Legal News

Does Teens Sending Nude Photos of Themselves Constitute a Crime?

By Dionne Searcey

What do you get when you mix cell phones and teenagers hopped up on hormones?

Sexting, of course, the practice of teens sending text messages of nude or partially nude photos of themselves to their buddies. It's the newest craze (along with smoking Smarties, see WSJ story here) that is shocking parents and teachers. Now prosecutors are weighing in with innovative ways to try to stop it.

In several sexting cases across the nation prosecutors have threatened child pornography charges against teens who received or sent the text messages. While technically applicable – after all the kids were possessing pictures of unclad minors – a kiddie porn conviction could mean jail time and registration as sex offenders, in some cases.

The most recent case is in Pennsylvania where three teenage girls are suing a prosecutor who wants to charge them with trafficking in child pornography after photos of themselves in their topless or skivvies ended up being sent to classmates' phones. The Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick has asserted that the girls were accomplices to the production of child pornography because they allowed themselves to be photographed. The girls say they didn't consent to the wide distribution, according to this Associated Press story. The ACLU sued Wyoming County DA today saying the photos are protected speech, not porn. (Here’s the suit.)

“Kids should be taught that sharing digitized images of themselves in embarrassing or compromised positions can have bad consequences, but prosecutors should not be using heavy artillery like child-pornography charges to teach them that lesson,” said Witold Walczak, Legal Director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania in this news release. “These are just kids being irresponsible and careless; they are not criminals and they certainly haven’t committed child pornography.”

The district attorney has offered that in order to avoid the charges, the girls be placed on probation, participate in a five-week re-education program and be subject to random drug testing. The photos were among several discovered by Tunkhannock School District officials on students’ cell phones.

Skumanick says that he sees his actions as cutting the kids a break. "We could have just arrested them but we didn't.” He said his actions came following the suicide last year of an Ohio girl who was taunted after nude photos of herself that she sent to her boyfriend that were then distributed elsewhere, according to the girl's mother.

"Kids have got to understand these things are out there forever," Skumanick said.

It should be noted that Skumanick is proposing what the ACLU has labeled a "re-education" program for the girls, in the form of a weekly course for five weeks. The course will teach the girls "[t]o gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today's society, both advantages and disadvantages," and "[i]dentify nontraditional societal and job roles," according to the complaint.

With the course, Skumanick says he wants to help girls “realize the severity of their actions.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 25, 2009 (boomark / email).