Date: June 5th, 2008
Cate: society + culture
Tags: , , , , , ,  
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age of consent?

I might sound like a broken record here (playing the same thing over and over again, for those of you in the audience who have only heard of what a record is) but stupid shit like this wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have such stupid arbitrary laws concerning how old you have to be before you can consent to sexual activity:

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old boy recently was charged with child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child and defamation for allegedly posting nude photos of his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend on his MySpace page. The girl had taken the pictures with her cell phone at her mother’s home and e-mailed them to the boyfriend, authorities said.

“They were pretty graphic,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Mark Yehle. “I think they just do it to impress their boyfriends. When he breaks up, he ..vents,’ in his words, by posting them. He apparently didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. He didn’t know it was illegal.”

Normally, getting back at your girlfriend by posting naked pictures of her on the internet is one of those mastercard ‘priceless’ moments – but if your girlfriend is 16, just two years younger then the age-of-consent, you are in deep shit, because you’ve ceased to be a jerk ex-boyfriend, and instead you’re a child pornographer who has sexually exploited a kid. What the fuck.

The images are complicating the work of investigators whose job is to find exploited children. Authorities trying to identify youngsters in naked photos are increasingly discovering that the teens themselves took the shots, said John Shehan, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

See? The assumption that all photos or videos of nude underage people is a problem, isn’t it? How can they be exploited when they took the photo themselves? I mean, have you seen Chris Crocker naked? He’s got a picture of himself when he was 17 – if you poke around a little in google image search you’ll find it. He took it himself, and chose to distribute it over the internet – but legally, he didn’t have the ability to take the photo, or distribute it. How fucked up is that?

It’s insulting the level of irresponsibility our government assigns to people younger then 18. It’s total bullshit. My imaginary punk rock band ‘bullshit policy’ probably has a song called ‘your body is not your own’ or something. Seriously.

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