Totally agree. These kids are young, not brain damaged.

However, one exception - and it's tied to the whole bullying thing. When the Mean Girls take a picture of some poor girl in the locker room and then post it maliciously, then I say charge 'em with distribution of child porn.

Very different in that case, UW Girl.

The most important lesson most kids have to learn is that actions have consequences. I certainly don't think these kids are child pornographers, discussing the spirit as opposed to the letter of the law. And risking arrest, and possibly a ruined life is not a reasonable consequence for what is an immature (perhaps "innocent" is not the right term) act of youthful exhuberance.

But what about the pic that gets into the wrong hands and gets sent all over the school, or further? Say you break up with the person you sent it to (and at that age, you certainly will) and it becomes something that you'll worry about how they use it for who knows how long?

Here's the most important lesson you can learn about the Internet.

IT IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SEND SOMETHING TO ONLY ONE PERSON, AND KEEP IT THAT WAY.

Don't say, send, photograph or otherwise disseminate on the Internet that which you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times.

Allow me to relate a tale...

A friend of mine got a divorce from his wife. While they were married, her sexual desires and exhibitionism were...pedestrian.

Some months afterward, he was trolling the newsgroups for emotional inspiration (judge not, lest ye be judged) and came across of a woman, her face obscured, posing in a fashion intended to share many things about herself to all and sundry.

He was pretty sure he recognized the woman...but he was POSITIVE he recognized a mark on the headboard of what was once their bed.

NOTHING stays private on the internet.

Kids are just doing what they've always done! But now we have better technology to do it with, that's all! I remember being a young teen and exploring my sexuality... a lot, and with other people (not that I was loose or anything, I was a virgin until 19 years old!) and if we'd had the opportunity to be able to sext, we'd have done that too... I don't think there is any harm in it.

However... now, being a mother of two who will eventually be teens, I can understand the concern parents have on this issue. I don't want some nasty old man enjoying himself to pics of my 14 year old daughter because she thought sexting was cool.

But where do we draw the line... we can't keep advancing forward with technology, teach our children how to use it and then NOT expect them to come up with a way to use it in a way it wasn't intended for.

As I've long said,* there's a changing culture regarding nude and explicit pictures. In 20 years, I suspect these sexting teenagers will look back not with horror, like today's serious adults expect, but with bemusement.

The same arguments were made in the 60's and 70's, in response to sexual liberation, but never resulted in the sort of attitudes they predicted. I think that it's fair to say that adults develop a sense of self ownership, humility, and privacy that teens often don't have. Which isn't to argue that sexting should be illegal, simply that Mr. Apollo is expecting a change in human nature that probably has not come about. There's nothing so magical about mobile phones that they're capable of fundamentally altering our sexuality.

As someone who long ago worked the night shift at Albertson's, I can testify that even in the old "take them down to the developing center" days about 1/10 of all the photographs were of someone or another naked.

I wonder if there are a still a few of me out there that my girlfriend took. We took lot's of each other, but when we broke up she took custody of all them...

Well, having read only the blog and not the comments, and saying I am very against a sexting teen getting charged as a sex offender for life: if distributing kiddie porn is illegal, it's illegal. Shouldn't be okay for some people (sexting teens) and not okay for others (nambla members). If the teens are old enough to get their little tech toys and know it will see a wider audience, they're old enough to know sending kiddie porn is illegal and there are consequences. They can't be smart in paragraph one and dumb in paragraph 2 just because it works for your argument.

No, they DON'T understand the consequences of what they are doing. Oh, they may intellectually understand that their friends may send it to someone else, but they really don't get what it will mean further down the line in their lives. They don't have the understanding of how it can (not definitely will, but CAN) affect them in the future.

Even if they don't run afoul of the law, what happens 10 years from now when their employer finds out that they helped pass around pictures of their then-15-year-old classmate? Maybe nothing, but maybe they get fired, and essentially blackballed from their entire industry. Teenagers just don't get that.

Incidentally, momof4, that response was not specifically at you, but at the statement this "Apollo" character made in the article above.

Seems like if you are going to take nekkid pictures of yourself, the BEST time to do it is before your eighteenth birthday.

Should you ever become famous, those photos can't be shown as any site hosting them would fall afoul of kiddie porn statutes. For a recent example, Miley Cyrus had pics that hit the internet a few weeks after her 18th birthday, which then were all over the place, but the signs that proved they were her (hotel room, clothes) also suggested the shots were taken a few weeks before she was 'legal'.

Those snaps promptly disappeared (or the naughty bits were blurred). Seems a bit ridiculous, nothing magically changed about her nipples that made them less juvenille (or adult) looking over the course of the month in question, yet legally those shots became very troublesome for any site that hosted them.

So, high school girls, snap away, those shots can't be distributed too widely, but once you hit college, should you stay in the 'sexting' habit, expect those pert young breasts to stay with you with the rest of your life (wait, that's a bad thing?).

Child pornography laws were written to prevent abusive situations for children. They were wrote to prevent pedophiles using predatory behavior to take advantage of people that could not fight for themselves.

