True or false: Your teen could be convicted of a felony and be labeled as a sex offender — for life — if he or she has sexted photos of classmates? The answer is “True” if your kid lives in one of the many states, like Colorado, that doesn’t have laws specifically addressing teens who sext.
Why bring up the Rocky Mountain state? Earlier this week, it was revealed that an unspecified number of Cañon City High School students had been suspended for using their smartphones to share explicit photos of their fellow students — apparently all consenting, but all under age 18. Full Article
Is it really a problem or are the laws being counterproductive to the yearning for exploration of oneself and others beginning around that developmental stage in life? Sure there will be some who go too far, but I doubt the sexting is the real problem.
All the sexting participants that are under 18 just give them a verbal warning, keep it on the down low, send them home to their parents so they can be grounded. Silly teens. Parents and their teens can get on with their lives. Production, possession, and distribution…no harm, no foul.
Meanwhile…
Investigators: make not of the hash values of each and every one of those files and add them to your CP file database. This will come in handy during your monitoring of P2P networks. Now you sit back and wait
Watch a few hundred people (many of them likely porn addicts) download one or more of these files (renamed or not, opened or not, intentional or not), and now you can arrest hundreds of “child predators”. If they are 18 or older…throw the book at them.
Would this be fair? How could you make it fair? Can the punishment be made fair? Punishment based on the age? 17 year old could get a slap on the wrist, 18 year old goes to jail for 6 months, a 25 year old goes to jail for 3 years, and a 50 year old goes to federal prison?
As a parent I understand the cry from other parents for leniency when it happens to their kids. Would those same parents be asking for leniency if a 40-year old neighbor of theirs was arrested for having one of those same pics or videos that their son or daughter had willingly produced a year earlier? Probably not.
Come on…this is nothing but a high-tech version of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” that has been done since the beginning of time and is perfectly NORMAL.
Again, the mere mention of the work S-E-X and Americans freaking lose their minds!
Isn’t the whole thing rather silly – YES IT IS