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Is That "Sexting" Pic Illegal? A Scientific Test
A county district attorney in Pennsylvania has threatened to file felony child pornography charges against three teenage girls for pictures that they took of themselves, even though the girls' lawyers say the pictures are clearly not sexually explicit and do not meet the legal definition of child porn. The American Civil Liberties Union has countered by asking a federal judge to block District Attorney George Skumanick from filing charges.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers, but according to the reported descriptions, one picture shows two of the girls flashing the peace sign in their bras, and the other picture shows a girl wrapped in a towel with her breasts exposed after stepping out of the shower. Unless there's something very significant being deliberately left out of those descriptions, it sounds pretty obvious that the pictures do not meet the definition of child pornography, which requires sexual explicitness, not just nudity.
Skumanick may even sound like a buffoon for threatening to prosecute the girls over those pictures, but his overreaching is probably an example of the "context syndrome" that I referred to in writing about a Wikipedia article about a CD showing a naked underage girl on the cover. In that article, I wrote:
Suppose you read a news article about a man who was arrested for possession of child pornography, and you happened to see a sample of the images (never mind how) that he was arrested for. And suppose the Virgin Killer album cover photo had been mixed in with those images. Would it have jumped out at you as an obvious case of over-reaching by the police?
In other words, even an obviously legal photo might seem illegal when it's mixed in with a group of photos that constitute actual child porn. According to the AP, Skumanick's office first found the photos in question after confiscating students' cell phones and rounding up 20 students accused of making or distributing the images found on the phones. Some of those other photos were presumably racy enough to meet the definition of child pornography, and Skumanick probably just lumped in the bra and towel pictures into that category without thinking too much about it. Giving him credit, if someone had come to his office and shown him the picture of the towel girl by itself and asked him to prosecute the girl for creating child pornography, he might have said that it didn't meet the legal definition.
But the "context syndrome" only excuses the initial mistake, and only partly. By now, he's had time to think about those particular pictures, and he knows that non-sexually-explicit photos do not constitute child pornography, so what is he doing? He claims that the girls in their bras were posed "provocatively", but that's not the same as sexual explicitness, and he hasn't even made that claim about the towel picture, so unless there's some bombshell piece of information about the photos that he's still keeping secret (and why would he?), there's no excuse for him not to drop the threats of prosecution right away.
But could even the initial mistake have been avoided? I think it could have, if you designed a scientific procedure for deciding, objectively, whether an image meets the legal definition of "child pornography", by borrowing some of the principles used in police lineups.
Now, obviously one big difference between deciding if the right suspect has been identified in a lineup, and deciding whether an image constitutes child pornography, is that the question of a suspect's identity in a lineup is a question about objective reality, while the question of whether an image is "child pornography" is a matter of opinion and consensus about an imprecisely defined English phrase, so it may sound odd to try and find a "scientifically objective" answer. But by "objective", I mean that the procedure should eliminate the influence of factors that are not relevant to the legal definition of child pornography (for example, if asking someone to decide if they think a picture meets the definition, don't tell them whether the photo was found in a pedophile's basement or in a parent's photo album, because under the strict legal definition, that shouldn't matter). And by "scientific", I mean that the Yes/No answers returned by the procedure should be repeatable as far as possible, so that different defendants aren't being tried under wildly different standards, where Bob is convicted of possessing an innocuous photo while Alice is acquitted even though she possessed a racier one.
A naive solution, from a scientific point of view, would be to poll a random sample of lawyers or other professionals in a police go-to database, and ask them to evaluate whether the picture is child pornography, without any information about where the picture came from. These results would be objective (if the respondents didn't know the source of the picture), and would generally be repeatable, if the sample size is large enough. The problem with this method is that while all defendants would be held to the same standard, all citizens would not be. Suppose the lawyers in the go-to list start to decide, as many of them probably would, that anybody who is being prosecuted for possessing a picture of a topless underage girl is probably a pedophile creep anyway, and would start voting "child pornography" for all but the most obviously legal pictures. The prosecutor would realize this, and would know that they could threaten to ruin people's lives by charging them with possession of child pornography because of pictures found in their possession -- even while other members of society possessed similar pictures without ever being charged.
