turbolapp said:
I don't know about charging them with child pornography but they need to be charged with something. Once kids understand the severity of the situation maybe they'll actually stop and think before they do something that stupid.
Ha, come on, like teenagers are now being briefed on recent court decisions? When I was a teenager I had no idea of much of any of the legal decisions that were being made, and I'll bet that 95% of kids under 18 don't even know that the child pornography laws are being interpreted this way.
My stance is, let them send naked pictures of themselves to each other. I really don't think there's anything wrong with it. They're humans with mammal behaviors, so within certain limits (i.e. getting knocked up), let them do what comes naturally.
If an adult is involved then of course that changes things, but two kids, lets say 13 and 14, sexting each other? I say let them be. Who cares if their parents are trying to "slow things down," because of some notion they have about what is right and proper.
The kids are obviously going to be embarassed about it, but so would most Americans if someone walked in on you naked. But this kind of sexual "shaming" is at best not helpful, and at worse could instill the type of fundamentalist values about sex (i.e. it's bad, it's shameful, it's dirty) that this logic is based on. It's acting like sexuality is something to be ashamed of, but haven't we gotten past that already?
Truthfully, we can have "SEX" on every issue of Cosmo magazine in big letters, but when it comes to kids, we have these demure notions of what they are actually like. I'm sure we can configure the phones so it is secure, but no one wants to talk about that. The actual *idea* that their kid could be interested in sex and actually doing something about it offends them.
Absolutely bullshit litigation but that just proves how out of touch the legal system can get ... to charge two kids for sending pictures of themselves to each other is just crazy. Next, lets give them whistles so they can alert us if they see any crimes happening.
Keep the litigators out of it. If the parents want to do something, fine, but making it a crime? A joke.
Even if you made it just a "little crime" you are essentially giving the justice system the right to decide morally what is best in this situation, and how to "re-educate" the kids.
turbolapp said:
Something like this can have devastating consequences for the child. (There have been more than a few cases of suicide because of this alone.) and I don't care if it's severe or not I do not want naked pictures of my child on the internet. Period.
I'll reply to this since I know the first quote isn't entirely in context given your later replies... (So, I'm not really replying entirely to you turbolapp, just happened to illustrate what I meant)
The thing is, I don't think a deterrent is going to do any good. I really don't. You would have to make the phones unable to send pictures. The kids would find a way around it. The parents would go crazy again.
The only way in the first place is to make it undesirable for them to do it. But you know what? No matter how many times a celebrity's sex tape gets leaked, I still have been able to convince all but one of my girlfriends to make sex tapes. They just have more resistance to it.
But if you want to deter it, you show a commercial aimed at the target audience, with a short movie type of thing where first a girl sends some pics of herself to her boyfriend, he's impressed but then the other girl steals her phone, it gets distributed.... and then have some caption fly up on the screen that urges them to not do it.
At least that way they are making the decisions for themselves, which I think is the only way you are going to get something like this to stick.
