn, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to adults who were in the business of molesting children.
That's not a good thing.
In fact, it's such a bad thing that when we started making child porn illegal, the few objections on free-speech grounds (and there were some) were easily dismissed. The value of free speech, in these narrow circumstances, is not enough to overcome the legitimate interest of the state in protecting children. Remember, in this case, we're talking about the REAL protection of children. The act of buying child porn back then was functionally equivalent to paying a group of adults to rape kids. No court had a problem with outlawing it.
From that perfectly reasonable beginning, weirdness soon began to grow.
Simple possession was outlawed and nobody raised a fuss because, well, who cares, really? The few pervs who collected large amounts of the stuff were also the people most likely to buy more, so making their lives more difficult wasn't seen as a problem.
Remember, at that time child porn laws came into existence because child porn consisted of adults being paid to rape children. Child porn prohibition had a positive effect on reducing that problem and everybody was happy - except the pedos. In the immediate pre-consumer-internet period, child porn had ceased to exist as a commercial product. Essentially no one in the U.S. was selling it except for the U.S. Postal Service as a part of sting operations. About the only place to get it was alt.sex.pedophilia (and related groups); most of what was available there was simply scans of old nudist magazines. Child porn, for a while, was essentially dead.
Then, the consumer-level internet and ubiquitous digital media technologies came into existence. EVERYTHING changed. Comparing then to now:
Then, child porn was expensive to produce. Now, it's cheap.
Then, child porn was a business. Now, it's amateur hour, all the time.
Then, child porn exclusively involved adults molesting kids. Now, the most common forms of child porn involve children molesting themselves.
Then, child porn only saw the light of day because an adult sold it. Now, most child porn involves no adults at any stage of production or distribution.
Then, child porn was rare because it was difficult to physically distribute the magazines and films in quanti
thats slightly MORE fucked up. Laws should not be made to encourage people to NOT report crimes.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.