Here's where the analogy to a police lineup comes in. Police lineups are supposed to include "known innocent" candidates in order to test the credibility of the eyewitness; if the eyewitness selects a candidate who could not have possibly committed the crime (because, for example, they were in jail), then the police know the eyewitness is not reliable. (This was one guideline notoriously violated by District Attorney Mike Nifong in the Duke lacrosse team rape trial; he assembled a lineup consisting only of lacrosse team members from the party, so that whomever the eyewitness identified was guaranteed to fall under a cloud of suspicion.) In the same vein, the lawyers or other experts being consulted by the police could be shown a "lineup" of photos, consisting of several photos that were determined in advance to be legal (either because of a prior court ruling, or perhaps just because the D.A. had declined to prosecute the photos on previous occasions), along with the photo whose legality was in question. Ask the experts to pick which photo they think is closest to the definition of child pornography. Unless most of them pick the photo that's on trial, then that photo can't be said to be worse than any of the other photos that had already been deemed legal.
This is closer to a fair solution, but there's still a big loophole. When police assemble candidates for a lineup, they are supposed to pick candidates who match the general physical description given by the eyewitness. If the eyewitness said they were attacked by a redhead, the police can't fill out the lineup with one redheaded suspect that they want to railroad, and 10 blondes. Because attributes like "Caucasian" and "redhead" are pretty straightforward, if the rules for lineups are being enforced properly, the police don't have a lot of wiggle room to fill out the lineup with candidates who blatantly don't match the description. Unfortunately, it would be a lot easier to cheat when creating a "lineup" of photos to compare against a photo whose owner was on trial for possessing child pornography. If the photo at issue is probably legal but still provocative, then the police could fill out the rest of the lineup with completely non-sexual but perhaps eyebrow-raising photos, like a naked teenage girl watering some houseplants. Then when the police ask, "Which of these does not belong?", everybody would pick the provocative one, and the police would take that as "vindication".
The only way I can think of to guard against this, would be to let the defense counsel pick the other photos in the lineup, and then they could pick the most "provocative" ones that were still legal! For any photos that have been declared legal in the past, the defense ought to be able to argue that if an independent panel of experts doesn't think their client's pictures are any worse than those, then their client should not be prosecuted either. (If the defense lawyer decided their client was a child molester and wanted to throw them to the wolves, they could deliberately pick non-sexual photos for the lineup, so that their client's photo gets pegged as the odd one out -- but when the defense lawyer decides to railroad their own client, it's almost impossible for the system to guard against that anyway. Also, it's probably not a good idea to make this an option for child pornography defendants who decide to represent themselves, so that they can rifle through thousands of photographs of naked children, even legal ones, to find the pictures that they think are the "sexiest" to use for their defense.)
Perhaps someone can think of a better method that is still roughly scientific, in the sense of trying everyone according to the same standard and giving repeatable results. The irony is that despite the potential of child pornography charges to destroy a person's life, it is in possible in principle to try child pornography cases more objectively than almost any other type of crime, because you can separate out the alleged criminal act from everything else about the defendant, and let people examine the evidence of criminality in isolation. If someone shoots a person and claims it was self-defense, it's hard to imagine how you could distill out only the relevant facts of the case, and pass along just those facts to some third-party observer who then renders a judgment without knowing anything else. Half the courtroom battle is over what facts are "relevant" in the first place. But in the case of a child pornography charge, you can give the photo -- and no other information -- to an expert, and ask them to make a judgment.
I know, I know. The police and prosecutors are not actually doing to do this. But that in itself says something. Even if it's not possible to try most crimes in a truly objective fashion, why don't the courts and the police do this when it is possible? Many first-year psychology students that have an intuitive grasp of the principles of sound double-blind testing, could probably come up with a procedure better than the one I've described. When you've spent long enough thinking about how to design experiments objectively, you can't even hear about lawyers arguing over whether a photo constitutes child pornography, without the thought popping into your head: "Have a group of experts look at the photo and rate it, independently of each other. Compare the results to a 'control' result where the experts look at a photo that is not child pornography." And so on. Why don't those suggestions ever come from within the legal profession itself?
And on the flip side, what about using scientific methods to examine facts about the legal system? When considering that judges are tasked with evaluating parties' claims in an objective and fair manner, one could ask: Are they really being objective? What are different ways that we could test this? Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?
