Have you ever met a teenager? They're fucking idiotic. That's why we don't let them drink alcohol or vote or get married or have sex or join the army or a bunch of other stuff.
> You know those dirty letters you got from your sweetheart when you were 17? Sexting is the same damn thing.
No it isn't. A dirty letter is a dirty letter. A photo sent via sms has lasting consequences. Youth don't understand consequences, that's why we need to keep reminding them that anything they put on the Internet will stay there forever.
You make this sound like a sociological issue but it's really biological. Teenagers are idiots because their brains / hormones are going through rapid and dramatic changes that retard their ability to make good judgements about what is safe and what is not.
So, you are in favor of the current remediation against teenagers that sext, which is generally to bring the recipient up on charges of possession of child pornography and the sender on charges of making and distributing child pornography?
Such felony convictions will have far more ramifications that the act itself ever could.
That doesn't happen in my country. The US legal system is a cluster fuck of horrible practice, and it's not just weird application of sexting laws that's the problem.
That this doesn't happen where you come from is good. It is the reason for arguing for a different status for these things for teenagers in America, though. More than a few lives have been destroyed in applying these laws to those they were supposed to protect.
I think if the sender and recipient in your described scenario are consenting then they should not be charged with these laws. That is not the intent of those laws. Even if the recipient is not consenting, the sender should also be charged with some other sort of harassment. But if the recipient forwards or shares the image in any way then they probably should receive the severe distribution charge.
Keep in mind that generally teenagers lack legal agency, and so consent is irrelevant because they cannot exercise consent. Their parents can exercise or choose not to exercise the consent for them and a lot of these cases are parents punishing their children's partner. It's not generally the state going off on some ridiculous spree of hunting down horny teenagers just for shits and giggles.
> Have you ever met a teenager? They're fucking idiotic.
I've met plenty of idiotic adults, and I've met plenty of non-idiotic teenagers.
If "idiocy" is the appropriate criterion for determining how people should be disparately treated by the law, then let's develop a precise definition of "idiotic", so we can directly determine whether someone is an idiot or not, and stop using other, inconsistently correlated variables a proxy.
Have you ever met a teenager? They're fucking idiotic. That's why we don't let them drink alcohol or vote or get married or have sex or join the army or a bunch of other stuff.
> You know those dirty letters you got from your sweetheart when you were 17? Sexting is the same damn thing.
No it isn't. A dirty letter is a dirty letter. A photo sent via sms has lasting consequences. Youth don't understand consequences, that's why we need to keep reminding them that anything they put on the Internet will stay there forever.