I’m sitting here tonight watching an episode of Law and Order SVU, in between watching episodes of NCIS and Scrubs, when a main point of the story revolves around a girl being arrested for taking and sending risqué photos of herself and sending them to her boyfriend. This poor deluded girl gets arrested and eventually charged with taking and distributing child pornography on her cell phone. Now the taking of and proliferation of raunchy photos is nothing new, the only thing that is is the ease of use.
There is nothing different between a teenage girl taking photos of her naughty bits, sending them to their boyfriend and those photos ending up on the internet, and a girl from previous generations taking photos of their naughty bits, mailing or giving those photos to their beau, and that photo ending up tacked to a notice board somewhere, granted there definition of what a naughty bit is may have changed, and the number of people who might see it may not be as many, but overall, its no different.
Now this episode has some reality, as two 15 year old girls in California faced not only criminal convictions, but becoming listed as registered sex offenders… just for taking pictures of themselves in the mirror, and sent them to boy-friends, if I recall, they were wearing bikini’s or something, I kinda laughed a little when I first heard it about a year ago, and dismissed it, it wasn’t until I started hearing recently the bleeding hearts throwing around the ‘P’ word; in this case Paedophile.
Now not taking the shine off the fact that paedophiles have some deep routed psychological issues, but every single time that anyone in politics want to scare the ignorant masses into supporting whatever platform they want support for, they will wily nilly throw around Paedophilia as the single cause for whatever is wrong with society, yes even Stephen Conroy’s platform for the Internet Filter revolves around it, even though if you look at the fine print, it seems that protecting the kids from kiddie porn, doesn’t even seem to be a small part of it.
Okay, now that that’s out of me, we can continue, the problem with these kids getting in trouble for doing things that they don’t actually think is wrong, but that it because the laws have not caught up with the prevalence with the technology available to mostly stupid masses.
I can pretty much be sure that every guy that is reading this has received a ‘sext’ or a saucy email from a girlfriend, or at least knows someone who has and has seen it; even I have received a few in my time, but unfortunately most relationships don’t last very long, and sometimes these photos end up being sent to friends, or sent to the myriad of raunchy websites dedicated to ex girlfriends.
Granted maybe not all of these girls are 18, which alone brings some really hilarious parts of law into effect, in most Developed nations, the age of consent is 16, and some its lower, and yet, it is illegal for that same 16 year old to show their boyfriend, who if the same age, photos of their naughty bits that they have probably seen in person…a friend of mine made the classic point
you can have sex at 16 but not watch the video of you having sex with your girlfriend until your 18
Now I would like to make clear that seeing teens in varying stages of undress, is not something that I want to see I got to see enough of that being with Tikara since she was 15. But there are a lot of teen couples out there who want to send MMS’s (that’s the technical term for sending pictures via the cell phone, sexting is a buzz term) of their nasty bits, and I think they should be allowed to TO EACH OTHER, if it goes further than that, then sure, throw the book at them.
I am already aware that this might be my most controversial rant, but you never know where these things come from, I also want to apologise to my regular readers who are hoping for a review or news, and I promise, patience, your prayers will be answered
