> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?
In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.
In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.
Laws are far from being logical or always making sense.
Find enough innocent to change the jurisprudence, but I d bet that you can find so many more quilty parties that the law had to go one way.
Now I have a daughter and I was 16 before mobile phone existed. I m thinking what I would do if I see her sexting: probably nothing after 16 and a soft warning between 14 and 16 and a very strict one before, just because consent can only exist with maturity. Now if the guy is 30 and she s 16, I d tell her she s being an idiot sending him anything: it's not like he cares about her as a person, most likely and she s going to suffer under my responsibility or at best put him in danger. But, 16, starts to be her choice to listen or not and difficult for me to enforce anything.
Glad she s still 3 :D
I actually think that there were other EU countries that had even lower age limits than Germany.
Someone under 18 could have sex with someone over 14 (but also still under 18).
As soon as one of them is older than 18 it becomes child molesting, and the grown up is in serous trouble.
The law makes not sense of course. It was a more or less recent change. The old regulation may seem bizarre given that example of the parent, but it was more close to reality in most cases.
Before that a 18 year old was not in trouble when sleeping in consent with a slightly younger friend (which is a common situation in reality). Now you would automatically get prosecuted as child molester if authorities would find out; no matter a relationship and consent!
That's the outcome of the CP witch-hunt in Germany… Quite normal things are now outlawed and can ruin lives of young lovers quite substantially.
It's somewhat related to determining whether the child was capable of "sexual self-determination". But typically the abuser will only get punished if both the child and its parents file a legal complaint(at least that's what the law says).
I'm going to leave my opinions on this at the front door, but given how easily this law can be abused it's almost comical how often the german government has used the excuse of "think of the children" when they passed mass surveillance laws.
By the way as others have pointed out while the 14 and 17 year old can have sex legally, sending any kind of nudes actually triggers another law that may lead to imprisonment[1]. Making any kind of "pornographical" material available to children under 18 is a felony. Who would have known that the porn my classmate shared in highschool on VCR, if shared on an iPhone nowadays could have led to him being sent to the juvenile detention center.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzalter#Schutzalter_14_Jah...
The other child posts are correct, I'm wrong.
My confusion comes mostly form a not realized, but once planed change in this laws.
In the end the current legislation seems quite sane.
But this can't be said about the laws governing messaging intimate content between teens. That's the other source of my confusion.
Anyway, thanks to bmn__ and rjzzleep for pointing out my error!
Can you look first into Wikipedia, online law publication to verify before spreading misinformation?
You are morally obligated to edit your post and correct it with the true facts.