Probably because most people who think in terms of objective experimental design are drawn towards the hard sciences, not toward law. That's probably a good thing; such people can likely do more good as physicists and research psychologists than they could as lawyers and policemen. But they can still speak out for the principles of science to be applied wherever possible, in any area where objectivity is important -- especially the law.
All true scientists at heart should keep telling the world that "science" is not just a label that encompasses nerd subjects like biology, physics, and chemistry, with other subjects like art and law being "outside the domain of science". While the statements made within the framework of those subjects are not scientific ("This painting is pretty", "The court finds the defendant not liable", etc.), science can make statements about the people in those professions and the patterns in the conclusions that they reach. If art experts are evaluating paintings differently depending on whether they think the paintings come from an art gallery or a 4-year-old's kitchen table, you could find that out through a scientific experiment. If judges are giving an easier time to lawyers than they are to parties who represent themselves, even when they make exactly identical arguments, you could test that hypothesis with an experiment, too. And scientific principles could be used to draw up procedures for trying cases more objectively, as in the procedure for deciding the legality of sexting photographs. We just need to get over the idea that "scientists" should limit themselves to the forensic CSI stuff and then stay away from the legal arena because that's a "separate domain". Science could tell us quite a lot about how fairly justice is dispensed in the courtroom, and sometimes even how to fix the problems.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers
hard to prove your innocence if you're not given the chance to.
Sent from your iPad.
In practice, I suspect that the DA just consulted the "Contemporary Community Standards" that he keeps in his pants.
Post the pictures on Digg. The legality of the pictures will be inversely proportional to the number of Pedobear sightings.
a summary that long dedicated to whatever the fuck it is and no actual definition.
at first I thought it might be a "sex sting". turns out it is sending pics of your "naughty bits" via camera phone.
No sig for you!!
The DA is threatening to file felony charges against three girls for taking pictures of themselves. There's no wiggle room; the guy IS an unreasonable buffoon, and excuses like "context syndrome" don't help.
IN some states, the age of consent and child porn statutes have the same age limits.
For instance, a quick read of NV law shows the AOC to be 16. Child porn is defined as sexually explicit blah blah blah involving a person under 16. Federal law makes it a crime with a person under 18, but there may be some state line/interstate commerce nexus that needs to be fulfilled.
I didn't feel like looking at too many states, but found this same AOC/CP thing with NH-16/16.
Many states forbid distributing/exhibiting obscenity to people under 18, regardless of their AOC/CP statutes.
SO, excluding the feds, it's not a crime to have sex with a 16 year old or film it. But, she can't watch the tape afterward. It's a crime to allow her 16 year old friend to watch the act as it occurs, but not a crime to have her join. Neither of them can smoke a cigarette or have a beer afterward. If either one were to rob,beat,kill one of their fellow participants, they would be tried as an adult in every state in the country.
- Stolen from a Fark thread.
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How old do you think your great-great-great grandparents were when the got it on?
It is an interesting idea, and it might even work in theory, but I doubt it will ever be widely used. Why? Because you'll have a hard time convincing people to send possible child pornography off to be examined by a bunch of anonymous experts.
In the case of "sexting," where oftentimes the defendant and the victim are the same person, maybe it would pass. But if Joe Blow is charged with distributing dirty pics of Jenny Junior, I doubt Jenny's parents will be okay with those pictures being shown to even more people. There's no incentive for them to compromise, since people are routinely convicted on child pornography charges without this process.
This whole thing would probably have to be legislated anyway. How many state legislatures, not to mention the US Congress, will be willing to go out on a limb to (it will be said) protect child predators?
The solution to the "sexting" problem is common sense and prosecutorial discretion. Hopefully we'll see more of both!
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
No case has yet hit the court and, as such, there are no charges to defend against - only "threatened" charges.
Once the charges are made, the prosecution will be required to furnish the photographs. As it is right now, they may be required not to do so under dissemination laws. This isn't terribly sinister, perhaps simply a stupid law.
determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography
We don't have a scientific or legal definition for whether a picture constitutes any sort of pornography, other than Oliver Wendel Holmes' "I know it when I see it".
I am officially gone from
Child porn cases can be divided by two dimensions: The photo and the context in which it is possessed.
You can objectively decide the photo: It's either clearly porn, clearly not porn, or in the hopefully-narrow grey area where some local courts or experts applying local community standards would it is and some would say it isn't.
