A new reality is settling in, one that blurs the line between child porn and playful nude networking by minors. It has the potential of turning kids into pornographers after simply sending a series of personal, but not so private, cell phone nudes to their boy or girl friends.
In La Crosse, Wisconsin, a 17 year old minor posted pics of his 16 year old former girl friend on his MySpace page. Not a mature move by any stretch of the imagination, yet due to our current set of laws, this teenage boy is being charged with child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child and defamation. Stupid maybe, but can we seriously believe this adolescent error in judgment should seriously be compared to a real child pornographer or pedophile?
I think Catherine Davis, a PTA co-president in Westport, Conn. summed it up best: "Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their record for the rest of their lives."
According to an AP story, “Similar cases have been reported in New Jersey, New York, Alabama, Utah, Pennsylvania, Texas and Connecticut.”
As wrong as it surely is, it’s also a train that has left the station. And because it’s only the beginning trickle, we need to pull ourselves together, forgo the moral outrage and come up with a minor penalty that doesn’t traumatize and criminalize our children.
“Psychologists said the phenomenon reflects typical teenage hormones and
lack of judgment, with technology multiplying the potential for mischief. It
also may reflect a teenage penchant for exhibitionism, as demonstrated on
MySpace and countless other Web sites and blogs.”
Try and stop this…
School administrators in Santa Fe, Texas, confiscated dozens of cell phones from students…after nude photos of two junior high girls began circulating. The girls had sent the photos to their boyfriends, who forwarded them to others…Some boys are photographing themselves, too. In Utah, a 16-year-old boy was charged with a felony for sending nude photos of himself over a cell phone to several girls…Four middle school students, two boys and two girls, in Daphne, Ala., took photos of themselves on their cell phones and traded the images back and forth.”
Privacy.org posted this story- “A Ohio State University student lost her cellphone, which was found by another student. The student who found the cellphone mailed nude photos found on the phone to the owner's contact list and posted them to Facebook. Campus police traced the computer IP address back to the student suspected of posting the photos online.”
The reason why we need to put this in perspective, these hormonal acts of misjudgments, is because of the impact it will have on catching the real pornographers.
The images are complicating the work of investigators whose job is to find
exploited children. Authorities trying to identify youngsters in naked photos
are increasingly discovering that the teens themselves took the shots, said John
Shehan, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
This not just happening to high schoolers, nude photographs of a Toronto Maple Leaf forward Jiri Tlusty, 19, were posted all over the Internet. These cell phone photos were sent to a woman he met, who then posted them on the internet. John Ferguson, the general manager of the team, said, “Tlusty's actions were a "naive mistake as a teenager,"
It’s time for lawmakers to act swiftly, but wisely, before a child’s life is damaged forever and parents are vilified in their neighborhoods.
I agree. There's got to be a better way of dealing with this. The only winners in this scenario are the real child predators.
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