Especially because it's been so horribly abused in the past. Take this case in Manassas, Virginia. 17 year old texts a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. The police find out, charge the 17 year old with distributing child pornography, and take pictures of his penis saying they need it for evidence[1]. They then get a warrant from the courts demanding that the 17 year old send them a picture of his erect penis[2]. And if he didn't comply:
> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.
Eventually they backed off when it received widespread attention in the press. Later it turned out that the detective in charge of the case was a pedophile[3]:
> A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.
When I read stories like this, I'm at a loss for words. No one in the justice system realized how terrible this is? Not only does this show the problem with giving law enforcement this kind of power, but I think it shows that we really need some sort of public advocacy department to monitor and go after this sort of abuse (someone to watch the watchmen).
The kid in the case got probation, by the way.
[1] http://time.com/2971033/virginia-police-search-warrant-photo... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/manassas-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-ends-child-marriage-ra...
It's akin to something that bothers me personally; when people refer to "America" when they mean "White America." Yes, the recent rise of the alt-right has put on display an undercurrent of discontent in America, but when you say that, you're not being specific in a way that is distorting.
In christianity - god is the father of all men - the pastor is refered to as "father" - the father is refered to as father
All of them are there to protect and all of them must be obeyed.
And it feels to me that the police are also a kind of father. They are also there to protect and they too must be obeyed.
I do see a technocracy as being a patriarchy as well. After all it's not just Xi, but Xi Dada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRo9AMT8FI
And he too is there to protect and he too must be obeyed.
Edit: And this is what I hate about HN. I spent time thinking about and writing this post. And the more time you spend writing a comment on HN, the fewer people will read it.
Just think how oppressive the matriarchy of the beehive must be to those poor little princesses killed in their crib by the ascendant queen mother, not to mention armies of 'drones' working their ass off for the glory of their queen. Naturaly, and it is in fact true, those little princesses had to go bye bye for the greater good of the hive.
(& do we really want to discuss the "pedophile" matriarchs of the Bonobos .. :)
p.s. I simply can not relate to your notion of the police as father figures.
The connection here is that abusers make use of power structures to protect themselves from the consequences of abuse. This will happen with any sort of power structure; abusers are wily. But it's especially problematic with a power structure built on gender, because our sexual roles are also strongly gendered. That leads to behavior patterns like "old boys' club" and "boys will be boys", where men are more likely to trust other men, and to act in ways that support the people most like them.
So if we were coming out of a non-patriarchal past, we would still have abusers exploiting whatever the power structure was, but the patterns would be different.
Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.
Problem is, judges and police have yet to design an objective maturity test, so instead they use an age threshold, easy to test, objective but arbitrary.
Like the map is not the territory, the law is not a perfect match to our moral landscape. It works with constraints of fairness, neutrality and enforceability.
It is clear that there are couples for which some illegal relationships are actually harmless or even positive and done with mutual consent. It is also clear that some relationships are abusive and extremely dangerous.
The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority.
If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
You can't just assume teenagers will wait because they're told to. I don't think that's even remotely realistic. The law (any law) has to be written in a way that protects those who break it with no ill intent. There's nothing "easy" about child sex laws.
To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
Deciding that someone is both a rape victim and a rapist at the same time, for the same act, isn't an unfortunate sacrifice around the edge cases of heuristic reasoning. It's categorically insane.
States have typically balanced this against the desire to prohibit "relationships" with vast power differentials (i.e. between a child and a middle-aged adult) by carving out exceptions to statutory rape for consenting couples who are close in age. Others have just relied on police and prosecutors not to bring cases against teenage couples, and been mostly successful outside of a some newsworthy examples met with public outcry.
Where I'm from the age of consent is 15, but the law also explicitly states that there is no crime if the age difference is small. So in your example, if the two kids are fine with it, nothing would happen, not even if any of their parents were screaming bloody murder.
Were not exactly lacking blueprints of sane legislation in this area, or lacking datapoints on how different ages of consent affect different societies.
Why some places persist in prosecuting kids who have consensual sex with each other is just baffling to me.
There are traditionally two ways to do that and still make sure people who go to prison actually deserve it. The first is to draw the line high and rely on prosecutors to sensibly exercise their discretion, the second is to draw the line low enough that you don't find innocent people on the wrong side of it.
But prosecutors have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to exercise sensible discretion, leaving the second option as the only viable alternative.
In my country age of consent is 14. There is no pandora's box, there is no widespread abuse of teen girls and children being raped. Only ones who routinely have sex and get pregnant at that age are gypsy girls and that's because their "traditions" require them to marry young.
No, no, no. That's not how age of consent laws work, not even in parts of the US.
The main purpose of the age of consent is to define the difference between rape and child molestation. Both are illegal acts involving non-consensual sex, but the latter has a much stronger punishment, because society wants a larger deterrent for it. We think it's the worse crime.