You can objectively decide based on the context: Is this a parent with a childhood photo album that happens to contain half a dozen bathtime pictures, one of which has the child appearing to be masturbating, mixed in with hundreds of non-bathtime pictures? Is this a parent with an album of nothing but bathtime pictures most of which have the child masturbating? Is this an adult with pornographic pictures of himself he inherited from his parents? Is this a teenager with pornographic photos she took of herself? Is this a teenager with pornographic photos his girlfriend let him take? Is this a 30 year old with pornographic pictures of kids he doesn't even know? Is this a 30 year old with pornographic pictures of kids he doesn't even know stored in a locked vault in his office at the FBI, with carefully controlled access to the files in the vault?
Clearly, the FBI is allowed to have such pictures for official use. Clearly, the typical citizen is not allowed to have such pictures of kids that aren't his own without a very good reason, and possessing them is more than likely a sign that the person has criminal tendencies. While not as crystal clear, it's fairly clear that even a parent shouldn't have an album full of such pictures without a very good explaination, for the same reasons. The teenager, teenager's boyfriend, the now-grown child with inherited photos, and mom or dad with a single pornographic "cute kid in bathtub playing with his/her genitals" picture out of many innocent ones are much more likely to result in acquittals or public outcry at overzealous prosecution, even if the picture itself is objectively clearly pornographic. Why? Each of them can claim a moral right to take and/or possess the photos, and each can legitimately claim that possession of the photos is not an indicator that they are a danger to society. In other words, they are very sympathetic defendants.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The concept of picking the illegal photo from a lineup of legal ones is a good one, but it will inevitably lead to a slow migration of the legal standard to an ever more permissive definition of provacative. In order for a photo to be consistently selected from the lineup it would have to be significantly more provacative that the legal ones. Any photos that were only sligthly more provacative would not be identified and would therefore become part of the suite of photos that had been determined to be legal.
Was the subject abused or otherwise injured (psychologically or physically) by the photography? After all, child pornography laws are there to protect the children involved. If they took the pictures themselves, it's hard to make a case that they were injured.
It seems to me that if they're old enough to take responsibility for their actions in creating the pictures, and therefore old enough to be punished for them, then they're old enough to have given consent.
Sometimes, a test without context would be appropriate. In other cases, like this one, the context is sufficient to determine innocence without even looking at the pictures.
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
Some of these ideas seem like they would work to ferret out bias in legal proceedings, but mostly this would be because all of the judges and lawyers were too busy participating in scientific evaluations to actually get any (potentially biased) work done. The experiments that he describes (like holding two trials on the same charges for a white guy and a black guy) could take days, and that's just for one judge. To rigorously test the entire judiciary (and I imagine that this would optimally take place periodically), you would probably need almost all of the time of almost all of the judges, not to mention all of the other people that have to participate.
The thing about having a panel review alleged child pornography before charges are pressed wouldn't take that much time, comparatively, but preventing incorrect charges isn't as important as preventing incorrect convictions. IANAL, but isn't that what grand juries are for?
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Lawyers and judges do run experiments like you suggest (at least, the good ones do). Judges are generally encouraged to take classes which look at case studies (that is what you are talking about) of types of cases they're commonly trying. There are many social scientists who have made their careers studying how people interact in a court room and whether or not a particular procedure is fair.
Go sit in the audience for a court case. You'll find that lawyers absolutely can not just argue about things. The "case" which a lawyer makes is from evidence and experts, not opinion. They often bring up expert witnesses, and can have whole panels of experts look at evidence and interpret it. The defense lawyers in the case you bring up absolutely will have access to the pictures and will have a panel of experts evaluate them, should this ever go to trial. Anyone who's been on a jury for a DUI has seen how this works, as a good prosecutor will have a medical expert describe how alcohol enters the blood stream, how long it stays there and what the effects are. A good judge would not allow a lawyer to simply assert any of those things.
As a "hard" scientist, I would point out that what you're suggesting is not objective. It's fine to have a science of law, but it is a subjective science. Please don't assume that because someone is "an expert", they are an unfeeling automaton. Any measurement which requires the judgment of a person is subjective.
IAAL
The whole purpose of child pornography laws is to protect the minor victim.
