This is about a 17 year old sending a picture to an adult non-consensually - the court declined to rule on whether "two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consensually" would be the same.
"Pretending to be a minor" would have 1st amendment protections as per previous cases.
> This is about a 17 year old sending a picture to an adult non-consensually - the court declined to rule on whether "two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consensually" would be the same.
But, from the OP:
>> The case itself involved a 17-year-old sending “an unsolicited picture of his erect penis” to an apparently unwilling recipient, but the logic of the court’s reasoning applies even when the recipient is pleased to receive the photo. The court does say that, “because [Gray] was not a minor sending sexually explicit images to another consenting minor, we decline to analyze such a situation,” but I think that — given the logic of the majority opinion — the analysis would have to end up the same way; nothing in the majority’s reasoning turns on the presence of an unwilling recipient.
Came into this thread kinda pissed, but after reading more about the case... it's wrong to send unsolicited nudes of yourself to someone no matter how old you are. The kid should definitely receive some kind of reprimanding. Jail? I don't think institutionalizing someone's mind over something like this is healthy... maybe just counseling?
And that being said, one must imagine how differently the case might have been handled had the genders of the involved persons been switched.
What they did was wrong, but it shouldn't be prosecuted under child porn laws. They should get whatever punishment they'd get if they did the same at 18, under whatever harassment laws apply.
I think on one hand you are correct, but if the court wants to claim that a child is not old enough to consensually produce pornographic imagery of themselves, they must also admit that a child who takes and sends the images to another has not fully developed their reasoning skills.
Same reason that minors usually get a break from the law when committing vandalism, assault, etc.
So they should not get the same exact punishment, which is why I suggested counseling because unnecessary institutionalization of children is a predatory method of creating repeat offenders.
Well what I mean is, I just wonder at the likelihood of the situation being reported in the first place, as well as whether the sentencing would be the same. This isn't any attempt at making a point but just general curiosity.
It's like that episode of Seinfeld where they learn a sex offender moved into the neighborhood and went to confront the person, then found out it was a woman and immediately (and somehow understandably) lost their vitriol.
>In Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned sexually explicit depictions of minors, as well as depictions that appeared to be minors. These included computer generated images and depictions of legal adults pretending to be minors. The Court recognized that the First Amendment “does not embrace certain categories of speech, including … pornography produced with real children.” However, the Court found the prohibition of images that appear to be, but are not actually, minors improper; any harm stemming from those false images “does not necessarily follow from the speech, but depends upon some unquantified potential for subsequent criminal acts."
It was stricken down at the federal level. I believe that laws still exist against it at the state level. Their validity, to my knowledge, has not been questioned as of yet.
However there are such laws which remain, and in fact have been recently introduced, in Canada, England & Wales, Northern Ireland, Rep. of Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and various European countries.
What's perhaps even more concerning is that even stories are illegal in Canada. The mere possession of the material, i.e a drawing that you made yourself is illegal in England. Publishing a story or even sexual roleplaying with another adult over the Internet might find you sentenced under the Obscene Publications Act.
It's hideous in my view and such laws deserve to be stricken down with ferocity.
As for drawings, the CAJA 2009 section 62 onwards deals with it.[0] As for publishing text online, there was a case of a man who wrote stories and was convicted I believe under the Obscene Publications Act, though the BBC article just says "six counts of indecent publications"[1]
>I mean, you were wrong then, and you're wrong now, and if you read the law you'd see that.
Wrong about what, exactly? Images of children in sexual situations, or rather, as is described in the act, is illegal even to possess. Unless you know something about the act that I don't, or I've completely misread it - in which case I'm very open to corrections - I'm an optimist that the law isn't as hideous as I am reading it out to be.
>The OPA isn't new law, it's very old law.
I was talking about that section of CAJA, I know that OPA is old, but the "lolicon law" is only from 2009.
>he's an admitted paedophile
So what? That's completely irrelevant to any point that's being made. The fact is that he was imprisoned for spreading stories, fiction, and it was through UK law enacted by parliament that this happened.
>Justice Adams said the legislation's main purpose was to combat the direct sexual exploitation and abuse of children that occurs where offensive images of real children are made.
If he believes this, then why is he legislating that virtual pornography, in fact even hand drawn, of the Simpsons which bear such little resemblance to real people, never mind actually existing people, is against the law?
>But, he said, it was also calculated to deter production of other material, including cartoons, which "can fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children".
Was it really? And if so, does he, or the authors of the legislation, have evidence to back up this claim? This seems to be totally unsubstantiated nonsense this judge is saying. And what of fueled demand? The fact that a drawing or story might make someone else do an action is, in my view (and I hope others can agree) not reasonable grounds for illegalising possession or production of that drawing.
Unfortunately bone-headed cases and legislation like this have graced the rest of the Commonwealth and various European countries.
Fortunately I don't have to juggle anything here: Tarsnap's encryption makes it impossible for me to detect, never mind prevent people from storing "illegal bits".
Do you fear a world where multiple political entities (Obama, FBI, Singapore, Pentagon) have publicly requested laws that magically require you to somehow decrypt your users' data, else you go to prison for contempt?
It reminds me of the situation right now with the guy in Philadelphia who is in prison for contempt for not offering decryption password to the judge.
Not particularly. Judges are good at seeing through calls for magic; the situation in Philadelphia is a bit different because the judge doesn't believe that the password had in fact been forgotten.
What is strange is how today's puritanism is coming from the left rather than the right.
Growing up as kid, I remember christians and conservatives attacking "Married with Children", "Simpsons", "Beavis and Butthead", "Southpark", etc. Even as an elementary kid, I remember associating christians/conservatives with censorship and for most of my life identified myself as a liberal.
The past few years, I've given up on liberals too as they are now pushing their form of censorship under the aegis of "social justice".
> Congrats, two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consentually = child porn.
It's even worse that isn't it? If a 17 year old takes a picture of herself on a smartphone and sends it to herself on her other accounts, then she's guilty of distributing child porn. Technically, isn't she guilty of distributing child porn of herself to herself?
Re: your last point, I hope the God I don't believe in helps us...
At this point, if they spend time going after people for that type of technicality, then it's only a matter of time before they get all of us in prison for something.
70m people in the USA have a criminal record of some kind.
The more victimless crimes we have, the more power we will lose.
It's because the leftism in the US comes from the puritanism, not the other way around. Most of the social justice ideas, some of the key tenets of the left ideology, have obvious parallels in Christianity. (And if you think that the animosity between many churches and most leftists refutes this, remember how different Christian confessions liked each other 100 years ago, let alone 400 years ago.)
Because of the potential for selective or punitive prosecution I'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'd never use it against the people it's supposed to protect” isn't enough.
So, child porn is legal as long as both parties are involved? That doesn't work either. All you will wind up doing is having people magically always have only two people involved. And "teen sexting" isn't even uniform: a 10-year-old sexting a 16-year-old is generally a problem while a 17-year-old sexting an 18-year-old likely isn't.
Your opponents in kiddie porn are two different sets of people: 1) the egregiously stupid, generally teenagers, who may or may not be malicious about it and 2) the horrifically competent and malicious who WILL find a way to exploit any loophole.
Group 2 is what makes child pornography laws so problematic. Anything you do to strengthen your ability to get Group 2 generally increases the collateral damage in Group 1.
This is exactly what "prosecutorial discretion" is supposed to be used for. Unfortunately, it seems that "prosecutorial discretion" is now mostly "scoring poltical points for election."
I'm always on the side of "convicting innocents is wrong" because I consider it a pure civil liberty issue subject to abuse.
However, you are going to have to defend against people doing a "damage amount" calculation. The malicious individuals are so vile and cause so much damage and exploitation while teenage sexting cases are generally sufficiently rare that the calculus probably doesn't come up in your favor.
In addition, I have see firsthand from a bystander position that prosecutors are generally pretty good about teen sexting. I watched as a prosecutor patiently explained to an idiot mother that if he managed to convict the boy in the sexting case, he was also paving the way to convict her daughter of exactly the same thing. So, she could go along, and both of the involved parties would get some relatively innocuous conviction that would go away for both when they became 18, or she could make a big fuss and both of them would be sex offender registrees (the DA was clearly going to uncover evidence of statutory rape along the way--the boy and girl were obviously having sex with each other).
The DA really didn't want the case to go very far. Of course, the DA involved didn't have to bow to religious nutcases to get elected.
The relatives of the mother finally browbeat her into submission, but it was unclear which way it was going to go for quite a while and it could have gone very badly for all parties involved.
While lots of teens are sending pictures, the number of cases that actually get involved in the legal system tends to be low.
Generally something stupid has to happen--posted to Facebook, being shared around at school, comes up in a divorce proceeding, found on phone while being searched, etc.--before a DA is going to bother getting involved.
Vastly more than 10x as many teens send sexting photos than their are child predators out there. So, your harming large numbers of children to do what? Kill free speech for the fun of it?
What's next, outlawing anatomy textbooks? Prostituting people for baby photo's of their kids? That may sound silly, but the edge cases on this get complex. What happens if a kid texts a picture of a rash on their privates to their doctor?
PS: Remember with the current state of AI we could flag every single sexting photo ever posted. So, what your going have this minor conviction of a large percentage of teenagers...
I wouldn't call anyone egregiously stupid for engaging in normal sexual activity. If the vast majority of teens doing so have gone unprosecuted, why should someone assume that something might happen to them for the same action? A risk/reward analysis will not make it seem like such a bad idea, so I can't see what part makes the teen particularly stupid here.
Religious-based prohibitionism of premarital sex is a real problem in America. It's one of the frontiers of the culture war. So, please, donate to your local Planned Parenthood.
No victim means no crime. (Morally, I'm using the word "crime" here to refer to a moral crime.) But it also means that the prosecution of such non-crimes is itself a crime, meaning the "guilty" party here is the victim and everyone involved in their prosecution, up to and including the supreme court, is criminal.
This is hard to do in practice. I'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.
Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
> 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.
You can't just assume teenagers will wait because they're told to. I don't think that's even remotely realistic. The law (any law) has to be written in a way that protects those who break it with no ill intent. There's nothing "easy" about child sex laws.
Pandora and her friends routinely open their boxes at around 15. Age of puberty has been decreasing rapidly since the advent of industrialization and the increase in nutrition and general health and hyper-abundance of synthetic estrogen in consumables, in western societies at least. In america it is between 9 and 13, for girls. A bit more for boys.
To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
It's fine to assume that people under 18 lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide whether or not to have sex. But then we must also assume that they lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide to commit rape.
Deciding that someone is both a rape victim and a rapist at the same time, for the same act, isn't an unfortunate sacrifice around the edge cases of heuristic reasoning. It's categorically insane.
States have typically balanced this against the desire to prohibit "relationships" with vast power differentials (i.e. between a child and a middle-aged adult) by carving out exceptions to statutory rape for consenting couples who are close in age. Others have just relied on police and prosecutors not to bring cases against teenage couples, and been mostly successful outside of a some newsworthy examples met with public outcry.
I couldn't agree more. I've long said that it's insane that the law can say that someone is not mature enough to consent to sex, but is mature enough to commit statutory rape. The idea that two teenagers of say 14 and 15 who consensually go with their natural urges can then be both put on a sex offenders register that will affect them negatively for the rest of their lives is absolutely insane and proof of a fundamentally broken system.
Where I'm from the age of consent is 15, but the law also explicitly states that there is no crime if the age difference is small. So in your example, if the two kids are fine with it, nothing would happen, not even if any of their parents were screaming bloody murder.
Were not exactly lacking blueprints of sane legislation in this area, or lacking datapoints on how different ages of consent affect different societies.
Why some places persist in prosecuting kids who have consensual sex with each other is just baffling to me.
As others have noted, the age of consent is far less than 18 in much of the world. Indeed, in parts of the US. Or at least, it was no more than a couple decades ago.
> 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.
There are traditionally two ways to do that and still make sure people who go to prison actually deserve it. The first is to draw the line high and rely on prosecutors to sensibly exercise their discretion, the second is to draw the line low enough that you don't find innocent people on the wrong side of it.
