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posted by janrinok on Monday January 01 2018, @12:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the punishing-the-victim dept.

Child porn law goes nuts: 14-year-old girl charged for nude selfie

A 14-year-old girl is facing charges in Minnesota juvenile courts that could lead to her being placed on a sex offender registry—all for taking a nude selfie and sending it to a boy at her school. Prosecutors say that she violated Minnesota's child pornography statute, which bans distributing sexually explicit pictures of underaged subjects. But a legal brief filed this week by the ACLU of Minnesota says that this is ridiculous. Charging a teenager for taking a nude selfie means the state is charging the supposed victim—an absurd result that the legislature can't have intended when it passed Minnesota's child pornography statute, the ACLU argues.

The case is being heard by a juvenile court in Rice County—about an hour south of the Twin Cities. Because this is juvenile court, there's a lot we don't know including the name of the teenager. We don't even know if the selfie in question was a photo or a video. What we do know comes from the ACLU's legal brief, which includes a brief description of the case. According to the ACLU, the anonymous teen sent a nude selfie to a classmate over Snapchat. The recipient apparently took a screenshot of the message and shared it with others at school without the girl's consent. One of the classmates alerted the police in Faribault, Minnesota, which is presumably where the girl goes to school.

Officials decided to charge the girl with the "felony sex offense of knowingly disseminating pornographic work involving a minor to another person." An adult convicted of this crime can face up to seven years in prison. As a 14-year-old, the girl in this case isn't facing a criminal prosecution in adult court and won't face the harsh sentence an adult might face. The problem, the ACLU notes, is that if she's found guilty she is likely to be placed on a sex offender registry, where she would face the same stigmas as someone who commits violent sex crimes. That could lead to difficulties finding a job or obtaining housing. The ACLU's brief doesn't mention whether the boy was charged for distributing the girl's photo to other classmates.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Justin Case on Monday January 01 2018, @02:02AM (12 children)

    by Justin Case (4239) on Monday January 01 2018, @02:02AM (#616307) Journal

    Minnesota's child pornography statute, which bans distributing sexually explicit pictures of underaged subjects

    So she was fucking somebody?

    Mere skin is not "sexually explicit" or "porn".

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:30AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:30AM (#616314)

    What is softcore pornography, Trebek?

    Try your argument when the cops find images of nude teen or preteen girls (labia visible, no fucking) on your cputer.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @12:51PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @12:51PM (#616402)

      Geez... when I was a little kid, my mom snapped a pic of me on an old black and white kodak brownie camera... peeing next to a fountain.

      I was leaning way back, and had the stream neatly arched flying right over my head.

      I would hardly consider that photo sexual, even though I was butt-nekkid.

      And looking back on that old photo, I sure wish I could still do that. These days I often can't get enough line pressure to overcome surface tension, I get runback I cannot see, and I don't discover it till I am packing the tools back up and notice the front of my pants are all wet.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:04AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:04AM (#616666)

        These days I often can't get enough line pressure to overcome surface tension, I get runback I cannot see

        Get your prostate checked for cancer etc.

        But if you're over 70 and don't mind dying in 10-15 years then no biggie - prostate cancer normally kills quite slowly, you might die of something else first if you're 70+.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:48AM (#616317)

    Pics or it didn't happen.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 01 2018, @03:24AM (7 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday January 01 2018, @03:24AM (#616326) Journal

    This is an important point. In case people haven't been paying attention for the past decade, parents of really young kids taking innocent fun family photos at bathtime (for example) have been flagged for potential "child porn" production. I don't know about the photos in this case, but there seems to be an assumption now that child nudity is -- a priori -- pornographic and "sexual" somehow.

    Which seems to me to say something more about how sick police, prosecutors, and lawmakers are... To make that assumption.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 01 2018, @04:47AM (5 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 01 2018, @04:47AM (#616350) Journal

      That was true even before electronic imagery was available to the public. If you care to research it, you'll find that some photo developers would report child porn to the police when they developed pictures of babies being bathed. By some of these preposterous standards, my parents were child porn producers.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday January 01 2018, @11:42AM (3 children)

        by Bot (3902) on Monday January 01 2018, @11:42AM (#616392) Journal

        Given that you meatbags pop out NUDE babies when conceiving, I say, jail all moms!

        --
        Account abandoned.
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 01 2018, @12:36PM (2 children)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 01 2018, @12:36PM (#616397) Journal

          Actually, that doesn't happen. Those little meatbags don't pop out until after about 9 months of gestation.

          • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday January 01 2018, @01:58PM (1 child)

            by Bot (3902) on Monday January 01 2018, @01:58PM (#616413) Journal

            Those builds sure take time. Being un-parallelizable does not help.

            --
            Account abandoned.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:28AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:28AM (#616661)

              Twins and triplets don't really take more time. And while you can't have 9 women collectively make a baby per month for 9 months, you can have them reach the same quantity of babies at the end of those 9 months if you let them make babies the normal way.

      • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 01 2018, @02:44PM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday January 01 2018, @02:44PM (#616419) Journal

        Yes, that's actually one of the things I was talking about. People still develop photos and such things have happened in recent years. However, the hysteria has definitely been ramped up in the past decade or so, so such things appear in the news more often.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:13AM (#616667)

      I don't know about the photos in this case, but there seems to be an assumption now that child nudity is -- a priori -- pornographic and "sexual" somehow.

      To horny guys even fully dressed ladies can be porn, and scantily dressed ones definitely ;). But despite wanking off to porn, I haven't raped anyone nor had the urge to...

      So similarly such stuff probably is porn to pedophiles and even fully dressed kids might be porn to them too. And some pedophiles might never ever rape a kid even if they had the chance and could get away with it.