Under the law, a minor child CAN NEVER give consent to a sexual act. Period. There are exceptions for teenagers with other teenagers, but beyond that there is no exception (hence statutory rape laws). The whole point of making child pornography possession illegal is to get around the loophole of "I have a picture of an illegal act, but you can't prosecute me because you do not know who is in the picture."
Now when you actually KNOW who was depicted in the picture, and the circumstances surrounding the picture, you can make a determination as to whether the underlying sexual offense has taken place.
I find it impossible to comprehend the charging of a minor for possession of THEIR OWN PORNOGRAPHY!!! We are now prosecuting the person whom the law was written to PROTECT!!!
The question should not be "is it pornography?" The real question is "was the person who is shown in the photograph illegally exploited?" That is a much simpler question to come to terms with, and by ignoring that question, you make a mockery of the legal system.
Okay, first, you can't "scientifically test" people's sexual mores. It's a question of taste, culture, environment, and context. Second, the definition of pornography has long been held to be something along the lines of "You'll know it when you see it." This has actually been used as the legal test in many courts in this country. Third, people are stupid frothing-at-the-mouth retarded and lobotomized flatworms as soon as they become emotionally engaged in a social problem, and doubly-so when it involves criminal charges.
The legal system is a crap shoot. As a defendant you can be hung even if you make completely honest statements. False witnesses, poor quality of evidence, lack of evidence, or (god help you) eyewitness testimony, etc., can all destroy the credibility of a defendant who is completely honest on the stand. If you excercise your fifth amendment rights, the jury will pretty much hang you on that basis alone -- nevermind the VERY strong legal arguments for doing so (even if you're innocent). Not only that, but did you know that in something like a quarter of rape cases where the defendant was later aquitted based on DNA evidence -- they admitted to the crime? Not that YOU would ever do something like that, but why do you suppose they did it? And let's not even get into over-zealous prosecutors, incompetent judges and attorneys, "lost" or witheld evidence from the police department--because we all know they aren't human but in fact infallable robots who never make honest mistakes, let alone malicious ones. Did I mention that a lot of people plead guilty to lesser offenses simply because they don't want to deal with the hassle and stress of a trial? A lot of people do this. Think of when you got a parking ticket or speeding ticket -- after venting about how you're going to fight the man, etc., and how the cop was just singling you out, etc... How many of you knew you weren't guilty but decided to give in anyway and pay the fine just because it was easier than a fight and the risk of losing and having to pay even more (and pay you will, Citizen).
In the majority of cases, the trial is over before it even starts. And people don't learn -- it doesn't matter how many innocents they throw to the wolves, because in their mind they're justified for doing so "because we got a few bad guys doing it too!" People are irrational, emotional, slathering rat-beasts. And they're stupid. Just realize how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the people serving on your jury will be stupider than that. Oh, and the icing on the cake? I don't know you, but I'm sure you've committed an arrestable-offense today. There is no person on the planet who can understand and follow all the laws we've created. And there are so many of them, that the odds are incredibly good that you've broken at least one of them. So all of you are criminals. We just haven't caught you...yet.
Lastly, consider this: What if one of these girls had been a boy instead. Ah, but justice is blind they say.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think it's more disturbing that you think females past the age of puberty are somehow not sexual beings and that having a sexual interest is somehow unnatural and wrong.
If the people in the picture are younger than the age at which they can legally consent to having that picture taken, then that picture is illegal. If it's a picture of sex or nudity, then it's child pornography.
It's an easy question if the law protects the subject of the picture. Protects them from the original event, where they're having sex or being naked in a way that exploits them. And protects them from the damage to their reputation and self image that distribution of the picture does. Easy question, simply the age and pose of the subject.
If you're making a law that punishes sinners for lusting after a child, then it's a hard question. You've got to make the law prohibit depictions of children who don't exist, like in comic books. You've got to prohibit pictures of adults (un)dressed like children. And probably all kinds of other things, chasing the perversion in the minds of perverts, notoriously non-uniform in what's in their minds to prohibit.
That kind of question should be hard, because it's a waste of time. The government's business isn't policing sin, but protecting children. That legit business is mercifully much easier, while still hard enough that it needs to be done by professionals when parents fail.
--
make install -not war
What children? The article is about teenagers.
or it didn't happen...