But prosecutors have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to exercise sensible discretion, leaving the second option as the only viable alternative.
> If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
In my country age of consent is 14. There is no pandora's box, there is no widespread abuse of teen girls and children being raped. Only ones who routinely have sex and get pregnant at that age are gypsy girls and that's because their "traditions" require them to marry young.
> 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.
No, no, no. That's not how age of consent laws work, not even in parts of the US.
The main purpose of the age of consent is to define the difference between rape and child molestation. Both are illegal acts involving non-consensual sex, but the latter has a much stronger punishment, because society wants a larger deterrent for it. We think it's the worse crime.
The secondary effect is that it's easier for the person below the age of consent to be believed by the courts if that person claims the sex was non-consensual. Many regular rape cases unfortunately end in a he said/she said without much technical evidence, in which case there's no conviction. If an underage person is involved, society spends more resources on figuring out if a crime actually happened. This is good, because it adds to the deterrent.
In case of consensual sex between two people where both are below the age of consent or on different sides of it, it's obvious to me that society shouldn't pursue a criminal conviction. In the US, this is usually codified into age of consent laws as a "Romeo & Juliet clause", and other places usually have something similar.
There are of course parts of the US and the world where age of consent is high and there are no exemptions, because those places are neurotic about sex and want to impose some sort of morality on their teenagers. That's unfortunate, and I hope people oppose those laws.
> If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
What box? It's under 18 for large parts of the US. It's 14/15 in many places in Europe, and it has been that way for decades. There's plenty of facts if you want to measure the effects of different ages of consent.
Also, I believe that the average age of sexual debut is 17 in many parts of the US. To criminalize over half the teenage population is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. The laws of a society should reflect the morality of its citizens.
Now, we are rightly wiser in the 21st century and have almost entirely done away with child marriage. But I would say one key principle is believe the victim. Which cuts both ways. It makes no sense to pursue a life-ruining prosecution of a minor if the alleged victim claims (un-coerced) not to be a victim. There are plenty of nastier cases out there to spend scarce effort on.
Not to give people a blank cheque if they happen to be under 18, either: the treatment of unsolicited underage genital pics should be a lot more serious.
Conversely the long-unravelling scandal of UK entertainers abusing children comes from not believing the victims at the time, or constructing an environment in which they were met with extreme hostility for coming forward. This led to a "missing stair" environment, where lots of people suspected that Jimmy Savile was an abuser but he was able to get unsupervised access to children to abuse.
Those laws generally punish the older person, not the younger person they'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.
Laws where the victim is the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn't always want the offender punished is not.
Your comment is on a completely different topic than mine. In child molestation there is a victim- the kid. I'm talking about situations where there is no victim.
You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
So you're saying that if an adult managed to coerce a child to take pictures of themselves, then send it, they are going to get a get out of jail free card?!
I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
Ya, there are definitely cases where there was no crime (in the moral, not technical sense) even when there is a significant age gap. However, the law has to do its best at splitting the difference, and capturing 'most' of the true crimes here. However, I don't think anyone seriously considers a 15 year old sexting another 15 year old to be engaging in child abuse. We all agree there is no crime there. There is no difference to split, it's just kids playing out their natural urges.
Except that I'm pointing out (and explicitly said) that the law here is creating a moral crime and thus is itself corrupt, so citing the nature of the law is merely whitewashing criminal behavior.
"Drunk driving" is also a horrible category of crime, popularized by odious moral crusaders in order to raise money from parents they terrorized. Its primary role is to act as another input for the "justice" system treadmill to which we chain the working poor.
I'm not in favor of that at all. Neither I am favor of throwing the adult book meant for serious predators at kids messing around (which happens now in other areas and it really shouldn't).
What I am in favor of is a different set of rules for minors self distributing. Possibly deferred adjudication and counseling first offense, ramping up from there. It is behavior that could cause trouble for the kid and possibly for others, can't just say "have at it!". But neither should it make one a registered sex offender with all that baggage.
> “Trust us, we'd never use it against the people it's supposed to protect” isn't enough.
Especially because it's been so horribly abused in the past. Take this case in Manassas, Virginia. 17 year old texts a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. The police find out, charge the 17 year old with distributing child pornography, and take pictures of his penis saying they need it for evidence[1]. They then get a warrant from the courts demanding that the 17 year old send them a picture of his erect penis[2]. And if he didn't comply:
> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.
Eventually they backed off when it received widespread attention in the press. Later it turned out that the detective in charge of the case was a pedophile[3]:
> A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.
When I read stories like this, I'm at a loss for words. No one in the justice system realized how terrible this is? Not only does this show the problem with giving law enforcement this kind of power, but I think it shows that we really need some sort of public advocacy department to monitor and go after this sort of abuse (someone to watch the watchmen).
This case is such atrocious abuse of power. The fallout from this case did not affect nearly enough people. Think of all the enablers of this behavior at the various stages. The patriarchy has much of America in their clutch at various levels of so-called "public" service. Why was this man never reported? Everyone covered up for him. Standard operating procedure for America.
Words evolve and our usage changes, but there are better and worse ways for this change to happen. Changes that bring ambiguity unintentionally are generally bad. e.g. "something I don't like".
It means what it always meant, the tree of men who control things. It's just become more widely used because the fact that everything is controlled by men in authority doesn't need feminism to be true, it just needed feminism to be pointed out. It's just as true no matter what your concerns about authority are. Not using the word is just being unnecessarily vague.
It's akin to something that bothers me personally; when people refer to "America" when they mean "White America." Yes, the recent rise of the alt-right has put on display an undercurrent of discontent in America, but when you say that, you're not being specific in a way that is distorting.
When you imagine the archetype of a person with both the desire and ability to throw teenagers in prison for sharing pictures of their own bodies, it's hands-down an old rich white guy.
Not OP, but I understand the OPs use of patriarchy as to mean a hierarchical power structure which justifies itself with the claim of protecting the weak, but in the end is just a repressive hierarchy.
You have been 'well educated' indeed to equate patriarchy with top down control structures. This will make the bitter pill of swapping the dreaded patriarchy with a technocracy, that will most certainly have a 'controlling' interest in intimate matters, much easier to swallow.
I remember a sermon about god and fatherhood in which the pastor explained that god's commands must be followed because god loves us and god wants to protect us. The pastor explained god's wrath towards those who fail to follow him as the wrath of love. As an example, he told how one day his young daughter had run into the street and almost been hit by a truck. Afterwards he hit her repeatedly. He said he hit her, and was angry with her, not becaues he hated her, but because he loved her and wanted to protect her from wanting to run into the streat again. To my mind, this fatherlike aproach to power and control IS the patriarchy:
In christianity
- god is the father of all men
- the pastor is refered to as "father"
- the father is refered to as father
All of them are there to protect and all of them must be obeyed.
And it feels to me that the police are also a kind of father. They are also there to protect and they too must be obeyed.
And he too is there to protect and he too must be obeyed.
Edit: And this is what I hate about HN. I spent time thinking about and writing this post. And the more time you spend writing a comment on HN, the fewer people will read it.
I would think that any organizational structure for a 'society' entails control mechanisms. And patriarchy predates monothesim. Patriarchy is a contract between the sexes, as a matter of fact. You can flip the sex bit, but there remains a control structure.
Just think how oppressive the matriarchy of the beehive must be to those poor little princesses killed in their crib by the ascendant queen mother, not to mention armies of 'drones' working their ass off for the glory of their queen. Naturaly, and it is in fact true, those little princesses had to go bye bye for the greater good of the hive.
(& do we really want to discuss the "pedophile" matriarchs of the Bonobos .. :)
p.s. I simply can not relate to your notion of the police as father figures.
It is not a question of disagreement. OP is repeating a falacy. And when large numbers of otherwise thoughtful people repeat a falacy then "indoctrination" is on the menu of possibilities.
I think they're referring to the omerta-like man code that keeps people from snitching on bad apples. Although I think that's really tribalism, more than patriarchy.
The US, historically, comes out of a patriarchal tradition, where men have substantially more power. It's declining over time, but it's still significant. E.g., look at all the religious people who talk explicitly about how God wants men to be the head of the household.
The connection here is that abusers make use of power structures to protect themselves from the consequences of abuse. This will happen with any sort of power structure; abusers are wily. But it's especially problematic with a power structure built on gender, because our sexual roles are also strongly gendered. That leads to behavior patterns like "old boys' club" and "boys will be boys", where men are more likely to trust other men, and to act in ways that support the people most like them.
So if we were coming out of a non-patriarchal past, we would still have abusers exploiting whatever the power structure was, but the patterns would be different.
Also, there's the possibility of poor children with Android phones getting convicted while rich children with locked iPhones go free because they're more costly to investigate.
>“Trust us, we'd never use it against the people it's supposed to protect” isn't enough.
The correct answer to this is always "Since legislation is freeform and you're writing it now anyway, maybe you should write that it should never be used that way into the legislation".
What is the rationale behind defining child porn age < 18? I think most would agree there is a profound difference between a 23 year old dating a 17 year old and a 50 year old having anything sexual to do with an 8 year old. There are worlds of moral difference here.
The first case is something that actually happened to a friend of mine. He was 23 and dating a 17 year old, got convicted, sent to prison, and is now labeled a sex offender for life.
Are there any countries out there that take a sane approach to this moral conundrum?
> What is the rationale behind defining child porn age < 18?
This is actually known (as to the USA). When the law was passed, pornography producers didn't have to keep records of their models. The goal of setting the legal threshold at 18 was to make it really, really easy to convince a jury that a model who was e.g. 12 was below the legal threshold. It wasn't expected that photos of 16-year-olds would be prevented, because if all you're going on is a photo, they aren't easy to distinguish from 18-year-olds.
In Canada its within 2 years for 12 (or 13?) year olds (I.e. a 10/11 year old can consent with a 12/13 year old) and within 5 years for 14/15 year olds. Though I'm not sure if that covers self distribution of cp (e.g. if a 14 year old sends some nudes to another 14 year old)
AFAIK, many countries define child porn completely separately from consensual sex, to the point where it's illegal for a minor to have nude pictures of themselves, let alone someone they legally have sex with.
Curiously, the US Army will take you at 17 (with parental consent). So you're old enough to decide to die for your country, but not old enough to decide to have sex with someone who's 23.
I'm not sure about the gp comments specific case, but in many states in the US age of consent is actually much more nuanced than that. For example, in a number of states the age of consent for a female is 17 if their partner is no more than 10 years older than them at the time.
Laws need to be objective to avoid bias and corruption. The vagueness of continuity you speak of manifests in the sentencing. Maybe the mandatory minimum for sex offender registration is too high, but the actual conviction needs to hold.
This means a judge can't use his/her discretion to forgive, imposing extra toughness on the accused, usually in absurd ways, such as 30 years in prison for stealing a doughnut because of 2 prior similar petty theft convictions. But a Wall Street type could abuse billions of dollars and go free. I think this kind of cookie cutter justice is perverse and just serves to wage social war and fill up prisons.
By the time it comes to "conviction" it is far, far too late. By then several lives have been ruined, reputations damaged, and thousands of dollars of fees spent. To argue that the sentencing somehow fixes the inhumanity of the laws is utter rubbish.
"Most jurisdictions have set a fixed age of consent" but also
"Some jurisdictions have laws explicitly allowing sexual acts with minors under the age of consent if their partner is close in age to them."
Just saying, I would have happily had sex with adult women from about age 6 onwards. I did have my first sexual experiences at that age, and have no regrets.
Child marriage is legal in much of the the U.S.A.[1]:
> The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Most states have no minimum age, though some have a minimum age between 14 and 17 (only two have a minimum age of 17 going by the map in the article).
It's mostly just "18+" is considered an adult for almost all legal purposes.
California has some sanity about "statutory rape", which is what your friend almost certainly got nailed on. The number of years under 18 as well as the age difference can be taken into account, and that conviction could be reduced to a different misdemeanor. However, you need a GOOD lawyer to pull this off.
