<story><title>Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/14/its-okay-to-prosecute-minors-for-child-porn-for-distributing-sexual-pictures-of-themselves/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>This is hard to do in practice. I&amp;#x27;ve heard someone vehemently defend a relationship they had at 14 with an older fellow. They categorized it as a positive experience that helped them discover themselves. It may have even been 13; I forget.&lt;p&gt;Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.</text></item><item><author>rothbardrand</author><text>No victim means no crime.  (Morally, I&amp;#x27;m using the word &amp;quot;crime&amp;quot; here to refer to a moral crime.)  But it also means that the prosecution of such non-crimes is itself a crime, meaning the &amp;quot;guilty&amp;quot; party here is the victim and everyone involved in their prosecution, up to and including the supreme court, is criminal.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>Because of the potential for selective or punitive prosecution I&amp;#x27;m in favour of legalising teen sexting. Obviously the law needs to be carefully drafted to avoid allowing child exploitation, but it should absolutely not be possible to prosecute normal sexually-active teens under child pornography statutes. “Trust us, we&amp;#x27;d never use it against the people it&amp;#x27;s supposed to protect” isn&amp;#x27;t enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Iv</author><text>The idea that informed consent is a characteristic that magically appears in full at 18 or 20 is ridiculous. Obviously some people acquire it earlier. Some much later.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.</text></comment>
<story><title>Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/14/its-okay-to-prosecute-minors-for-child-porn-for-distributing-sexual-pictures-of-themselves/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>This is hard to do in practice. I&amp;#x27;ve heard someone vehemently defend a relationship they had at 14 with an older fellow. They categorized it as a positive experience that helped them discover themselves. It may have even been 13; I forget.&lt;p&gt;Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.</text></item><item><author>rothbardrand</author><text>No victim means no crime.  (Morally, I&amp;#x27;m using the word &amp;quot;crime&amp;quot; here to refer to a moral crime.)  But it also means that the prosecution of such non-crimes is itself a crime, meaning the &amp;quot;guilty&amp;quot; party here is the victim and everyone involved in their prosecution, up to and including the supreme court, is criminal.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>Because of the potential for selective or punitive prosecution I&amp;#x27;m in favour of legalising teen sexting. Obviously the law needs to be carefully drafted to avoid allowing child exploitation, but it should absolutely not be possible to prosecute normal sexually-active teens under child pornography statutes. “Trust us, we&amp;#x27;d never use it against the people it&amp;#x27;s supposed to protect” isn&amp;#x27;t enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zak</author><text>Those laws generally punish the older person, not the younger person they&amp;#x27;re supposedly there to protect. Prosecuting underage sexting as child pornography under laws supposedly meant to protect children from exploitation further harms the supposed victim.&lt;p&gt;Laws where the victim &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn&amp;#x27;t always want the offender punished is not.</text></comment>