I think we’re in agreement that it is wrong to distribute sexual images of minors, yes? So the judicial system is faced with that problem.
I first encountered it back around 2005 or ‘06, when picture phones and MMS were still pretty new, and my son was in High School. On his phone, I found photos that girls had sent of themselves topless, and later one of a girl fingering herself. These were 14–15 year old girls. My first thoughts were, where are their parents and where did they learn such behavior? Then I wondered, how do I as the parent of a son, teach him that this is unacceptable – how do you convince a teenage boy to say “no” to girls that are sexually aggressive (yes, the girls were much more aggressive then the boys in the early teen years) when it had been all over the news not too long before that our own President did not say “no”?
Clearly, the parents are NOT teaching their kids or monitoring their activities; besides which, teens aren’t often too concerned with what their parents say, as opposed to what is ‘cool’ among their peers. Thus, it behooves the powers that be to do their civic duty to stop this behavior. What are their options? Would a public service campaign make a difference? By taking a hard stance, they convey the stronger message that our laws and culture believe that minors should not be engaging in sexual activity. Someone has to be held accountable – but who? It makes sense for it to be the person who distributes the images.
By having a few cases handled this way, the public is aware of this behavior, so hopefully more guardians will pay closer attention to what their kids are doing; and hopefully the kids will see that having a conviction is a bad thing – even if they can’t comprehend that sending naked or sexual images of themselves (or others) is bad.
How else do any of you think society or government could handle this better, since individual families have clearly not been preventing their kids from doing this? Do you think it should be the responsibility of the schools, since they have already been left to pick up the slack where families are failing to teach – such as bullying, other sex ed, resisting alcohol and drugs, etc.? I’m just curious what those of you who believe this is too strong a legal stance would do if you were responsible for every citizen in your state.