The law goes completely beyond itself if someone is charged for taking a picture of themselves. I'm of the opinion that any self-portrait should be considered exempt.

This is a wonderful example how a good intention law goes well beyond what it was meant to do.

"The real problem is the idiot lawmakers who criminalize sexting, turning teens into sex offenders for sending out naked pictures of themselves or their friends or partners."

A real problem, yes. It's a ridiculous legal overreaction, with penalties far graver than the offenses warrant, and probably graver than penalties for more serious crimes. I'd submit that doing nothing at all would be better than forcing people onto a sex offender list, although doing nothing doesn't sound quite right either.

But to call idiot lawmakers the real problem makes it sound as if without them, there would be no problem at all. As previous commenters have suggested, there are lots of potential problems with young people sexting, just not ones that the law is agile or imaginative enough to deal with.

Ah, yes. The great teen pastime of "show me yours and I'll show you mine." Now in streaming video.

This is just one of many ways our laws are behind the tech curve.

This law needs some tweaking.

What we need is a campaign entitled "If You Must Send Out Naked Pictures of Yourself, Make Sure You Crop Your Face Out." That way you always have plausible deniability and the pictures can't come back to bite you when you're running for office 20 years later. And you can't proof it's kiddy porn if you can't identify the subject, right?

What nobody has mentioned so far: If you want to smear, mob, make fun of... whatever somebody, Photoshop's the name of the "game" - you can produce apparently nude pictures of anybody you can get a headshot of, in just about any pose you want, including those same lawyers.

Being careful with pictures, that may be something we need to teach, but even that's not going to be enough if somebody (with the slightest tech savvy) wants to bully...

What I don't think a lot of these kids realize is that there are porn sites that aggregate these pictures. I don't know how they get them, but they're presented alongside hardcore porn. A gentleman that I know of, through a friend, has been going through the process of trying to get his daughter's pictures off of these sites. Fortunately the pics of her aren't that bad, but the context is very bad. It's apparently freaked her out to the point that she's changed the color of her hair and wants to go far away for college.

It's probably an easy trap for a young woman to fall into, especially if she's grown up in a nice community and has been protected from this sort of thing. She thinks its grown up and sexy to take some provocative pictures, but she doesn't really understand how the pictures are going to be presented, and to whom. Apparently the man's daughter assumed that her pictures would only be sent to boys her age, which gives you an idea of how much thought she'd put into it.

"I'm of the opinion that any self-portrait should be considered exempt."

So, then when a parent or other molester make the kid take the pic, they're A-Ok?

When I was 22, I participated in a mff threesome and we took pics. They sent them to me and I promptly forgot about them. 2 years later, an ex hacked my email and found them buried in my inbox. He sent them to my entire address book and they were VERY graphic. A restraining order and suing him in small claims took care of his obsession with me but who knows where those pictures ended up.

Lesson learned though. I sext and still take pictures but I make sure my face isnt in the pic.

My thoughts about those pictures getting out is that there are millions and probably billions of images like that or more graphic and the likelihood anyone will find a picture of me is slim. And the chances I'll ever be famous for people to hunt down pics of me is even slimmer!

Notice the sickest part of this? I bet not.

You can go into a video store and buy a movie where a girl is chainsawed in half, or Ray Liotta gets fed his own brains, but the world is completely at an end if your teen is seen naked, anonymously or not. Or if she has sex with anyone earlier than you think is smart.

Sex is more important than murder. Murderers can be excused for their crime.

Rad, a couple of the characteristics of the movies your describing: First, they're just pretend, and everyone knows it. Second, the people in the movies have volunteered to be in them and are paid for it. That's not the same as a kid finding her picture flying through cyberspace unimpeded.

Of course, if you want to talk about how we seem less offended by graphic media violence than graphic media sex, we could have a great discussion, but that doesn't really seem to be the issue here.

Oh, while we're at it, is sexting exactly an epidemic, or is it one of those things that just a few people are doing? It seems to me a sense of proportion is in order here.

The thing I want to know is when did merely naked become (kiddie)porn? When I was a kid and also 30 years later when my kids were little, 2 year olds running around sans clothes at a pool in the backyard were a common and accepted thing. The mere fact that someone somewhere might find this sexually titillating was not enough to push us into a Sharia like position on nude bathing. This was even more common and accepted in Europe than the US.
What is next? Women and men having to walk around with their faces covered, not exposing even an ankle to avoid a charge of public lascivious behavior? Our freedoms are disappearing folks, not with a bang but with a whimper and it comes in the guise of the anti pornography "nanny state".
For 15 minutes in the future (or retroactively) we are ALL child pornographers.
This is what is known as either a slippery slope or unintended legal consequences. Not to put to fine a point on it and this is just a prediction not an argument.
If gay marriage becomes some sort of federal entitlement, a lot of nice 40 something lesbians and gay guys are going to marry their long time companion of 15 or 20 years, (and it will be really cute) but this same set of rights will also allow the rich gay pedophile to bring over a series of young lovers from third world countries who are barely legal (or illegal but with a forged birth certificate.) If you don't believe that 2nd and 3rd world countries forge birth certificates, look up Chinese gymnasts and Russian junior tennis players.

