The Monster Under the Bed Is… Your Teenager?
November 12, 2008
From Wired: A 15-year-old Ohio girl was arrested earlier this month for sending nude photos of herself to other minors and was facing felony criminal charges for illegally using a minor in nudity-oriented material and for possession of criminal tools. If convicted, the teen could have been forced to register as a sexual offender annually for ten years.
This week the girl, a student at Licking Valley High School in Newark, Ohio, reached an undisclosed agreement with prosecutors to resolve the case. Details were not released, but the teen won’t have to register as a sex offender.
It’s a GoodThing™ common sense prevailed in this case, as the girl’s “self-portraits” weren’t taken by an adult with the intent of exploiting her, rather they were part of a [modern] teen-dating ritual.
In other [ancient] news from Cnet’s Police Blotter: Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you’ll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere. There’s a problem with that: Technically, those images constitute child pornography.
The teenage couple were convicted on charges of disseminating child pornography, on the outside chance that neither [had] the “foresight or maturity” to make a reasonable estimation of the risks… [further, it was also] …said that transferring the images from a digital camera to a PC created innumerable problems: “The two computers (can) be hacked”.
Boy, that’s a stretch: “The two computers (can) be hacked”. As long as the two minors weren’t being exploited by adults, then what happens in their video should be private.
