A 14-year-old girl has been charged with distributing child pornography for posting naked pictures of herself on the internet.
A 14-year-old girl faces child pornography charges after she allegedly posted nearly 30 nude pictures of herself on a social networking site, authorities said. ...Following a month-long investigation, detectives discovered that the person posting the pictures was the same person featured in them — the 14-year-old girl. Anyone who was “friends” with the girl through MySpace or knew her full name could have accessed the photos.
The teen was charged with one count of possession of child pornography and one count of distribution of child pornography. She was released into her mother’s custody, Maer said.
You can't fix stupid, and you can't outlaw it either.
Charging the girl seems like a waste of law enforcement resources. She's apparently old enough to get an abortion without parental consent in New Jersey, and if she's capable of making that decision then can't law enforcement officers and prosecutors find something better to do?
Of course, I don't think 14-year-old girls should be allowed to get abortions without parental consent -- I'm just illustrating the absurdity of the system. Other than our heritage of Judeo-Christian morality, there's no reason that it should be illegal for a person to publish pictures of herself when there is no coercion or exploitation involved. The "no one gets hurt" standard of modern secular morality would appear to be satisfied since the girl posted these pictures of her own volition, so what's the problem?
Secularists who reject Christianity as a basis for morality will no doubt be quick to employ hand-waving arguments to explain why teenage girls shouldn't be allowed to distribute naked pictures of themselves. The most common such argument is that pictures of naked children encourage pedophiles to abuse children. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if it is, should we outlaw banks because they encourage bank robbers? Should we outlaw violent video games because they (possibly) encourage violence? Should we outlaw images or movies that portray crimes other than sexual abuse? ("Jackass" has inspired idiots to do all sorts of stupid and illegal things.)
Without Christianity or some other revelatory source of morality, there's no way to justify the prohibition of possession of child pornography by a person who has not herself abused a child.
"Secularists who reject Christianity as a basis for morality will no doubt be quick to employ hand-waving arguments to explain why teenage girls shouldn't be allowed to distribute naked pictures of themselves."
Actually, I'm going to have a bash at explaining why that should be legal.
Firstly, "You can't fix stupid, and you can't outlaw it either." Can't say it better than that. This behaviour requires parental admonishment, not criminal proceedings.
Secondly nudity != pornography. eg. every parent has naked baby photographs, naturists presumably have photos of each other etc. Don't criminalise normal and/or merely eccentric activity.
But I think the important thing is to identify what really should be illegal. Owning / distributing portrayals of crimes is a standard part of human experience, stories have always been obsessed by the criminal and violent. However, owning images of actual crimes probably should be illegal. Not just talking about exploiting teenagers, but also if I owned photos or films of a genuine murder or a bank robbery, I would expect to be invited to the local police station to answer some probing questions.
I've no idea if this is how the real law works, but it's what seems reasonable to me. I've no doubt that current legislation has singled out underage porn since that what we're all lighting torches and grasping pitchforks over at the moment.