Laws, of course, lag behind developments in technology. One
area where this is most apparent is when minors share naked selfies. Most high-schoolers
and even middle-schoolers carry their cameras everywhere. Put that fact
together with their emotional immaturity, impulsiveness (they won’t have decent
frontal lobes until much later), and desire to please their peers, and you have
an epidemic of naked pictures of children and teens being passed around. Our
pornography laws, which are meant to protect children from adults, do not come
close to addressing this situation, which requires children to be protected
from other children.
Naked selfies is the subject of a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. In the article, Rosin points out a practice she says is common: boys soliciting naked pictures from girls, then pooling the pictures and posting them on a Facebook or Instagram page that only the boys have access to. I have asked some high-schoolers I know, and it turns out this is going on in my town, too, and in other towns nearby. The girls take and send the pictures for a variety of reasons: because they want to, because they feel pressured to and give in, or because they erroneously believe the boys asking for the pictures care about them and are their boyfriends. When this practice was discovered in Louisa County, Virginia, law enforcement struggled with how to proceed. Should they charge everyone who had naked pictures on their phones with felonies, as the law allows? This would have meant bringing felony charges against hundreds of children. And as Rosin observed, some of the girls did not think it was such a big deal for their boyfriends and some of his friends see the pictures, but they were traumatized to think of parents, teachers, prosecutors, or judges viewing the pictures. The investigation did more damage than the event.
One solution proposed in the article is to ignore the
situation where a minor consents to send a picture to another minor and to
concentrate on the case where a picture is shared with another person, without
the subject’s permission, or is posted online. There could be different
penalties depending on whether the picture is shared with one other person, shared
with a few people, or posted online. The merit of focusing the issue on the
subject’s consent is that minors are not unduly punished for behaving as they
are wont to do (impulsively, with no thought of the consequences). But what
about the situation in which a teenage girl consents to have her naked picture
posted online? Should a minor be able to consent in this situation? Currently,
minors are not allowed to drink, smoke, consent to medical treatment, or to
enter into contracts as they are considered incapable of handling the same
rights as mature adults. Currently no comfortable solution exists, but being
limited to child pornography laws has become untenable.