You make some very good points.

I definitely agree that it is a horrible idea to “round up dozens of students and plaster them all with sex offender status and heavy jail time”.

What we have at present is a “case by case” scenario – where local officials are prosecuting or not, depending on a number of factors. Prosecution invariably leads to some serious consequences, whether jail time or a ruined reputation.

The point I want to emphasize in my post is that we all need to be aware that “sexting” exists, is growing, and needs to be dealt with in some manner other than charging a youngster with a felony child pornography charge.

Making “sexters” registered sex offenders for 20 years doesn’t seem to me to be an acceptable solution either.

Thanks for your input.

Brennan

The justification for not protecting child pornography under the First Amendment is that it is necessary to take prurient advantage of a child to make the picture. Hand drawn or computer generated child porn is not illegal (unless they use a live child for an artist’s subject I suppose) – one thinks movie scenes in “The Glitter Dome.”

A sexting teen who transmits her own is not being taken advantage of by an adult or anyone else. If she sends nude pictures to an 80 year old her part in the transaction might very well be protected under the First Amendment – once the first principles of the scenario are considered. Ditto for her side of sexting to a friend.

There is an outside chance a child possessing such the “sext” should be considered to be taking prurient advantage of a minor under the First Amendment (depending on which generation of judges gets hold of it maybe) – but does it make sense to make a teen boyfriend — who may even have made legal sexual contact with the girl — the equivalent of an adult who possesses child pornography?

The free speech crossover seems to be when boys distribute nude pictures of girls among themselves without the girls permission – certainly not free speech. But to begin with no child was hurt making the image. The kind of personal damage to a child making pornographic images may be much more devastating than that of having the image passed around (again, once thinks of “The Glitter Dome”) – at least most of the time.

Wouldn’t we feel more comfortable with law that punishes such a gross invasion of privacy in a case for case damage way – not rounding up dozens of students and plastering them all with sex offender status and heavy jail time – but treating the offense as the privacy offense it really is?