Can all fish swim?
Perhaps someone can think of a better method that is still roughly scientific,
Yupp. Don't make thinking illegal.
This is part of the whole "victimless crime" item, except that in the vast majority of cases, you can not even establish probable danger.
If I am speeding on a safe, empty road, I'm not really putting anyone at risk except me, but you could argue that there might be a child hiding at the precise tree I'll be slamming into, or someone somehow gets in front of me without me noticing quick enough - etc. Short version: While in that actual situation nobody might have been harmed, a small modification of the situation creates plausible danger, hence you could argue my speeding needs to be punished.
Now try to extend that to someone looking at cartoon characters fucking. Uh, wait, seemingly underage cartoon characters (whatever that means) fucking. I challenge you. Which small modification of the situation causes harm or puts someone at risk?
There's no risk here. Not even a theoretical one. AFAIK the often provided "looking at drawings that look like a 12 year old doing naughty things causes children to be harmed for more porn production" line has no scientific evidence for it whatsoever. In fact, all evidence we do have suggests that the more you suppress sexual desires, the stronger they will erupt when the barrier falls.
Quite honestly, my personal belief is that these kiddie-porn-crusaders are probably causing more actual damage to children than the vast majority of those who enjoy sexy cartoons.
In the end, though, this is a lost cause. Evidence, truth and justice are not on the agenda of 99.99% of the people involved. Just look at the lineup. Politicians, lawyers, policemen. All people who stand to profit from more laws, more complicated laws, broader laws and more difficult to decide legal cases.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Don't forget that they will very likely be tried as adults because they were fully capable of understanding the nature and consequences of their actions for something that is only illegal because they are NOT capable of doing exactly that.
That's not why child porn is illegal. It can't be.
Consider: I'm (significantly) over 18 years of age, so the law assumes I understand the consequences of my actions. That includes knowing the consequences of distributing pornographic images of myself, which I have the legal right to do.
Hypothetically, let's say that before I turned 18 and instantly became aware of the consequences of my actions, I took some photographs of myself masturbating, but never distributed them. It would be patently illegal for me to distribute (or even possess them) them now, despite my being well over the age of majority, because it would be child pornography.
If the child porn laws were merely about protecting those who don't understand the consequences of their actions, it would be legal for me to distribute those photos at the present time, because I am deemed (at present), to understand the consequences of my actions, and am in no need of such protection.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It's hard to avoid thinking that this case looks a bit like the Salem Witch Trials, but recurring as farce rather than tragedy. Since Classical Athens, there have always been societies that have an undercurrent of gynophobia and repression of women in general. Rather than apply this proposed test, at vast expense, what we need is for all legal staff involved in the prosecution of cases where there is a sexual element to undergo psychiatric screening to ensure that their desire to prosecute women and girls isn't, itself, a sexual perversion.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I tested this on the net, mainly to troll but also for curiosity. I went to 4chan and posted a picture of a young girl taking a bath. You could only see the face since there was soap everywhere. I followed by posting a picture of a nude family walking on the beach and was permanently banned in the following minute. So I stopped my experiment right there. If /b is disturbed, imagine how the rest of the world would react...
I can confidently conclude that nudity equals child porn now, so I'm not surprised by this trial at all. This is what society wants.
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
There were no children involved in this case. There were adolescents well past the age at which people in Western societies routinely engage in voluntary sexual behaviour. Of course adolescent girls experiment with how to attract and interact with potential sexual partners. That's a natural, inevitable and healthy part of growing up. The fact that, given ubiquitous camera phones, they're now using camera phones as part of this behaviour may be new, but its also inevitable.
Seriously, if this Attorney has a problem with these girls sharing these photographs voluntarily with their boyfriends (as opposed to broadcasting them across the web, for example) one has to start asking whether the Attorney has not got an altogether unhealthy interest in adolescent sexuality.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The following quotation comes immediately to mind. It was uttered by Cary Grant's character in the movie Operation Petticoat:
From what I understand, minors are tried as adults in many cases because, assuming they committed the crime of which they're accused, they've taken on "adult" responsibilities by [allegedly] committing an "adult" action and should be treated as such.
Is not sex one of those actions?