> He was 23 and dating a 17 year old, got convicted, sent to prison, and is now labeled a sex offender for life.
What third-world country would send someone to prison for dating a 17 year old? I doubt even Iran or some other theocracy would do that. Where was this?
My friend's grandfather was 21 and his grandmother was 15 when they first started dating. Needless to say if laws were as crazy back then as they are now my friend wouldn't exist as his grandfather would have been on a registry and in prison instead of starting a family and a 60 year long marriage.
Examples like this aren't useful or practical. Society's ethics can and do evolve over time. It's not "crazy" for someone who is 21 to not be dating someone who is 15.
You're arguing that the grandfather would have broken the law regardless of it existing, and is therefore innocent. Or that because a child was born out of this relationship, and grew just fine, that it makes it ethical and permissible in the general case. We don't know what the grandfather would have done. Time length of the relationship doesn't matter, and people often remain in dysfunctional marriages to the detriment of their own children.
This doesn't mean your friend's grandparents are bad, but that it's just an anecdote from the past that doesn't prove the rule against modern ethics regarding age of consent.
Ok well what about countries where the age of consent is and has been much lower than ours (Italy at 14, France 15, etc)? They don't seem to be suffering any negative effects although I haven't done much research into it.
I think that's a valid point to bring up and think about. We're looking at more than one person's anecdote and there's a chance of gathering real evidence for constructing public policy.
You imply that that ethics 'evolve' always in a positive and constructive direction. This is clearly false, especially with the subject matter at hand. You also link 'ethics' and 'lawfulness' which is pretty naive, at best.
I'm not sure "dating" as in "the series of social engagements shared by a couple looking to get married" will put you on a sex offenders registry even now... Of course I don't know what did your friend's grandparents did precisely when they started "dating".
The weirdest thing is that we deem people as legal adults at 18.
If you look at neurological science, crime rates, and even car insurance rates then it's fairly easy to see that the brain has not fully matured by age 18 in most people.
Sure, a person's capacity for logic/reason has matured but usually that happens around 15 anyway. Inhibition of risky behavior and thus the ability to make sound decisions definitely has not.
A more sane legal adult age would probably be around 25 but then how would we justify enlisting legal 'children' in the military?
The rationale is the age of majority. As a parent, I have a right to control the influences in my daughter's life - save for some exceptions around mandatory education and maintaining basic health. That means whom she associates with, and how images of her taken are used save for those taken of her while in public and not under duress of compulsion. Why is that so hard to understand?
Children in various age groups have numerous rights that go far above education and health care in many countries, from the right to privacy to things like religious freedom. Saying that parents should have full control over their children's sex life until they reach the full age of majority is certainly controversial.
Teenagers also have the right to live lives that allow them to experience the world on their own terms and to learn from their experiences. Overly controlling parenting is ultimately detrimental to teenagers' development. Why is that so hard to understand?
That may be part of good parenting, but teenagers simply do not have that as a "right". The OP asked simply "What is the rationale behind defining child porn age < 18?" I gave the rationale, and people are jumping to all sorts of conclusions about the day to day reality of how I raise children. The law in these matters is about objectively boundaries.
Perhaps the age of majority ought to be changed, perhaps the placement of all convicted on the registry ought to be lifted, perhaps the record ought to be sealed if good behavior can be maintained for X number of years, but these are all "oughts".
Write to your legislators and put your morality into law if you want to see changes. Don't ask judges to use their discretion and open the door to widespread Brock Turner justice.
So you outsource your parenting to the police and the courts?
I absolutely agree that you have a right to control the influences in your kids' lives (to some extent, at least). But why do you need to involve the law in this way?
Say your daughter receives a lewd photo from an underage male. Now she's in possession of child porn (whether she wanted the photo or not) and could end up on a sex offender registry for life. How is that sane?
And the guy who sent her the picture is "trafficking in child pornography"? C'mon. That's ridiculous.
Many of these crimes are on the book with "strict liability"; that is, the mere fact of existence or possession triggers culpability, and intent doesn't enter into the equation.
I think the better model is in places where the age of consent is at some reasonable age below the age of majority (no, I don't have a good definition for "reasonable", but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try), as it is in many places. There are no legal ramifications of sexual behavior down to that age, but parents are, as always, free to set limits and impose consequences if they aren't obeyed.
But if she sends an indecent photo of herself to a (similarly aged)boyfriend should she be put on a sex offenders list for the rest of her life for distribution of child pornography?
That seems excessive. And it's hard for me to empathize with any parent who thinks that's ok.
> What is the rationale behind defining child porn age < 18?
The most widely ratified human rights convention, the UNCRC, defines a child as someone under 18.
While the US doesn't ratify those conventions (because constitution) they do try to put them into law. That means they enact a mish-mash of bits and pieces, and leave out quite a lot.
England does a reasonable job here. We have the law (The Sexual Offences Act 2003 covers photographs of children), and we have prosecution advice (which covers things like whether it's in the "public interest" to prosecute.) The sexual offences act has some protections for people who are over 18 but who have a vulnerability impdeding choice (eg, a learning disability) or who are in a weird power dynamic (eg university lecturers).
There are also differences in law between someone under 13 (where it's assumed the alleged offender knew they were under age) and someone between 13 and 16/18 where the crown has to prove the alleged offender knew they were under age.
English law is a bit complicated because the age of consent for sexual activity is 16. It is weird that you can fuck a 17 year old, but you can't have naked photos of that same person. There's a narrow exemption in law for possessing images for people who are under 18 and married.
> What is the rationale behind defining child porn age < 18?
You are conflating two concepts that aren't relevant.
1) Dating and age of sexual consent have nothing to do with the legal rationale behind child pornography prohibitions.
2) Depictions of nudity of subjects under 18 do not run afoul of child pornography prohibitions (of course, contingent on if you can afford your rights all the way past appeals court)
The age in 2) is typically standardized by the federal government, and they just let people consent to contracts to exploit themselves at the age they can consent to any other contract.
I could easily see 30 days in jail being a traumatic experience that could ruins someone's life, especially if jails are as violent as often portrait.
It's a complete miscarriage of justice: throwing a minor in jail, using a law supposedly created to protect minors. It could only be more cynical if they tried them as an adult–I didn't check, for fear of what I may discover.
Yes. In the US being on the sex offender registry has deep negative impacts on getting housing, credit, work, and of course social life. This completely independent of /why/ you're on the registry. A felony does cause some problems getting work, but doesn't really affect anything else.
A majority of housing is no felon. Work is damn tough, and people get paid bottom dollar. In some places you can't vote.
A lot of activities prohibit felons too. Being a coach, for example, isn't a walk in the park.
And your traffic stops? Ugh.
I know this due to a friend stuck with one. Hanging with the wrong people, group case. First offense. It's pretty brutal.
In many States expungement isn't possible on many felony crimes either. Someone who got the message, living right, can't escape it despite the clear reform.
Okay, but once you get on those registries you're screwed. Can't live within a certain distance of anyplace a child might be. Schools, parks, day care centers. I remember reading an article about a town in Florida where all the sex offenders were literally living in the same apartment complex because it was the only one left after all the circles were drawn on the map.
And if you think felons have a hard time getting a job...
Which is inexcusable. The Supreme Court is clearly corrupted and failing at its one job.... which is to shut stuff like this down and be a check on the irresponsibility of the legislative and executive branches.
The Supreme Court's role is not to change the laws when they seem unjust, it's to provide a clear and coherent interpretation of them. The Supreme Court oversteps its constitutional bounds when it starts to ask what the law should be rather than what it is.
False. Aside from unconstitutionality, the place to fix bad laws is in Congress. They're only irresponsible because we keep electing them no matter what they do.
Implying that Snapchat is mostly for sexting is doing a disservice to the platform, isn't it? In my experience (which is just an anecdote, idk if there are stats on this) Snapchat has been ~95% showing dumb jokes to friends
What other things that you can do to yourself are illegal? Suicide. Abortion in some places. What if I cut a piece of my body and eat it, is that cannibalism?
If I'm not wrong (but I might be), in some parts of the US you can get drunk, have consensual sex with somebody, and the day after somebody else can claim that you have been raped, as you were too drunk to consent.
I don't think you can press a rape charge without the consent of the alleged victim, assuming the victim is a competent adult. Anyone can claim you were raped, but if you stand up and say "bullshit", then nothing can come of it legally.
Hmm. If being drunk means not being able to consent, I don't see how is up to the victim to decide whether it was rape or not. What constitutes a "competent adult" seems to be the problem here, as a drunk person might not be considered a competent adult in some cases. Otherwise, it is tantamount to saying that whether one has committed a crime or not depends entirely on the other party will decide at some point in the future.
The idea that it is constitutional to charge someone with a felony for taking a picture of their own body is absurd. The judges were just too chicken to strike the entire statute. Actually, my apologies, that's unfair to the chicken.
Let me add - transmitting a photo of your genitals to someone uninvited is pretty awful, and should be illegal for a completely different reason.
So no mistake about this guy. The bigger question is if it was intended to be received by the adult, are they both guilty? Or just the adult at that point?
It seems to me the biggest hinge with this case is that the recipient didn't want the pic and actually called the cops herself.
Would be much more satisfying if they would have charged and proven that he assaulted the woman and just stuck with that.
The courts are saying there must be a legislative fix. What's the chance they actually fix it?
Yet the distribution between two consent minors are not as scary as an adult sending it to a child. Yes, we have to educate children there are other ways to explore sexuality, not enlist them as sex offender for life?
I'll be the bad guy here and say that these laws should all just go away. It is just too convenient to plant "evidence" be it alcohol, drugs, or this.
The idea that minors cannot consent is correct. Children are not a scaled small version of adults. They need to develop not just grow physically and children are vulnerable. We need to protect vulnerable members of our society. However, like with so many things in life, we've gone too far though. We need to scale back this stupidity be it "for the children" or "terrorism" or "drugs are bad".
There's a quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results which I can't remember off the top of my head but to me all of this: including the drama against marriage and abortion feels like bread and circus to get people occupied with silliness.
> There's a quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results...
It's the definition of insanity.
The abortion topic is interesting because we're talking about how we socially define a human life in a realm where science can't help at all (or at least has failed to give a concrete answer thus far). If it was an accepted truth that human life begins at conception, then abortion is murder. Even our laws reflect that at a certain stage prior to a baby exiting the uterus the thing is, for all intents and peuposes, alive. I actually think using fuzzy privacy prose to defend the right to terminate something that may or may not be conscious or "human" is really a stretch.
It'd be so much easier if as a society we agreed that everyone should have healthcare, and that reproduction should be a choice positively made, instead of the default consequence of sex.
While that would help it doesn't 'fix' the issue. Unintended pregnancies will happen and you will need a moral framework to deal with them. There is no avoiding the matter.
I think contraception has gotten quite good. I don't think the edge cases would excessively burden society in a way we'd be unable to manage. I could see a definition of contraception being something that prevents an egg, fertilized or not, from developing. And then we could define abortion as the act of terminating a developing embryo. I imagine if people had universal access to contraception we'd be more socially willing to push the responsibility of using the tools provided (and generally being sexually educated and responsible) back on the individuals involved.
Exactly. There's nothing additional that abortion solves that isn't covered by responsible use of contraception except maybe someone changing their mind or I guess more fairly having their economic situation change such that rearing a child is no longer the socially responsible choice. But I think that's something we're equip to handle via other means (adoption).
Failure rates for contraception are surprisingly high, even if you are using it responsibility. 1% is common, but that's not even over a person's lifetime, that's PER YEAR. That make lifetime failure rate more like 20%.
On top of that some people can't tolerate the most effective hormonal birth control methods methods.
Reproduction is one consequence of one specific sex act.
Hetero vaginal intercourse often doesn't result in procreation, and that's your best shot at it anyway.
There isn't really any universal default consequence, just like there isn't a universal sex act. A lot of people enjoy it, some people feel shame, etc. Life is a spectrum.
I believe the grandparent just means free access to birth control. Ie “With our current technology the default state doesn’t have to be pregnancy anymore.” It’s phrased a bit weirdly, I’ll grant you.
