Two cases on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean have garnered attention this week with the common link that both cases involve criminal sanctions being imposed on teenagers under the age of legal majority for having nude images of themselves. In North Carolina two romantically involved 17 year olds faced charges when a search of one's phone lead police to discover their mutual exchange of nude photographs. One of the 17 year olds plead down to a lesser charge while the other still faces multiple charges of child exploitation almost all of them relating to his own self portraits (archived) making him legally the victim and perpetrator of his own exploitation. Meanwhile in Britain authorities have without any formal arrest or charges filed a 14 year old boy in Criminal Records Bureau database for a term of no less than 10 years (archived) after sharing his own nude self portraits with a classmate who ended up sharing the photographs around the school. The classmate has not been charged for her distribution of child pornography.
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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
I confess that I still keep the analog nude pictures I took of a friend when when we were both 13. It took me a long time, several years before I dared bring those films to a photography store to get print copies. But growing up in a somewhat saner place, I was certainly more worried about what they would think of me, their neighbor's kid, than them calling the police or getting a child porn case. I still keep these pictures, of which I'm quite proud, in physical prints and their digital copies.
There might be someone somewhere thinking about subpoening (is that a word?) qntra to send me the cops. :) would be pretty lulzy.