I mean, I know people are becoming sexually active at younger ages (compared to the few previous generations, but certainly not humanity as a whole) but if sex is something that our laws deem fit to be an action that is defined as an adult choice, why are sexually active minors only treated like adults when their actions are considered criminal? Why is it that discovering self-made sex videos or pictures of consenting minors suddenly means that we have to treat and try them as adults, whereas the same minors would require a parent's signature to get an abortion?
I'm not one to think that everyone should be treated like an adult, but there are some things that even kids understand are adult choices. They may not realize the full consequences of their actions, but on the same token, when I was younger I always knew when I "done fucked up." I may not have known how to handle it, but I certainly knew I'd be held responsible...
Part of becoming an adult is the process of making adult decisions (read: mistakes) and adjusting to the consequences of screwing up, and those who survive long enough generally become healthy adults, but when the consequences for something as commonplace, enjoyable, and desirable as sex are FEDERAL CRIMINAL CHARGES, chances are good the only lesson you'll learn from your teenage foray into your sexuality is that society believes you are one fucked up individual... and you'll probably be one until you die.
It's sad that the heartbreak, embarrassment, emotional distress, STD-acquisition potential, and general insecurity that having sex at the wrong time or with the wrong person can give you isn't enough for some people... we really need to throw criminal charges on top of it.
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You do realize that girls above the age of puberty are supposed to be sexually attractive, right? That's how nature gets us to reproduce -- you hit puberty and start to become sexually capable and your body starts to look it as well.
Holding off on your urges and being polite and treating girls with respect has nothing to do with the internal reality that you should probably find a sexually mature person of your gender of preference sexually appealing (yeah that's a lot of political correctness for one sentence).
I'm sick of society's bent notion that finding attractive girls attractive is wrong. We use them for models and put them on magazine covers and use them to sell make-up, but its totally wrong to see them as sexual beings? Give me a break.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
They aren't actually nude, they are wearing bras.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
It doesn't matter if the photo you received is a 50-year-old Valerie Bertinelli, a 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, or a 6-year-old Elle Fanning. The naked human body is not a crime. It is God's masterpiece. It is Natural, not sinful.
The only time a crime has been committed is if the photo shows penetration or oral gratification, and only if the person is younger than 18, since minors are not allowed to have sex.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Your claim of morality notwithstanding, it's currently illegal in most or all states for someone underage to send a pornographic image of herself to her boyfriend.
Whether it should be or not is a matter for public debate. The fact is, until the courts or lawmakers say otherwise, it is illegal.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where are the interviews with the children? Where is their say in this situation? After all, they are the victims of their own crime, right?
This is a wonderful example of parenting being done to children, not with children. Adults are freaking out of control and exercising their power to dominate the children's lives without a real need apart from the adult's emotional insecurity.
I wonder how are the girls and their classmates feeling after their private lives were taken into the spotlight? Their childish (not very well thought out) actions judged and classified as child pornography acts?
Yes, maybe it is not direct sexual abuse. But how does the violation of their privacy feel? And yes obviously they took these photos and distributed them themselves... not to their teachers / principle, though.
How can we be sure that at least one of the adults involved is not secretly getting sexual / emotional gratification from the photos AND the emotional violation/domination, safely hiding behind the facade of "caring for the children?"
What do the children have to say about this? If the goal of this investigation is to protect children from abuse then let's talk to the children involved and find out if they feel better and safer after the investigation.
If this is not the case, then maybe the investigation is catering to a different agenda.
Why don't those suggestions ever come from within the legal profession itself?
The criminal law industry earns its living by trying people and tossing them in jail, not by serving the abstract concept of "justice". We should not be surprised, then, if the industry resists any innovation that might reduce the rate of prosecution or conviction.
"Prosecuting a child for the law that's suppose to protect the child from older predators is stupid."
Stupid? Why not call it child abuse?
Go show me how it isn't, or would damage the child less than the least of legally recognized forms of child abuse.
I sure wouldn't want any child to be "molested" by the "Justice System".
I'm pretty sure anyone with a porn collection unintentionally has at least a few photos of underage people. Trying to determine age can be damn tricky nowadays. Likely almost everyone on slashdot can be charged with possession.
How can a law that was created to protect minors from exploitation be used to punish those whom it was designed to protect. Punishing a minor for a picture that she took of herself is like charging someone with attempted murder for engaging in high risk activities that could potentially result in their own death.