You're deliberately misinterpreting what he's saying. Apply that 'logic' to the first clause: Dying of disease or predation alone in a jungle or on a savanah is the default consequence of living. That's biological fact. You can't legislate that away.
I know why you picked that latter bit - it makes a cool sound bite. But it's just wrong, and whatever 'biology' imposes on us, we as a society shouldn't look at those loose shackles and say, "yes, this is the way it must always be."
ALSO, reproduction is the default consequence of a specific kind of sex under certain conditions, it's not like it's a 100% guarantee. Treating it as such makes you sound like a Texas lawmaker's favorite textbook.
Science didn't fail and actually helps a lot here. We know the brain development level of fetus at different stages. As a society we're generally ok with killing fish, reptiles and most of the society is ok with killing mammals. That places abortion cut-off anywhere between 3 and 6 months for the current state of the society moral development. And that is what most of the states have when they aren't dominated by anti-science organizations, ie when it isn't the situation of Catholic Church and Ireland for example.
Basically it boils down to what intelligence level we're ok to kill. Those pro-lifers chewing that juicy steak can't be more oxymoronic and hypocritical.
Science has failed to define what a human life is (really what any life is). It has not enumerated the qualities that make us human nor has it established a plausible theory and effective model that allows us to assess the attributes of a developing fetus and declare, "this one is human, this one is still a pile of cells". (And that's not to say it hasn't been helpful in sussing out practical guidelines so far.) I respectfully disagree that terminating the life of a fish/mammal and a 3- or 6-month old human are effectively the same thing. We kill and eat animals because that's how our biology works, and thus it is mostly socially acceptable. We don't allow eating small human fetuses because they're, "basically just a mammal at that stage". There are things that make something decidedly not human, but so far we can't really agree on how to distinguish definitely a human from potentially a human. Until we understand exactly what makes us human, I'm uncomfortable simply sweeping that unknown under the rug, morally.
6 month old isn't a fish. You put words in my mouth. 3 month is about fish equivalent. 6 month is a pretty intelligent mammal and I'm against killing them.
I didn't realize that's what you meant. edited. Sorry for unduly implying anything about your character--that was not my intention. I thought you were just generally grouping fish/mammals with 3-6month old fetus brain development. Regardless it doesn't change my point.
I'm not sure I see it that way. We're effectively biological computers that run an unknown, self-modifying program.
We know when the body begins to develop (conception), but we're uncertain as to what sensory input is being processed, whether that program is aware of its own state, and such things may vary between individuals.
We have bright lines, but none that have sufficient agreement about their use in all cases for legal purposes.
We are indeed biological computers. But this is a social problem. Socially we develop moral and ethical frameworks (codified as laws) in order to navigate the scenarios that come up in this biological thing we call life. It's not innately wrong to lust for someone who is younger than [country.min_adult_years] old; it's actually pretty biologically natural. However we socially agree that children are sexually off limits because we legally consider them unable to consent to sexual intercourse. My point was that abortion should not be grouped with "other laws that exist to protect vulnerable children" because it's more about the definition of a human life which is really hard and not about the vulnerability of a developing child's brain or decision making ability, albeit understandably easily conflated.
It's not hard to form definitions, it's hard to form ones that people will agree upon because there are many different interests in play and many different values. And it's not really that difficult to know whether a proverbial 'clump of cells' is developing into what everyone normally agrees to be 'human' or not.
The hard part is in forming the laws and deciding whether they should value undeveloped members of the homo sapiens genus for their species, for being intelligent, their capacity to suffer, or other reasons, then balancing whatever rights are assigned against the rights of others.
>Science has failed to define what a human life is ... It has not enumerated the qualities that make us human ... "this one is human, this one is still a pile of cells".
Those questions you pose is not really of scientific domain - they are actually equivalent reformulation of the religious question when/where "soul" is created (equivalence of the "soul" and "human" questions is established by the religious dogma that only humans have "soul"). Science has Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, Australopithecus, etc... It is the question of religion domain whether Neanderthals or our common ancestors all the way to ancient apes were "humans"/"had soul". If notion of "soul" exists where did it appear between us and those cells $2B years ago to which each of us is connected through the continuous chain of bodies?
I agree. And that's part of the point. If we could scientifically agree on definition of human life, it would be way easier to navigate the abortion topic. But since we can't, it's currently entirely a social issue. The reason I didn't want to group abortion with CP under "silly socially issues" is that I'm still holding out on us being able to eventually understand our own humanity. And when we do, it may shed light on an agreeable framework under which to legislate termination of a fetus.
We kill for many other reasons than food as well as for no reason at all. Why did you choose the eating for your statement? Well, anyway eating your own species has selective pressure working against such a trait so your statement doesn't make sense.
I think the abortion discussion is much easier than its made out. I like Peter Singers approach to ethics which sets the goal to be avoiding of suffering. Now the question is easy: at what stage of the pregnancy can the being suffer?
The entire abortion conversation is completely ruined by most people wearing glasses colored with existence bias.
If you like Peter Singer's approach so much, then you agree with him that one should be allowed to "abort" babies for a long time after birth as well? No? I guess it's not so easy after all.
Actually I do agree with that as well. Where I'm much more of a bigot is when it comes to the much more obvious issue of how we treat animals. I was a vegetarian for several years but have up on it because I didn't believe it was making a difference. If we had a vote though to ban animal slaughter and especially factory farming I'd vote for it in a heartbeat.
It depends on the circumstances. We don't kill animals because we are hungry. We kill animals because we want more enjoyment from food. If you are somewhere starving and it's you it the rabbit, go for it. That's not the common situation though.
Euthanasia is a much more complicated topic and I find it bewildering that we are focusing on this discussion on babies. I assume it's out of some notion of protecting the adorable innocence. I think it's important with these topics to try to keep emotions out of it because they just reflect biases we have built in due to evolution. Evolution of course is not your friend. Especially not after you've procreated.
You're being hyperbolic but we don't allow children to make medical decisions for themselves until the age of majority, and parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).
So effectively yes, this is already the state of things, and there is no serious movement to restrict this form of post-birth abortion. Who would have imagined that all it would take for abortion to gain acceptance is to frame it as a religious liberty?
>parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).
That is false. Parents cannot legally deny their children life-saving treatment.
Also, I'm not sure where I am being hyperbolic. Peter Singer literally does advocate for the "right" to kill young children for a long time after their birth. So if you say that Peter Singer offers an "easy" moral approach to abortion, I have to ask whether you actually do agree with his logic and follow it to the same ultimate conclusions that he does.
I wouldn't argue that we should legalize killing infants and toddlers, but I would suggest that the tendency for the whole society to lose its collective shit about infanticide is related to our discomfort with the legal status of abortion. Ethically, there doesn't seem to be much difference between an infant one day before and one day after birth. Of course, ours is not an ethical society, so killing one is perfectly legal while killing the other will inspire a vituperative media circus, widespread hand-wringing, and decades in prison. Why is that? It seems that mothers who kill their young children function as scapegoats, so that we may have a focus for the hazy sense of guilt that many of us feel about abortion.
I think the point is that a fetus doesn't have the capacity to suffer before a certain point. A blastula of cells shortly after conception is not capable of feeling pain, but a fetus at 8 months likely is. OP is saying that it would be morally acceptable to terminate pregnancy before the point where we could establish that the fetus was capable of suffering.
Being unfamiliar with Peter Singers ethical approach, it was not clear to me from the parent comment alone that the notion of suffering extended also to a developed fetus.
While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation. It also does not account for scenarios where one might be willing to suffer on behalf of another. In other words, I'm not sure there exists an absolute scale of suffering which we can use to judge the morality of such a scenario. Again, maybe I'm not familiar enough with this ethical framework.
Singer is definitively pro-abortion, for basically the reasons I mentioned. It's not terribly nuanced, it follows pretty directly from his basic ideas.
I'm not super expert about it either (at best a casual armchair philosopher), but from what I know Singers philosophy isn't specifically about suffering, it's about weighing interests. He assumes that the desire to avoid pain is one of the more important interests, hence it takes priority most (but not all) of the time. It's not black and white, it's more of a calculus about weighing the different competing interests of individuals, with certain classes of interests being given more weight than others.
I think Singers arguments in favor of abortion actually go farther than what OP's post implied regarding the fetus' capacity to feel pain. Singer argues that a fetus is unable to have any self-interests (including the desire to avoid pain), hence the interests of the mother should be given priority. I think this is taking it too far myself; I can agree with the delineation of the fetus' capacity to feel pain, but it is not clear to me at what point (if any) Singer feels it would be immoral to abort a fetus.
I discovered last year that people are actually promoting this. I've been attacked by people because I do not agree with late-term (for no medical reason) and after-birth abortion:
"to this day, many procedures are performed on newborns without the benefit of analgesics. That’s largely because of an enduring misconception in the medical community that newborns don’t feel pain like adults."
Yep, there's also Antinatalism, which is the belief that having children is immoral. There are a few different strains, but greatly oversimplifying my favorite is that suffering in life outweighs pleasure, so bringing a new life into existence increases the net amount of suffering and is thus immoral.
> It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia
While that sentiment is certainly a part of medical history, there's a good reason why many procedures on infants are still carried out without anesthesia today. Infants are fragile and most forms of pain relief we use on adults are simply too dangerous for infants. Any anesthesiologist will weigh the benefits vs. the risks for each particular procedure and for infants that ratio is considerably different compared to adults.
"Key medical objections to infant anesthesia - that it was (a) unnecessary and (b) dangerous - were resolved by the brilliant research of Kanwal Anand and colleagues at Oxford from 1985 to 1987. Making precise measurements of infant reactions to surgery, they proved that the babies experienced pain, needed and tolerated anesthesia well, and had probably been dying of metabolic and endocrine shock following unanesthetized operations."
I'm not a medical doctor and not necessarily current on the latest research. However, there is quite a lot of evidence that general anesthesia is fairly likely to cause actual brain damage in infants and young children [1,2] with significant consequences in later life and there are (less significant, but still non-trivial) issues with various methods of local anesthesia. As far as I know, there's a lot of unsolved issues in the field of infant anesthesiology and the general trend is to err on the side of caution.
If there is a need for "repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic" on infants there is usually already something wrong which could attribute to the said symptoms as well. It would be crazy to not use anesthesia on young children based on this warning, as shock (Which usually happens when operated on without anesthetics and the reason the child is silent during and a while after the operation) may cause worse damage.
The first reference I linked specifically controlled not just for disorders that could lead to similar symptoms, but even things like the mother's socioeconomic status, etc. The effect was still huge.
I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting simply forgoing anesthesia in life threatening cases, but people might want to rethink a routine tonsillectomy or some dental work.
More shocking than that you would even be allowed to die when you are ill and suffering too much. You know like we do with our pets because we love them and don't want them to suffer.
"While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation"
The statement was not about defining humanity. Why is it relevant if something is human or not? Would it be OK to torture non-human life that's clearly in possession of cautiousness just because it's not human?
If avoiding suffering is the issue ten anyone can be murdered morally under the right conditions. I can stab you in your sleep (painlessly), and that would be fine according to this criterion.
It would certainly not OK unless you also painlessly kill my wife, family and friends. Of course I would still be afraid of it because we have the irrational existence bias built in. I'm not particularly upset about the fact that I didn't exist 100 years ago so why should I be upset about not existing 100 years from now as long as no suffering is involved. Of course knowing that our existence is about to end causes as agony due to our biases. That doesn't mean though that we as a rational society should allow these biased to set or goals. We need to take them into account though.
I think the main point is not who suffers, but who cares and why. We have a lot of people suffering around due to lots of reasons, but don't actually care to fix that. E.g. "abortion" after birth is biologically rejected by many, because it completely contradicts the evolutional efforts of a group to survive and reproduce. That's why children make many of us happy — if you're not happy or careful enough, then they're quickly dead, and your group is dead. Other animals have different strategies, from having hundreds of children to being pregnant for years, so child is ready to fall to the ground and go travel in five minutes.
