Criminalizing stupidity

Though it’s sometimes tempting to criminalize stupidity, it would be nice if we, y’know, limited it to adults.

Three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves, and three male classmates in a Greensburg Salem High School who received them, are charged with child pornography.

 

Police said the girls are 14 or 15, and the boys charged with receiving the photos are 16 or 17. None are being identified because most criminal cases in Pennsylvania juvenile courts are not public.

 

“It was a self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude,” said Capt. George Seranko of the Greensburg Police Department.

[…] Police said the girls are being charged with manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys face charges of possession.

 

“It’s very dangerous,” said Seranko. “Once it’s on a cell phone, that cell phone can be put on the Internet where everyone in the world can get access to that juvenile picture. You don’t realize what you are doing until it’s already done.”

Okay, no question this was unutterably stupid, even without getting into arguments about morality. And Seranko is right, to the extent that digital photographs have a tendency to get out in the wild, with what could have been embarrassing, even damaging results … to the young ladies involved.

But there are ways to deal with kids behaving stupidly (esp. when driven by hormones) other than charging them with child pornography, fergoshsakes, branding them as sex offenders. It’s like lopping off a kid’s hand for running in the halls at school. Why not just throw acid in their faces while you’re at it?

These are high school teenagers, sexually misbehaving in a dangerous manner. But the danger should not be from the police. This is not a kiddie porn ring. To call it such is not only a grotesque miscarriage of justice, but dilutes the horror of true child pornography and its purveyors.

There’s something disgusting here, and it’s not the behavior of the juveniles in question.

(via BoingBoing)