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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @04:44PM (1 child)
Oh, please. "Minor" does not mean "kindergartener unable to operate anything more complex than a polaroid" -- FFS, this very case is about a 14-year-old. If you don't think teenagers (and younger) have dabbled in photography almost from its introduction, including developing their own film or plates, your stupendous ignorance is part of the problem -- this myth of juvenile uselessness fuels those who want to treat minors like infants until they turn eighteen, and then expect them to instantly adapt to the adulthood they've been insulated from.
Regardless, they definitely had polaroids in 1977. Not sure if you have no clue when we started criminalizing child porn, or have no clue about the history of instant cameras, but either way, would it kill you to google first, instead of rubbing your ignorance in everyone's face?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 01 2018, @06:39PM
In the 70s, the Polaroids weren't the main lack. It was the inability to copy, transmit and store photos cheaply-- no Internet, no smart phones with digital cameras, no gigabyte hard drives, flash drives and SD cards-- that kept the lid on this.