Suffering has nothing to do with it, it's just a biological motivator for both parent and child to escape pre-reproduction death with insignificant side-effects like really, really missing a nice car or just an ice cream.
But while this topic is naturally highly dependent on "local" social rules, I think modern society should put responsibility and planning on the first place. If someone is not very sure that s/he can raise, care of, or simply enjoy the parenthood, it must be okay to abort it, unless that overweights all imaginable social programs. Like killing born children, for one. With modern society atomization and precision, abortion absolutely falls into "not your business" category in most places, unless one has very conservative and/or intrusive religious views, which is a bad thing itself, given how many completely different minds have to interact now on daily basis.
Your first paragraph explains what evolutionary forces have shaped our minds and societies. It's unclear why that should be a basis for ethics. If that was our goal we should all have ten children and user religious devotion to stay cohesive as a group.
There is a lot to disagree with in your statement.
First, you use "murder" incorrectly. Abortion, in the US, is legal, and therefore not murder. Murder is defined as an illegal killing. That is why when someone is given the death penalty, they are said to be killed, not murdered. We say soldiers kill the enemy, not murder the enemy. By using "murder" you are adopting the conflation that anti-abortion activists have been (apparently) successful in promoting.
Second, nobody doubts that a zygote is alive. Nearly every cell in your body is alive (barring hair, nails, upper layers of skin, recently recycled cells), including sperm and eggs. When an egg and a sperm fuse, the result is also alive. The question is whether the rights of the zygote->blastula->fetus->baby trump the rights of the woman who is carrying it.
Obviously, by the time it becomes a baby, the baby's rights trump the desires of the woman carrying it, in general -- everybody agrees on that. Some people conceive (pun not intended) of the fertilized egg as being fully human, something God ordained and which is the vessel for a soul which has been waiting for that very zygote, and by aborting it, one is subverting God's will and destroying the intended future destiny of that soul.
Others don't share that belief. There is certainly no bright line dividing when that fetus is developed enough that its rights are superior to that of its mother, and deciding where to place that light should not be taken lightly and will cause discomfort. But we deal with such things all the time. It is legal to drive 45 MPH on the street near my house, but not 46. Yes it is somewhat arbitrary but not unreasonable either. That we have to make an uneasy boundary somewhere on the continuum isn't reason to declare that the speed limit should be zero, or that there should be no speed limit at all.
It should also be noted that at the time Roe v Wade was decided, Protestants and even evangelical Protestants by and large were not bothered by the decision. Catholics were, of course. It wasn't until the rise of the Moral Majority that the issue became objectionable to so many religious groups.
And to further take this off topic I would like to mention that every church I have been to (mostly Methodist) never even talk about abortion. It just never comes up. Abortion right to life seems to be a favorite topic of some politicians and liberal commentators trying to ostracize Christians.
This is not a case of Christian persecution. Good for you, you are part of a liberal Christian denomination. But there are more than 100M Christians who strongly object to abortion on religious grounds. In most states in the US, there has been a terrible erosion in the ability to get an abortion, and this is due to political leveraging of the issue with Christian support.
70% of evangelicals are opposed, while 44% of Catholics are. From that you might conclude that since the majority of Catholics are not opposed to abortion that proves your case. That would be wrong. The church and those who oppose it are far more vocal and influential than those who support it.
Really, this topic is in the news all the time. I don't know how the religious connection has escaped you.
It is really interesting that it has escaped me since I have been to a number of religious retreats, events, and have been a regular church goer for about 20 years now. Maybe it is because I live in California.
The "mainline" protestants made a bit of a Faustian bargain on abortion. Like most religionists, their doctrine is determined primarily by what will generate the fullest collection plate. In attempting not to alienate women who've had abortions, they instead alienated judgmental old people, which latter group has got to be any religion's primary customer. Nowadays they're much quieter with their "abortion is OK" dogma.
I find the definition "unlawful" for murder to be at odds with the common use. People refer to dictators as murderers all the time, even if the dictator unilaterally declared the killings legal. I find "unjustified" to be much more in line with common usage of the word murder.
Dictators usually kill illegally, and protect themselves from the consequences with the sheer power they hold. Fascists kill and protect themselves through the idiotic/selfish mass' silent presence on their side.
I gave some examples of common use which contradict your claim.
As for dictators, they are violating international law. Abortion is legal in the US (withing certain parameters), and international law does not declare it to be illegal either.
Killing of armed combatants is considered justified, as is executions of people for capital offenses. Neither contradict my claim (though they don't contradict yours either).
International law primarily regards the interactions between nations rather than the actions within a nation. It is debatable whether or not a nation that is non-signatory to a treaty has violated a law when they fail to abide by its precepts.
I think most people would claim that murder is intrinsically wrong, and is not bad merely because it is contrary to some words on a piece of paper.
People can disagree as to what is unjustified; one person might consider a death in an arranged duel to be murder, while another might consider it justified. Under the law of today it is unlawful, under many laws 200 years ago it would be lawful.
But that’s the thing, if you get their name in the media, true or not, they’re ruined. People NEVER believe someone accused of These types of crimes are innocent.
Just being investigated, losing all electronics, losing your job, losing friends, losing family, living in fear for months is bad enough that a framing is probably considered successful in the eyes of the framer whether or not it results in a trial.
It's like you're saying the rape doesn't count if nobody gets pregnant.
And god help you if you find yourself in the media crosshairs at any point. Which is even more likely if you go to trial since "paedophile gets community service/fine" is an absolute slam dunk of a headline and nobody other than the courts are going to give a shit whether you violently raped a kid in a dark alley or had someone download 3 videos on your badly secured wi-fi.
These are the easiest laws...namely because they are strict liability laws[1], if pictures exist there is guilt notwithstanding intent which is the common standard in US criminal law.
Take a dead body, that could be murder( 1st degree, 2nd, 3rd), manslaughter or even a lawful killing (self defense). But as you will see in the link below even receiving a text can lead to conviction even if you receive it in error and report it.
My wife uses a local mail client. So recently, I was helping her find an attachment. And I happened to browse the embedded images folder. She was very surprised ;)
Anyway, putting someone on a CP spam list, and then getting them busted, might well do it.
The courts have determined that having CP in your browser image history as thumbnails not even full sized images is the same as having seen the full sized images. So popping up a window with a hundred thumbnails is enough to provide evidence to send someone away for life.
I'm definitely leery of any law that attributes strict liability to mere possession, rather than requiring the authorities to prove that something was obtained with intent or knowingly stored in an unsafe way. It might as well be engineered to enable busting "inconvenient" people by planting evidence.
You HAVE to prosecute them. If you didn't, a child could send a naked photo of himself to all his teachers, call the FBI, and see them all arrested (there's no defense against possession.)
Didn't Ron/Rand Paul have a proposed bill to limit punitive action on structural crimes (crimes committed structurally due to them being under age): this, alcohol in possession of minor, curfew violations, ... ?
This is a symptom of how I think Republicans and many neoliberal Democrats have basically reduced our government to systematically stop recognizing compassion as a function. All that is left is possession (property rights), and punishment (criminal enforcement). Charity and compassion are seen as some exotic thing that tend to belong in the personal sphere, not something that is a government function in society.
I cannot understand why Americans say "we" in statements like this. I'm not out of mine (at least not with respect to this issue) and you're quite likely not out of yours.
It's not noble to take responsibility for things when you have no control over them and thus won't be able to fix them.
It's "we" as in "we the people". "We" are doing this because our elected representatives appointed the people who made the decision. "We" collectively bear the responsibility for what our government does. But there's a difference between responsibility and guilt. Unless we voted for someone and knew this would be the consequence, we shouldn't feel guilty.
I know, but I disagree and, moreover, I consider that a harmful belief. The problem isn't that not every citizen of a democracy will agree with the majority preference (I think people understand that caveat), it's that even the majority preference of the population on a single issue is, for many reasons, likely not what gets through the political process.
The "we" wording sweeps all these limitations of democracy comprehensively under the rug: it diverts blame onto the people when it should rightly be directed at the existing political order.
The people in the "existing political order" are put there by the public who ultimately has the responsibility for creating good government. Again, responsibility is not the same as guilt.
as a parent and also someone who was a child at one time I can see that kids make all kinds of mistakes. I mean, I seriously don't even ask why sometimes because I know the answer I'm going to get will not make any sense.
I'm very lucky and I have some wonderful children I cannot see them going out and doing something like this however people do stupid things. I don't think charging someone with something that is going to stick with them for the rest of their life for something that they did when they were 13 ,14, 17 years old.. they are kids and their brains, hello all you scientists out of there, are not even fully developed.
Listen, if a 17-year-old child sent an explicit image to my daughter I would be over at the parents house faster than you can imagine. That kid obviously needs a swift kick in the ass, he or she does not deserve to be charged with a crime will follow that person for life.
If we continue to charge children as adults, kids that are 13,14,15 or 17, then we might as well change the age of when you are an adult to 13 years old.
has anyone given any consideration to the crap that these kids are bombarded with on a moment by moment basis on television in music and all entertainment, it is hyper sexualized. What do you expect your children to do when they are faced with this?
The sad situation and I don't agree with the stupid thing that this kid did in the stupid things the kids are going to do but they are kids! Come on now, haven't we seen cases recently where adult pedophiles have been let off? Are we going mad?
And as a side note, someone has to consider how in some parts of the US you can legally drive a car at 14 or 15 (of course with some limitations, but not that many), at 16 or 17 you can get an airplane or helicopter pilot license, yet you become of age at 18 and you cannot drink beer or get an unrestricted commercial driver's license before turning 21.
Somehow these age limits sound contrasting each other.
When I was in law school I worked on a Florida legislative project to bring forward a version of Romeo & Juliet laws to Florida [1]. For example there are cases where 17 year old girls become registered sex offenders for life due to relationships with their 16 year old boyfriends (whom they have married in some cases). These types of cases have made it to the SCOTUS. Challenging on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment and double jeopardy, and upheld by the court.
It goes without saying civil and criminal child abuse, neglect, and abondonment cases are as difficult as any to stomach. But there are famous case of parents with "bathtub" framed photos of their kids on their hallway walls and grandfathers with pictures of their grandchilds running through sprinklers, and as you might imagine they were painted as the devil incarnate.
Our law clinic was very aware the issues of text messaging even then, 2006. At the time we used the Socratic method to debate the logic and human aspects of charging the young children guilty of originating "sext messages" of themselves. My position was always that such a law would chill the indemnity a victim needs to come forward.
One of the major issues is that many of these crimes are under the strict liability [2] standard meaning if the pictures exist, the defendant is guilty,
notwithstanding their intent.
Why "prosecution" and not "investigation." There's a difference. It depends upon an audience. What about self portraits? That's how photographers learn. I had a Canonet and black and white film as a kid. I loved it. Asking questions doesn't have threaten kids. Good kids will answer good questions. Have I missed something?
"the Court found the prohibition of images that appear to be, but are not actually, minors improper; any harm stemming from those false images “does not necessarily follow from the speech, but depends upon some unquantified potential for subsequent criminal acts.”"
Washington SC: "He claims any potential harm in his case is just as attenuated and vague as Free Speech Coalition. Because no harm was done, he should have the same right as any adult to take voluntary photographs of his own body. We do not find this argument persuasive."
Am I correct in reading this as the court basically saying "The defendant presents a solid argument. We don't care." ??
Also as a follow up - this is our fault. We elect the people that write the laws. The courts job it is to check the law constitutional. We have this illusion that the court is there to think better then those we elect, which is not the case. If you are outraged by this then pay some attention to who you vote for.
> He claims any potential harm in his case is just as attenuated and vague as Free Speech Coalition. Because no harm was done, he should have the same right as any adult to take voluntary photographs of his own body. We do not find this argument persuasive.
Given how persuasive this argument is, I am a bit surprised that the court was not persuaded. I understand that Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition has some distinguishing factors, like the fact that the depictions in question were clearly distinguishable from records of a crime (on account of them not being photographic images of actual minors).