The only limitation is going to be how long he has to be "married" to the first one before he can dump him for a fresher younger one. As Glenn Reynolds says "What could go wrong?"

"But to call idiot lawmakers the real problem makes it sound as if without them, there would be no problem at all. "

I tend to think the reverse is more true; that is, the expectation that passing a law will make the prohibited behavior magically disappear. I do think this falls into the category of Criminalization of Everything (CoE). Putting teens on the sex offender list for juvenile behavior is ridiculous -- after all, the reason they engage in juvenile behavior is because they are, well, juveniles.

However, I'm not sure I agree that in the future it will be no big deal. You never know how social standards will change in the future. It may very well be that, twenty years from now, having nude photos of oneself circulating around the Internet will be a deal-breaker in some fields of employment.

Here's a case where the parents and teens had more sense than to be bullied.

Court Slaps Prosecutor Who Threatened Child-Porn Charges Over ‘Sexting’

The Nancy Doe picture probably is on the border of child porn. The other girls showed the picture on one of the morning shows. She and her girlfriend did head and chest shots in sports or training bras. They were cute to me as an adult. As a horny teenager -- maybe they would be different. But I've seen more teenage skin at a pool or beach.

I am so glad the prosecutor has been slapped down and voted out of office.

Here is the *ahem* Money shot from that case in PA:
the appellate court stated the prosecutor does not have authority to “coerce parents into permitting him to impose on their children his ideas of morality and gender roles.”

In my day, parents would have taken care of this. Maybe we would have been punished, or maybe they would have shrugged. Either way, it's the parents right to raise their kid they way they see fit. It's just another Nanny-State intrusion on our rights as parents.

As Eric points out, nakes pics are nothing new. They are just easier to take and distribute now. How many of the older generation still have naked pics of old boyfriends/girlfriends in a shoebox in the attic? Yet somehow we didn't get prosecuted for taking them, or even for showing them to friends.

What about pics taken by parents? The kids in the tub. The toddlers running around on the lawn under a sprinkler. A couple of decades ago, these were utterly normal - now, some DA is just itching to get his stats up by prosecuting you for them.

momof4 then asks the right question: "if distributing kiddie porn is illegal, it's illegal. Shouldn't be okay for some people (sexting teens) and not okay for others."

This question points out the absurdity of current laws. In fact, it should not be illegal to distribute pictures. It should be illegal to abuse children.

This is like the war on drugs: all we have achieved by prosecuting people smoking joints is to fill the jails while making the whole problem worse. Trying to combat sexual child exploitation by jailing anyone with pictures of a naked kid is *exactly* the same kind of idiotic, misguided initiative.

Still, I do like the INTENTION of the Abbott/Watson bill... Sexting teenagers shouldn't be placed in the same category as child molesters. Of course, teens make stupid/reckless decisions, but "distributing" a naughty picture of yourself isn't the same thing as raping a four-year-old. Keeping teen sexters off of sex offender registries and out of prison makes sense.

-Kids are just doing what they've always done!-

Wow. After reading this and several posts along this line, I now realize how boring my youth must have been.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

While I never took any sexy pics of myself as a teenager, I did help two of my girlfriends take lingerie shots of themselves for their boyfriends. This was 20 years ago and there were no digital cameras or cellphones (except maybe in Hollywood?) We just took them to a big city about an hour away to get them developed so no one who knew the girls in question would see them or tell their parents. And I have no doubt that we were not the first generation to think of this or do something similar. And I have no doubt that the current generation will not be the last.

-And I have no doubt that the current generation will not be the last.-

Yeah, nothing is really new. We just find new ways to do it.

Unfortunately for the young & the reckless, the Internet has made it possible to be instantly humiliated world-wide instead of just locally.

"Rad, a couple of the characteristics of the movies your describing: First, they're just pretend, and everyone knows it."

The audience calls this "entertainment".

Tell John Hinckley.

Either available media encourages antisocial behavior, or it does not.

Notice something else? The pros, because they can be identified, are at greater risk than an anonymous girl -- but then, any available girl may serve as a victim.

Let's be sure to get this straight: if - and this is changing the subject very slightly - if pictures teens send of themselves are not harmful, then pictures of teens other people send are not harmful. It's a picture, not a person.

Everyone knows it.

I definitely see a huge difference between sending out pictures of yourself, and sending out pictures of someone else without their consent. Frankly, the second one DOES sound very serious to me.

I live in Texas, and this bill will actually correct the wrong that everybody seems to be upset about with respect to these situations.

Currently, sexting is a felony with a mandatory entry on the sex offender's list. This law would reduce it to a misdemeanor, and with counseling, the minor avoids being placed on the list.

I wish people would quit thinking we're some fundamentalist state here. The proposed legislation is actually very good.