The New Pornographers
salon.com
salon.com
I can't believe that children are being put on trial for possession of pictures of themselves. It's the thought process that bothers me. Child porn is illegal because it encourages abuse of children, who cannot legally consent to sexual activity. Fine. But the problem is, it's hard to not consent to something you do to yourself. So I don't really see a crime here. The kid isn't a victim. Society isn't a victim. Sure, there may be consequences for taking naked pictures of yourself, but no worse than any other dumb things you can do.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the solution to this is. Maybe change the age of consent to something lower than 18, so that these kids can consent to pictures, and everyone is happy. (But of course, then porn sites featuring 14 year olds will be mainstream, and I don't think society is ready for that.)
I think that's a pretty good way of doing it: Let the kids play, as long as they don't do so with adults.
As a strange aside: In Mexico the legal age of consent is 12!! Source: http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm
I don't think 12 is an unreasonable number. I had a pretty good understanding of sex at 12... so it would be dumb to put me in jail for having sex at that age.
OTOH, I could see how pressuring a 12 year old to consent (and not tell anyone about it) could be pretty easy... and that's not good. (FWIW, people over 18 are also pressured into sex they don't really want, so I am not sure how to deal with this.)
In the UK there's a close-in-age exception for anyone under 16 (the legal age is 16). Canada just last year changed their age of consent to match, moving the AoC up to 16 from 14.
This is just a simple equation I use in my head to figure out if a relationship is creepy-weird when dating and it's quite simple. Here's my example, (21 - 13) / 2 = 4, so in this instance a 21 year old can date a 17 year old or a 25 year old without the age difference being weird. It seems to hold up for most 'accepted' relationships, including the like 80 year olds married to the 50 year olds, but not the 80 year olds married to the 20 year olds that people find disgusting.
Personally I'd say it's okay for 12-13 year olds to have sex with 12-13 year olds because as a culture we seem to be subconsciously pushing for it. 14 and over I'd say the close-in-age exceptions apply well, a 14 year old can have sex with someone within 5 years of their own age without it being a crime and over 16 you have the right to choose who and how you do it, although I wouldn't disagree with a law making a bigger close-in-age for 16-18 of like 10-15 years. It's socially accepted that a couple are usually within a 10-15 year age difference of each other.
your age > (her age / 2) + 7
So:
if you're 16 she should be at least 14
if you're 20 she should be at least 17
if you're 30 she should be at least 22
if you're 50 she should be at least 32
These all seem to fit nicely into the acceptable ranges. Doesn't work too well if you're under 14 though :-)
younger_person >= (older_person / 2) + 7
For example if the older person was 12, then the younger person would have to be at least 13, which is impossible.
I have a 28-year old friend who has an 18-year old girl, there's no problem there, so this rule doesn't always apply.
The problem, as my parents explained to me when I was younger, isn't that you're not physically ready, because after adolescence starts you're physically primed for sex. The problem is that before you've matured to a certain degree, you're not mentally ready to handle hormones, and while I think that's completely fine between, say, two high school kids who lust after one another, once you're in your 20s and you realize that these younger children are easily taken advantage of, then your using that is despicable.
While I think better sex ed would help a lot, I agree with the current age of consent in the U.S. Eighteen means you're old enough not to be taken in by somebody as easily. The rules about child porn need to be changed, because becoming a sex offender over "sexting" is stupid, but the rules about having sex make logical sense to me.
The age of consent in the UK for sex is 16, but for porn it's 18. This means you can legally have sex with, but not photograph, your partner. The LibDem's in the UK are trying to fight this, saying either bring the legal age up or the consent age down, specifically to protect against the hypocrisy as they foresaw this coming.
IIRC there was a case in the UK where a 15 year old was charged with producing child pornography after taking a surprise photo of his friends in bed together (guy was 17 girl was 16) and posting it on myspace or something. I believe it got dismissed by the judge on preliminaries, as the defense lawyer pointed out that they were having consensual sex and that it's not a crime to watch but a photograph is a crime.
The stupidity is akin to charging someone for making a snuff movie and not for first degree murder.
http://www.slate.com/id/2211169/
For whatever it's worth, Slate has totally and thoroughly trounced Salon.
For what it's worth, Salon's literature articles are still among the best out there. Slate can't touch that division of Salon.
"... the trio text-messaged the photos to some friends ... in addition to the girls' being indicted as kiddie pornographers, three boys who received the pictures were slammed with charges of child porn possession."
Someone texted them some data, and they're charged? It's not like they requested it. Expecting 15 year old (horny) guys to delete nudies their female classmates sent them is... unrealistic.
Agreed. The law is being very stupid here.
I didn't see much in the way of details about the trial. Apparently one kid didn't take the plea bargain? Does anyone else know of any more information about this?
(As an aside, I wish there was a social news site where I could indicate ongoing interest in a topic, and see new articles whenever they are written. It is very hard to follow news stories, since followups are sporadic and spread around the Internet.)
But jailing kids obviously isn't protecting them. The tug of war is not between protecting and empowering the kids. It's between punishing the kids, or not.
I agree with the tone.
The nagging part is the fact that "kids being kids" never included making media of their naked selves doing sexual stuff before. Media which can easily be distributed to millions, including some very sick people. Media which can last a lifetime (or longer)
Sure, we smoked pot when we were kids, and we read Playboys too. But nobody has videos of us doing all of that on YouTube. The electronic records problem here is extremely disturbing.
With the current FB conflict, I'm sure that most adults don't realize what kind of electronic record they're leaving all over the place, much less their kids. As a society, we've generally tried to protect kids from doing things that could have lifelong consequences. Do we want to give that up?
The underlying philosophy is a tricky-wicket. We don't necessarily allow kids to do stuff simply because "kids will be kids", i.e., it's natural for them to do it. So while I'm all with the emotion of the article, the underlying issues are a lot trickier than I think the author lets on. You can't just skim over the fact that 30 years from now when you're applying to be Supreme Court Justice that videos of your 14-year-old self doing stupid people sex tricks could be out there circulating. Fair or not, people aren't going to understand.
That "very sick people" bit gives away your true motivation for these opinions, though.
I don't buy it. Even if people intellectually realize that a stupid sexy video made when you are 18 is no big deal, it will still unavoidably color people's opinion of you, and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it except make sure they can't get that video in the first place.
So you're attacking my motivation instead of my comment?
Nice.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that there are not very sick people in the world? In addition, you're also saying that people act the same way towards public figures as they would to a close friend?
Got any examples of this benevolent social behavior? Because I'm thinking we went about 80 years after the prohibition of pot before we allowed a president who admitted using it. It was accepted practice to deny it, because guess what? People are hypocrites about the way they treat public figures. They always have been that way. Sounds like this is coming as a news flash for you.
I'm still trying to figure out what my true motivation is. Somehow I managed to give it away and I don't seem to remember having one (besides curiosity with the topic)
Fail. Flagged for removal.