This is a messy and complicated business, it seems like there needs to be a legislative solution since the supreme court can not find what most people consider a just outcome in an interpretation of the statute.
Since almost all of us agree that sexual preference is something that is innate, we cannot consciously affect it significantly, isn't it wrong to prosecute pedophiles? IMO, these people should be treated with pity, not as criminals. If we do that, all these absurdities will disappear automatically.
Of course, coercion is still illegal, and coercion of a minor would carry higher criminal penalties. But distribution of content does not automatically imply coercion or violence.
But sentencing somebody to prison for looking at cp is akin to sending gay people to prison.
I absolutely agree that we shouldn't prosecute people for being attracted to children. Seeking out and looking at live CP (as opposed to cartoons) is another matter, because looking at someone's naked body without their consent is always a violation. There will always be a grey area around age of consent, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm quite comfortable with the idea that a 10-year-old cannot meaningfully consent to being in porn.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadCongrats, two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consentually = child porn.
What I also couldn't understand from the article:
A picture of someone who is an adult, but is /pretending/ to be a minor is also child pornography?
What?!
Pornhub.com will need to take a hard look at some of its content providers then.
Or does it not apply to Montreal based companies?
What if the servers are in the US? What if the client is in the US?
Lunacy.
"Pretending to be a minor" would have 1st amendment protections as per previous cases.
Thank you for clarifying.
Is it me or was this densely worded?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/teen-sends-dick-... is more readable, probably.
Mods might want to update the link?
But, from the OP:
>> The case itself involved a 17-year-old sending “an unsolicited picture of his erect penis” to an apparently unwilling recipient, but the logic of the court’s reasoning applies even when the recipient is pleased to receive the photo. The court does say that, “because [Gray] was not a minor sending sexually explicit images to another consenting minor, we decline to analyze such a situation,” but I think that — given the logic of the majority opinion — the analysis would have to end up the same way; nothing in the majority’s reasoning turns on the presence of an unwilling recipient.
And that being said, one must imagine how differently the case might have been handled had the genders of the involved persons been switched.
Same reason that minors usually get a break from the law when committing vandalism, assault, etc.
So they should not get the same exact punishment, which is why I suggested counseling because unnecessary institutionalization of children is a predatory method of creating repeat offenders.
It's like that episode of Seinfeld where they learn a sex offender moved into the neighborhood and went to confront the person, then found out it was a woman and immediately (and somehow understandably) lost their vitriol.
"However, the Court found the prohibition of images that appear to be, but are not actually, minors improper"
They found the prohibition to be improper. It's oddly phrased.
>In Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned sexually explicit depictions of minors, as well as depictions that appeared to be minors. These included computer generated images and depictions of legal adults pretending to be minors. The Court recognized that the First Amendment “does not embrace certain categories of speech, including … pornography produced with real children.” However, the Court found the prohibition of images that appear to be, but are not actually, minors improper; any harm stemming from those false images “does not necessarily follow from the speech, but depends upon some unquantified potential for subsequent criminal acts."
Unless I'm reading it wrong.
However there are such laws which remain, and in fact have been recently introduced, in Canada, England & Wales, Northern Ireland, Rep. of Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and various European countries.
What's perhaps even more concerning is that even stories are illegal in Canada. The mere possession of the material, i.e a drawing that you made yourself is illegal in England. Publishing a story or even sexual roleplaying with another adult over the Internet might find you sentenced under the Obscene Publications Act.
It's hideous in my view and such laws deserve to be stricken down with ferocity.
I'm sure I've replied to you about this before, actually, not long ago. (Edit: found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14904716)
I'm not sure why my comment here is downvoted, though.
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/25/section/62
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-38146988
Your bbc example is telling: he's an admitted paedophile, who was offending against children. The OPA isn't new law, it's very old law.
> He admitted at Preston Crown Court to storing hundreds of child abuse images and posting on a paedophile website.
Wrong about what, exactly? Images of children in sexual situations, or rather, as is described in the act, is illegal even to possess. Unless you know something about the act that I don't, or I've completely misread it - in which case I'm very open to corrections - I'm an optimist that the law isn't as hideous as I am reading it out to be.
>The OPA isn't new law, it's very old law.
I was talking about that section of CAJA, I know that OPA is old, but the "lolicon law" is only from 2009.
>he's an admitted paedophile
So what? That's completely irrelevant to any point that's being made. The fact is that he was imprisoned for spreading stories, fiction, and it was through UK law enacted by parliament that this happened.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-12-08/fake-simpsons-cartoon-...
>Justice Adams said the legislation's main purpose was to combat the direct sexual exploitation and abuse of children that occurs where offensive images of real children are made.
If he believes this, then why is he legislating that virtual pornography, in fact even hand drawn, of the Simpsons which bear such little resemblance to real people, never mind actually existing people, is against the law?
>But, he said, it was also calculated to deter production of other material, including cartoons, which "can fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children".
Was it really? And if so, does he, or the authors of the legislation, have evidence to back up this claim? This seems to be totally unsubstantiated nonsense this judge is saying. And what of fueled demand? The fact that a drawing or story might make someone else do an action is, in my view (and I hope others can agree) not reasonable grounds for illegalising possession or production of that drawing.
Unfortunately bone-headed cases and legislation like this have graced the rest of the Commonwealth and various European countries.
Just utterly amazing. Hentai is now child porn. How many hentai pictures are stored on Tarsnap??!
Those images might be stored on US servers. Time for you to grant a "backdoor" to the government.
If I was in your position, I would be genuinely confused when trying to juggle all of these regulatory threat matrices :( :(
It reminds me of the situation right now with the guy in Philadelphia who is in prison for contempt for not offering decryption password to the judge.
What is strange is how today's puritanism is coming from the left rather than the right.
Growing up as kid, I remember christians and conservatives attacking "Married with Children", "Simpsons", "Beavis and Butthead", "Southpark", etc. Even as an elementary kid, I remember associating christians/conservatives with censorship and for most of my life identified myself as a liberal.
The past few years, I've given up on liberals too as they are now pushing their form of censorship under the aegis of "social justice".
> Congrats, two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consentually = child porn.
It's even worse that isn't it? If a 17 year old takes a picture of herself on a smartphone and sends it to herself on her other accounts, then she's guilty of distributing child porn. Technically, isn't she guilty of distributing child porn of herself to herself?
At this point, if they spend time going after people for that type of technicality, then it's only a matter of time before they get all of us in prison for something.
70m people in the USA have a criminal record of some kind.
The more victimless crimes we have, the more power we will lose.
From both actually, take the UK for example, the anime=CP law was made under a right-wing government.
Your opponents in kiddie porn are two different sets of people: 1) the egregiously stupid, generally teenagers, who may or may not be malicious about it and 2) the horrifically competent and malicious who WILL find a way to exploit any loophole.
Group 2 is what makes child pornography laws so problematic. Anything you do to strengthen your ability to get Group 2 generally increases the collateral damage in Group 1.
This is exactly what "prosecutorial discretion" is supposed to be used for. Unfortunately, it seems that "prosecutorial discretion" is now mostly "scoring poltical points for election."
I'm always on the side of "convicting innocents is wrong" because I consider it a pure civil liberty issue subject to abuse.
However, you are going to have to defend against people doing a "damage amount" calculation. The malicious individuals are so vile and cause so much damage and exploitation while teenage sexting cases are generally sufficiently rare that the calculus probably doesn't come up in your favor.
In addition, I have see firsthand from a bystander position that prosecutors are generally pretty good about teen sexting. I watched as a prosecutor patiently explained to an idiot mother that if he managed to convict the boy in the sexting case, he was also paving the way to convict her daughter of exactly the same thing. So, she could go along, and both of the involved parties would get some relatively innocuous conviction that would go away for both when they became 18, or she could make a big fuss and both of them would be sex offender registrees (the DA was clearly going to uncover evidence of statutory rape along the way--the boy and girl were obviously having sex with each other).
The DA really didn't want the case to go very far. Of course, the DA involved didn't have to bow to religious nutcases to get elected.
The relatives of the mother finally browbeat her into submission, but it was unclear which way it was going to go for quite a while and it could have gone very badly for all parties involved.
Generally something stupid has to happen--posted to Facebook, being shared around at school, comes up in a divorce proceeding, found on phone while being searched, etc.--before a DA is going to bother getting involved.
What's next, outlawing anatomy textbooks? Prostituting people for baby photo's of their kids? That may sound silly, but the edge cases on this get complex. What happens if a kid texts a picture of a rash on their privates to their doctor?
PS: Remember with the current state of AI we could flag every single sexting photo ever posted. So, what your going have this minor conviction of a large percentage of teenagers...
I think that you mean "prosecuting" ;)
And yes, that's already common. Or at least, it was, when people still used film cameras.
If you get rid of the sex offender registry then the problems around the child pornography laws become far less acute.
Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
You can't just assume teenagers will wait because they're told to. I don't think that's even remotely realistic. The law (any law) has to be written in a way that protects those who break it with no ill intent. There's nothing "easy" about child sex laws.
To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
Deciding that someone is both a rape victim and a rapist at the same time, for the same act, isn't an unfortunate sacrifice around the edge cases of heuristic reasoning. It's categorically insane.
States have typically balanced this against the desire to prohibit "relationships" with vast power differentials (i.e. between a child and a middle-aged adult) by carving out exceptions to statutory rape for consenting couples who are close in age. Others have just relied on police and prosecutors not to bring cases against teenage couples, and been mostly successful outside of a some newsworthy examples met with public outcry.
Where I'm from the age of consent is 15, but the law also explicitly states that there is no crime if the age difference is small. So in your example, if the two kids are fine with it, nothing would happen, not even if any of their parents were screaming bloody murder.
Were not exactly lacking blueprints of sane legislation in this area, or lacking datapoints on how different ages of consent affect different societies.
Why some places persist in prosecuting kids who have consensual sex with each other is just baffling to me.
There are traditionally two ways to do that and still make sure people who go to prison actually deserve it. The first is to draw the line high and rely on prosecutors to sensibly exercise their discretion, the second is to draw the line low enough that you don't find innocent people on the wrong side of it.
But prosecutors have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to exercise sensible discretion, leaving the second option as the only viable alternative.
In my country age of consent is 14. There is no pandora's box, there is no widespread abuse of teen girls and children being raped. Only ones who routinely have sex and get pregnant at that age are gypsy girls and that's because their "traditions" require them to marry young.
No, no, no. That's not how age of consent laws work, not even in parts of the US.
The main purpose of the age of consent is to define the difference between rape and child molestation. Both are illegal acts involving non-consensual sex, but the latter has a much stronger punishment, because society wants a larger deterrent for it. We think it's the worse crime.
The secondary effect is that it's easier for the person below the age of consent to be believed by the courts if that person claims the sex was non-consensual. Many regular rape cases unfortunately end in a he said/she said without much technical evidence, in which case there's no conviction. If an underage person is involved, society spends more resources on figuring out if a crime actually happened. This is good, because it adds to the deterrent.
In case of consensual sex between two people where both are below the age of consent or on different sides of it, it's obvious to me that society shouldn't pursue a criminal conviction. In the US, this is usually codified into age of consent laws as a "Romeo & Juliet clause", and other places usually have something similar.
There are of course parts of the US and the world where age of consent is high and there are no exemptions, because those places are neurotic about sex and want to impose some sort of morality on their teenagers. That's unfortunate, and I hope people oppose those laws.
> If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
What box? It's under 18 for large parts of the US. It's 14/15 in many places in Europe, and it has been that way for decades. There's plenty of facts if you want to measure the effects of different ages of consent.
Also, I believe that the average age of sexual debut is 17 in many parts of the US. To criminalize over half the teenage population is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. The laws of a society should reflect the morality of its citizens.
I see everyone's forgotten Jerry Lee Lewis and his (AFAIK perfectly legal at the time in that state) 13 year old wife. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-B...
Now, we are rightly wiser in the 21st century and have almost entirely done away with child marriage. But I would say one key principle is believe the victim. Which cuts both ways. It makes no sense to pursue a life-ruining prosecution of a minor if the alleged victim claims (un-coerced) not to be a victim. There are plenty of nastier cases out there to spend scarce effort on.
