A young girl voluntarily takes titillating pictures of herself and sends it to a couple of guys:
If there’s culpability on Alex’s part, Splain says, it’s that he did what might be expected of a kid his age: He looked at the photos and asked for more. “The thing to bear in mind,” Splain adds, “is she sent him these pictures unsolicited. He’s [got] hormones galore—hey, yeah, holy cow! It’s Christmas morning!”
(Contacted for this article, Laurie’s father would only say on the record, “This country has laws in place to protect children. Those laws need to be enforced, and parents need to pursue those laws to the fullest extent to protect their children.”)
Because the technology that allows sexting is new, age-appropriate punishments have yet to be hammered out. Instead, laws designed to thwart middle-aged people who prey on children are being applied to the children themselves.
A comment on the article:
The justification for banning possession of child pornography was that you could draw a straight line from the images to an act of exploitation. The reason for the laws is not primarily to prevent the spread of the images; it’s to prevent the exploitation of a child that lead to their production. When you have teenagers voluntarily snapping pictures of themselves, there is no act of exploitation. Sure, it’s not something that should be encouraged, but it’s not something that should destroy your life, either.