The secondary effect is that it's easier for the person below the age of consent to be believed by the courts if that person claims the sex was non-consensual. Many regular rape cases unfortunately end in a he said/she said without much technical evidence, in which case there's no conviction. If an underage person is involved, society spends more resources on figuring out if a crime actually happened. This is good, because it adds to the deterrent.
In case of consensual sex between two people where both are below the age of consent or on different sides of it, it's obvious to me that society shouldn't pursue a criminal conviction. In the US, this is usually codified into age of consent laws as a "Romeo & Juliet clause", and other places usually have something similar.
There are of course parts of the US and the world where age of consent is high and there are no exemptions, because those places are neurotic about sex and want to impose some sort of morality on their teenagers. That's unfortunate, and I hope people oppose those laws.
> If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
What box? It's under 18 for large parts of the US. It's 14/15 in many places in Europe, and it has been that way for decades. There's plenty of facts if you want to measure the effects of different ages of consent.
Also, I believe that the average age of sexual debut is 17 in many parts of the US. To criminalize over half the teenage population is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. The laws of a society should reflect the morality of its citizens.
I see everyone's forgotten Jerry Lee Lewis and his (AFAIK perfectly legal at the time in that state) 13 year old wife. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-B...
Now, we are rightly wiser in the 21st century and have almost entirely done away with child marriage. But I would say one key principle is believe the victim. Which cuts both ways. It makes no sense to pursue a life-ruining prosecution of a minor if the alleged victim claims (un-coerced) not to be a victim. There are plenty of nastier cases out there to spend scarce effort on.
Not to give people a blank cheque if they happen to be under 18, either: the treatment of unsolicited underage genital pics should be a lot more serious.
Conversely the long-unravelling scandal of UK entertainers abusing children comes from not believing the victims at the time, or constructing an environment in which they were met with extreme hostility for coming forward. This led to a "missing stair" environment, where lots of people suspected that Jimmy Savile was an abuser but he was able to get unsupervised access to children to abuse.
Laws where the victim is the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn't always want the offender punished is not.
You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
No adult and no coercion — no case.
You cannot victimize yourself by sharing pics of your own self.
This isn't true in the least. Jaywalking and speeding can be done in a world with "population: 1", yet caught on camera would constitute a crime.
You're misusing the word crime here, despite me being very explicit about what I'm talking about.
The law does not determine crime-- morality determines that the law is criminal itself, as I've shown.
What I am in favor of is a different set of rules for minors self distributing. Possibly deferred adjudication and counseling first offense, ramping up from there. It is behavior that could cause trouble for the kid and possibly for others, can't just say "have at it!". But neither should it make one a registered sex offender with all that baggage.
The correct answer to this is always "Since legislation is freeform and you're writing it now anyway, maybe you should write that it should never be used that way into the legislation".
Your opponents in kiddie porn are two different sets of people: 1) the egregiously stupid, generally teenagers, who may or may not be malicious about it and 2) the horrifically competent and malicious who WILL find a way to exploit any loophole.
Group 2 is what makes child pornography laws so problematic. Anything you do to strengthen your ability to get Group 2 generally increases the collateral damage in Group 1.
This is exactly what "prosecutorial discretion" is supposed to be used for. Unfortunately, it seems that "prosecutorial discretion" is now mostly "scoring poltical points for election."
I'm always on the side of "convicting innocents is wrong" because I consider it a pure civil liberty issue subject to abuse.
However, you are going to have to defend against people doing a "damage amount" calculation. The malicious individuals are so vile and cause so much damage and exploitation while teenage sexting cases are generally sufficiently rare that the calculus probably doesn't come up in your favor.
In addition, I have see firsthand from a bystander position that prosecutors are generally pretty good about teen sexting. I watched as a prosecutor patiently explained to an idiot mother that if he managed to convict the boy in the sexting case, he was also paving the way to convict her daughter of exactly the same thing. So, she could go along, and both of the involved parties would get some relatively innocuous conviction that would go away for both when they became 18, or she could make a big fuss and both of them would be sex offender registrees (the DA was clearly going to uncover evidence of statutory rape along the way--the boy and girl were obviously having sex with each other).
The DA really didn't want the case to go very far. Of course, the DA involved didn't have to bow to religious nutcases to get elected.
The relatives of the mother finally browbeat her into submission, but it was unclear which way it was going to go for quite a while and it could have gone very badly for all parties involved.
Generally something stupid has to happen--posted to Facebook, being shared around at school, comes up in a divorce proceeding, found on phone while being searched, etc.--before a DA is going to bother getting involved.
What's next, outlawing anatomy textbooks? Prostituting people for baby photo's of their kids? That may sound silly, but the edge cases on this get complex. What happens if a kid texts a picture of a rash on their privates to their doctor?
PS: Remember with the current state of AI we could flag every single sexting photo ever posted. So, what your going have this minor conviction of a large percentage of teenagers...
I think that you mean "prosecuting" ;)
And yes, that's already common. Or at least, it was, when people still used film cameras.
If you get rid of the sex offender registry then the problems around the child pornography laws become far less acute.