Not to give people a blank cheque if they happen to be under 18, either: the treatment of unsolicited underage genital pics should be a lot more serious.
Conversely the long-unravelling scandal of UK entertainers abusing children comes from not believing the victims at the time, or constructing an environment in which they were met with extreme hostility for coming forward. This led to a "missing stair" environment, where lots of people suspected that Jimmy Savile was an abuser but he was able to get unsupervised access to children to abuse.
Laws where the victim is the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn't always want the offender punished is not.
You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
No adult and no coercion — no case.
You cannot victimize yourself by sharing pics of your own self.
This isn't true in the least. Jaywalking and speeding can be done in a world with "population: 1", yet caught on camera would constitute a crime.
You're misusing the word crime here, despite me being very explicit about what I'm talking about.
The law does not determine crime-- morality determines that the law is criminal itself, as I've shown.
What I am in favor of is a different set of rules for minors self distributing. Possibly deferred adjudication and counseling first offense, ramping up from there. It is behavior that could cause trouble for the kid and possibly for others, can't just say "have at it!". But neither should it make one a registered sex offender with all that baggage.
Especially because it's been so horribly abused in the past. Take this case in Manassas, Virginia. 17 year old texts a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. The police find out, charge the 17 year old with distributing child pornography, and take pictures of his penis saying they need it for evidence[1]. They then get a warrant from the courts demanding that the 17 year old send them a picture of his erect penis[2]. And if he didn't comply:
> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.
Eventually they backed off when it received widespread attention in the press. Later it turned out that the detective in charge of the case was a pedophile[3]:
> A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.
When I read stories like this, I'm at a loss for words. No one in the justice system realized how terrible this is? Not only does this show the problem with giving law enforcement this kind of power, but I think it shows that we really need some sort of public advocacy department to monitor and go after this sort of abuse (someone to watch the watchmen).
The kid in the case got probation, by the way.
[1] http://time.com/2971033/virginia-police-search-warrant-photo... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/manassas-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-ends-child-marriage-ra...
It's akin to something that bothers me personally; when people refer to "America" when they mean "White America." Yes, the recent rise of the alt-right has put on display an undercurrent of discontent in America, but when you say that, you're not being specific in a way that is distorting.
In christianity - god is the father of all men - the pastor is refered to as "father" - the father is refered to as father
All of them are there to protect and all of them must be obeyed.
And it feels to me that the police are also a kind of father. They are also there to protect and they too must be obeyed.
I do see a technocracy as being a patriarchy as well. After all it's not just Xi, but Xi Dada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRo9AMT8FI
And he too is there to protect and he too must be obeyed.
Edit: And this is what I hate about HN. I spent time thinking about and writing this post. And the more time you spend writing a comment on HN, the fewer people will read it.
Just think how oppressive the matriarchy of the beehive must be to those poor little princesses killed in their crib by the ascendant queen mother, not to mention armies of 'drones' working their ass off for the glory of their queen. Naturaly, and it is in fact true, those little princesses had to go bye bye for the greater good of the hive.
(& do we really want to discuss the "pedophile" matriarchs of the Bonobos .. :)
p.s. I simply can not relate to your notion of the police as father figures.
The connection here is that abusers make use of power structures to protect themselves from the consequences of abuse. This will happen with any sort of power structure; abusers are wily. But it's especially problematic with a power structure built on gender, because our sexual roles are also strongly gendered. That leads to behavior patterns like "old boys' club" and "boys will be boys", where men are more likely to trust other men, and to act in ways that support the people most like them.
So if we were coming out of a non-patriarchal past, we would still have abusers exploiting whatever the power structure was, but the patterns would be different.
The correct answer to this is always "Since legislation is freeform and you're writing it now anyway, maybe you should write that it should never be used that way into the legislation".
The first case is something that actually happened to a friend of mine. He was 23 and dating a 17 year old, got convicted, sent to prison, and is now labeled a sex offender for life.
Are there any countries out there that take a sane approach to this moral conundrum?
This is actually known (as to the USA). When the law was passed, pornography producers didn't have to keep records of their models. The goal of setting the legal threshold at 18 was to make it really, really easy to convince a jury that a model who was e.g. 12 was below the legal threshold. It wasn't expected that photos of 16-year-olds would be prevented, because if all you're going on is a photo, they aren't easy to distinguish from 18-year-olds.
Most of the rest of the world actually.
...or even a 17.997-year-old.
The problem is that the world is mostly continuous, not discrete, but laws try to be the latter.
The UK had a problem a few years ago when they accidentally deployed some 17 year olds to Iraq.
This means a judge can't use his/her discretion to forgive, imposing extra toughness on the accused, usually in absurd ways, such as 30 years in prison for stealing a doughnut because of 2 prior similar petty theft convictions. But a Wall Street type could abuse billions of dollars and go free. I think this kind of cookie cutter justice is perverse and just serves to wage social war and fill up prisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
"Most jurisdictions have set a fixed age of consent" but also "Some jurisdictions have laws explicitly allowing sexual acts with minors under the age of consent if their partner is close in age to them."
> The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”
Most states have no minimum age, though some have a minimum age between 14 and 17 (only two have a minimum age of 17 going by the map in the article).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/sunday/it-was-for...
California has some sanity about "statutory rape", which is what your friend almost certainly got nailed on. The number of years under 18 as well as the age difference can be taken into account, and that conviction could be reduced to a different misdemeanor. However, you need a GOOD lawyer to pull this off.
What third-world country would send someone to prison for dating a 17 year old? I doubt even Iran or some other theocracy would do that. Where was this?
https://news.vice.com/article/irans-government-is-worried-th...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/29/iran-gender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender_registry#Sex_offe...
And I'm not sure that any of them would put someone that pees in public in those registries
You're arguing that the grandfather would have broken the law regardless of it existing, and is therefore innocent. Or that because a child was born out of this relationship, and grew just fine, that it makes it ethical and permissible in the general case. We don't know what the grandfather would have done. Time length of the relationship doesn't matter, and people often remain in dysfunctional marriages to the detriment of their own children.
This doesn't mean your friend's grandparents are bad, but that it's just an anecdote from the past that doesn't prove the rule against modern ethics regarding age of consent.
If you look at neurological science, crime rates, and even car insurance rates then it's fairly easy to see that the brain has not fully matured by age 18 in most people.
Sure, a person's capacity for logic/reason has matured but usually that happens around 15 anyway. Inhibition of risky behavior and thus the ability to make sound decisions definitely has not.
A more sane legal adult age would probably be around 25 but then how would we justify enlisting legal 'children' in the military?
Depends on whether maturity is reached 25 years after birth, or 7 years after you start to make your own decisions.
Perhaps the age of majority ought to be changed, perhaps the placement of all convicted on the registry ought to be lifted, perhaps the record ought to be sealed if good behavior can be maintained for X number of years, but these are all "oughts".
Write to your legislators and put your morality into law if you want to see changes. Don't ask judges to use their discretion and open the door to widespread Brock Turner justice.
I absolutely agree that you have a right to control the influences in your kids' lives (to some extent, at least). But why do you need to involve the law in this way?
Say your daughter receives a lewd photo from an underage male. Now she's in possession of child porn (whether she wanted the photo or not) and could end up on a sex offender registry for life. How is that sane?
And the guy who sent her the picture is "trafficking in child pornography"? C'mon. That's ridiculous.
Many of these crimes are on the book with "strict liability"; that is, the mere fact of existence or possession triggers culpability, and intent doesn't enter into the equation.
I think the better model is in places where the age of consent is at some reasonable age below the age of majority (no, I don't have a good definition for "reasonable", but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try), as it is in many places. There are no legal ramifications of sexual behavior down to that age, but parents are, as always, free to set limits and impose consequences if they aren't obeyed.
That seems excessive. And it's hard for me to empathize with any parent who thinks that's ok.
The most widely ratified human rights convention, the UNCRC, defines a child as someone under 18.
While the US doesn't ratify those conventions (because constitution) they do try to put them into law. That means they enact a mish-mash of bits and pieces, and leave out quite a lot.
England does a reasonable job here. We have the law (The Sexual Offences Act 2003 covers photographs of children), and we have prosecution advice (which covers things like whether it's in the "public interest" to prosecute.) The sexual offences act has some protections for people who are over 18 but who have a vulnerability impdeding choice (eg, a learning disability) or who are in a weird power dynamic (eg university lecturers).
There are also differences in law between someone under 13 (where it's assumed the alleged offender knew they were under age) and someone between 13 and 16/18 where the crown has to prove the alleged offender knew they were under age.
English law is a bit complicated because the age of consent for sexual activity is 16. It is weird that you can fuck a 17 year old, but you can't have naked photos of that same person. There's a narrow exemption in law for possessing images for people who are under 18 and married.
Here's the sexual offences act: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/contents
Here's the Crown Prosecution Service guidance: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/...
Almost all of them? Heck, 23-17? I don't even see the conundrum at all.
You are conflating two concepts that aren't relevant.
1) Dating and age of sexual consent have nothing to do with the legal rationale behind child pornography prohibitions.
2) Depictions of nudity of subjects under 18 do not run afoul of child pornography prohibitions (of course, contingent on if you can afford your rights all the way past appeals court)
The age in 2) is typically standardized by the federal government, and they just let people consent to contracts to exploit themselves at the age they can consent to any other contract.
It's a complete miscarriage of justice: throwing a minor in jail, using a law supposedly created to protect minors. It could only be more cynical if they tried them as an adult–I didn't check, for fear of what I may discover.
A majority of housing is no felon. Work is damn tough, and people get paid bottom dollar. In some places you can't vote.
A lot of activities prohibit felons too. Being a coach, for example, isn't a walk in the park.
And your traffic stops? Ugh.
I know this due to a friend stuck with one. Hanging with the wrong people, group case. First offense. It's pretty brutal.
In many States expungement isn't possible on many felony crimes either. Someone who got the message, living right, can't escape it despite the clear reform.
And if you think felons have a hard time getting a job...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/03/owning-...
We need to improve on all of this somehow. It's too much in way too many scenarios to make sense. And the problem is when it's all appropriate.
Work to be done here. A lot of it.
At an interview "so I googled you... what's this about the Supreme Court having a ruling over your dick pic, brah"
Better start his own business or get to flipping them burgz.
fortunately most people don't report it
minefield out there
also, stop sending dick pics to women
But hey, having fun is immoral.
I think at that point, you're likely to be involuntarily committed anyway :)
> one has committed a crime or not depends entirely on the other party will decide at some point in the future
That is already true. In many crimes you need to press charges, and sometimes you can even request the charges to be dropped.
Think about a simple case: a coworker slaps you. Is that an assault? Depends on the exact details and on your relationship with him.
So no mistake about this guy. The bigger question is if it was intended to be received by the adult, are they both guilty? Or just the adult at that point?
It seems to me the biggest hinge with this case is that the recipient didn't want the pic and actually called the cops herself.
Would be much more satisfying if they would have charged and proven that he assaulted the woman and just stuck with that.
The courts are saying there must be a legislative fix. What's the chance they actually fix it?
We should really cover this sort of thing under the existing indecent exposure laws.
The idea that minors cannot consent is correct. Children are not a scaled small version of adults. They need to develop not just grow physically and children are vulnerable. We need to protect vulnerable members of our society. However, like with so many things in life, we've gone too far though. We need to scale back this stupidity be it "for the children" or "terrorism" or "drugs are bad".
There's a quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results which I can't remember off the top of my head but to me all of this: including the drama against marriage and abortion feels like bread and circus to get people occupied with silliness.
It's the definition of insanity.
The abortion topic is interesting because we're talking about how we socially define a human life in a realm where science can't help at all (or at least has failed to give a concrete answer thus far). If it was an accepted truth that human life begins at conception, then abortion is murder. Even our laws reflect that at a certain stage prior to a baby exiting the uterus the thing is, for all intents and peuposes, alive. I actually think using fuzzy privacy prose to defend the right to terminate something that may or may not be conscious or "human" is really a stretch.
Anyway for all the other stuff I agree: insane.
On top of that some people can't tolerate the most effective hormonal birth control methods methods.
Wait what? Reproduction is the default consequence of sex. That's basic biological fact. You can't legislate that away.
Hetero vaginal intercourse often doesn't result in procreation, and that's your best shot at it anyway.
There isn't really any universal default consequence, just like there isn't a universal sex act. A lot of people enjoy it, some people feel shame, etc. Life is a spectrum.
I know why you picked that latter bit - it makes a cool sound bite. But it's just wrong, and whatever 'biology' imposes on us, we as a society shouldn't look at those loose shackles and say, "yes, this is the way it must always be."
ALSO, reproduction is the default consequence of a specific kind of sex under certain conditions, it's not like it's a 100% guarantee. Treating it as such makes you sound like a Texas lawmaker's favorite textbook.
Basically it boils down to what intelligence level we're ok to kill. Those pro-lifers chewing that juicy steak can't be more oxymoronic and hypocritical.
We know when the body begins to develop (conception), but we're uncertain as to what sensory input is being processed, whether that program is aware of its own state, and such things may vary between individuals.
We have bright lines, but none that have sufficient agreement about their use in all cases for legal purposes.
The hard part is in forming the laws and deciding whether they should value undeveloped members of the homo sapiens genus for their species, for being intelligent, their capacity to suffer, or other reasons, then balancing whatever rights are assigned against the rights of others.
Those questions you pose is not really of scientific domain - they are actually equivalent reformulation of the religious question when/where "soul" is created (equivalence of the "soul" and "human" questions is established by the religious dogma that only humans have "soul"). Science has Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, Australopithecus, etc... It is the question of religion domain whether Neanderthals or our common ancestors all the way to ancient apes were "humans"/"had soul". If notion of "soul" exists where did it appear between us and those cells $2B years ago to which each of us is connected through the continuous chain of bodies?
The entire abortion conversation is completely ruined by most people wearing glasses colored with existence bias.
Euthanasia is a much more complicated topic and I find it bewildering that we are focusing on this discussion on babies. I assume it's out of some notion of protecting the adorable innocence. I think it's important with these topics to try to keep emotions out of it because they just reflect biases we have built in due to evolution. Evolution of course is not your friend. Especially not after you've procreated.
So effectively yes, this is already the state of things, and there is no serious movement to restrict this form of post-birth abortion. Who would have imagined that all it would take for abortion to gain acceptance is to frame it as a religious liberty?
(correct answer: anyone who's lived in America)
That is false. Parents cannot legally deny their children life-saving treatment.
Also, I'm not sure where I am being hyperbolic. Peter Singer literally does advocate for the "right" to kill young children for a long time after their birth. So if you say that Peter Singer offers an "easy" moral approach to abortion, I have to ask whether you actually do agree with his logic and follow it to the same ultimate conclusions that he does.
While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation. It also does not account for scenarios where one might be willing to suffer on behalf of another. In other words, I'm not sure there exists an absolute scale of suffering which we can use to judge the morality of such a scenario. Again, maybe I'm not familiar enough with this ethical framework.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_eutha...
I'm not super expert about it either (at best a casual armchair philosopher), but from what I know Singers philosophy isn't specifically about suffering, it's about weighing interests. He assumes that the desire to avoid pain is one of the more important interests, hence it takes priority most (but not all) of the time. It's not black and white, it's more of a calculus about weighing the different competing interests of individuals, with certain classes of interests being given more weight than others.
I think Singers arguments in favor of abortion actually go farther than what OP's post implied regarding the fetus' capacity to feel pain. Singer argues that a fetus is unable to have any self-interests (including the desire to avoid pain), hence the interests of the mother should be given priority. I think this is taking it too far myself; I can agree with the delineation of the fetus' capacity to feel pain, but it is not clear to me at what point (if any) Singer feels it would be immoral to abort a fetus.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...
It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia:
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surge...
I believe some operations on infants are still being done without it:
http://gizmodo.com/why-are-so-many-newborns-still-being-deni...
"to this day, many procedures are performed on newborns without the benefit of analgesics. That’s largely because of an enduring misconception in the medical community that newborns don’t feel pain like adults."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
While that sentiment is certainly a part of medical history, there's a good reason why many procedures on infants are still carried out without anesthesia today. Infants are fragile and most forms of pain relief we use on adults are simply too dangerous for infants. Any anesthesiologist will weigh the benefits vs. the risks for each particular procedure and for infants that ratio is considerably different compared to adults.
"Key medical objections to infant anesthesia - that it was (a) unnecessary and (b) dangerous - were resolved by the brilliant research of Kanwal Anand and colleagues at Oxford from 1985 to 1987. Making precise measurements of infant reactions to surgery, they proved that the babies experienced pain, needed and tolerated anesthesia well, and had probably been dying of metabolic and endocrine shock following unanesthetized operations."
Source: http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html
[1] http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20120820/anesthesia...
[2] https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm364078.h...
I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting simply forgoing anesthesia in life threatening cases, but people might want to rethink a routine tonsillectomy or some dental work.
The statement was not about defining humanity. Why is it relevant if something is human or not? Would it be OK to torture non-human life that's clearly in possession of cautiousness just because it's not human?
Suffering has nothing to do with it, it's just a biological motivator for both parent and child to escape pre-reproduction death with insignificant side-effects like really, really missing a nice car or just an ice cream.
But while this topic is naturally highly dependent on "local" social rules, I think modern society should put responsibility and planning on the first place. If someone is not very sure that s/he can raise, care of, or simply enjoy the parenthood, it must be okay to abort it, unless that overweights all imaginable social programs. Like killing born children, for one. With modern society atomization and precision, abortion absolutely falls into "not your business" category in most places, unless one has very conservative and/or intrusive religious views, which is a bad thing itself, given how many completely different minds have to interact now on daily basis.
First, you use "murder" incorrectly. Abortion, in the US, is legal, and therefore not murder. Murder is defined as an illegal killing. That is why when someone is given the death penalty, they are said to be killed, not murdered. We say soldiers kill the enemy, not murder the enemy. By using "murder" you are adopting the conflation that anti-abortion activists have been (apparently) successful in promoting.
Second, nobody doubts that a zygote is alive. Nearly every cell in your body is alive (barring hair, nails, upper layers of skin, recently recycled cells), including sperm and eggs. When an egg and a sperm fuse, the result is also alive. The question is whether the rights of the zygote->blastula->fetus->baby trump the rights of the woman who is carrying it.
Obviously, by the time it becomes a baby, the baby's rights trump the desires of the woman carrying it, in general -- everybody agrees on that. Some people conceive (pun not intended) of the fertilized egg as being fully human, something God ordained and which is the vessel for a soul which has been waiting for that very zygote, and by aborting it, one is subverting God's will and destroying the intended future destiny of that soul.
Others don't share that belief. There is certainly no bright line dividing when that fetus is developed enough that its rights are superior to that of its mother, and deciding where to place that light should not be taken lightly and will cause discomfort. But we deal with such things all the time. It is legal to drive 45 MPH on the street near my house, but not 46. Yes it is somewhat arbitrary but not unreasonable either. That we have to make an uneasy boundary somewhere on the continuum isn't reason to declare that the speed limit should be zero, or that there should be no speed limit at all.
It should also be noted that at the time Roe v Wade was decided, Protestants and even evangelical Protestants by and large were not bothered by the decision. Catholics were, of course. It wasn't until the rise of the Moral Majority that the issue became objectionable to so many religious groups.
http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortio...
70% of evangelicals are opposed, while 44% of Catholics are. From that you might conclude that since the majority of Catholics are not opposed to abortion that proves your case. That would be wrong. The church and those who oppose it are far more vocal and influential than those who support it.
Really, this topic is in the news all the time. I don't know how the religious connection has escaped you.
Do they? They are the ones who define the law after all.
As for dictators, they are violating international law. Abortion is legal in the US (withing certain parameters), and international law does not declare it to be illegal either.
International law primarily regards the interactions between nations rather than the actions within a nation. It is debatable whether or not a nation that is non-signatory to a treaty has violated a law when they fail to abide by its precepts.
I think most people would claim that murder is intrinsically wrong, and is not bad merely because it is contrary to some words on a piece of paper.
People can disagree as to what is unjustified; one person might consider a death in an arranged duel to be murder, while another might consider it justified. Under the law of today it is unlawful, under many laws 200 years ago it would be lawful.
However you could probably get someone fired or develop a bad rep.
It's like you're saying the rape doesn't count if nobody gets pregnant.
Depends: https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/colorado-springs-man-car-...
Take a dead body, that could be murder( 1st degree, 2nd, 3rd), manslaughter or even a lawful killing (self defense). But as you will see in the link below even receiving a text can lead to conviction even if you receive it in error and report it.
[1]https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/news/congressio...
Anyway, putting someone on a CP spam list, and then getting them busted, might well do it.
It's not noble to take responsibility for things when you have no control over them and thus won't be able to fix them.
The "we" wording sweeps all these limitations of democracy comprehensively under the rug: it diverts blame onto the people when it should rightly be directed at the existing political order.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255290
I'm very lucky and I have some wonderful children I cannot see them going out and doing something like this however people do stupid things. I don't think charging someone with something that is going to stick with them for the rest of their life for something that they did when they were 13 ,14, 17 years old.. they are kids and their brains, hello all you scientists out of there, are not even fully developed.
Listen, if a 17-year-old child sent an explicit image to my daughter I would be over at the parents house faster than you can imagine. That kid obviously needs a swift kick in the ass, he or she does not deserve to be charged with a crime will follow that person for life.
If we continue to charge children as adults, kids that are 13,14,15 or 17, then we might as well change the age of when you are an adult to 13 years old.
has anyone given any consideration to the crap that these kids are bombarded with on a moment by moment basis on television in music and all entertainment, it is hyper sexualized. What do you expect your children to do when they are faced with this?
The sad situation and I don't agree with the stupid thing that this kid did in the stupid things the kids are going to do but they are kids! Come on now, haven't we seen cases recently where adult pedophiles have been let off? Are we going mad?
Somehow these age limits sound contrasting each other.
It goes without saying civil and criminal child abuse, neglect, and abondonment cases are as difficult as any to stomach. But there are famous case of parents with "bathtub" framed photos of their kids on their hallway walls and grandfathers with pictures of their grandchilds running through sprinklers, and as you might imagine they were painted as the devil incarnate.
Our law clinic was very aware the issues of text messaging even then, 2006. At the time we used the Socratic method to debate the logic and human aspects of charging the young children guilty of originating "sext messages" of themselves. My position was always that such a law would chill the indemnity a victim needs to come forward.
One of the major issues is that many of these crimes are under the strict liability [2] standard meaning if the pictures exist, the defendant is guilty, notwithstanding their intent.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Romeo_and_Jul...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability
So what, in a decade or so, an appreciable percentage of young people will be labeled as child pornographers?
Washington SC: "He claims any potential harm in his case is just as attenuated and vague as Free Speech Coalition. Because no harm was done, he should have the same right as any adult to take voluntary photographs of his own body. We do not find this argument persuasive."
Am I correct in reading this as the court basically saying "The defendant presents a solid argument. We don't care." ??
Given how persuasive this argument is, I am a bit surprised that the court was not persuaded. I understand that Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition has some distinguishing factors, like the fact that the depictions in question were clearly distinguishable from records of a crime (on account of them not being photographic images of actual minors).
This is a messy and complicated business, it seems like there needs to be a legislative solution since the supreme court can not find what most people consider a just outcome in an interpretation of the statute.
Of course, coercion is still illegal, and coercion of a minor would carry higher criminal penalties. But distribution of content does not automatically imply coercion or violence.
But sentencing somebody to prison for looking at cp is akin to sending gay people to prison.
Whatever one's opinion may be, it's pretty difficult to arrive at solid conclusions if the premise is such a sweeping assumption.