Yet another incident of students photographing themselves nude has surfaced, this time in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
40 Parkland High School students have been threatened by prosecutors with possession of child pornography when a video and photos of girls having sex and exposing their breasts were transmitted by cell phone to students and elsewhere.
When you read the article, there is no indication that anyone at all is concerned that the kids are having sex or taking their clothes off. That's because anyone with a pulse knows that children are engaging in sexual activity and there's really nothing anyone can do about it except to educate them about contraception and safe sex. Abstinence does not work.
What upsets people in this incident is the images of that sex. It's OK to have sex, it's OK to know about sex, it's OK to talk about sex, but it's not OK to photograph sex. Suddenly with photographic evidence that high school kids with hormones are sexually active, it becomes "child pornography" and the sex authorities all swoop in for the kill.
This is not child pornography. It's kids being stupid and experimenting with sex. Child pornography is abuse, it is exploitation, it is the adult use of images of underage children engaged in sexual activity for gratification and profit. A bunch of high school kids photographing each other in the nude and then sharing the images among themselves is not child pornography. It's dumb, but it should not be a crime.
Call the parents, take away the cell phones, bring in a counselor if you must, but leave the state police and prosecutors out of this. There is not a child pornography ring at this high school, and the unnecessary criminalization of what happened can only serve to ruin many young lives.
As I've said before, society has to come to terms with the fact that technology has brought about the virtual end of privacy. Just about everything we do in public is subject to surreptitious imaging, either by the government, or by anyone passing by with a camera phone. Celebrities are photographed to such an extreme that we know when they are not wearing underwear, or are having their menstrual period, or are snorting coke.
There is always a price to pay for having a free society, and sometimes that price seems quite high, but when one considers the alternative, a police state that seeks to control all human behavior, it's frightening.
Without police intervention, these kids will have learned their own lesson by realizing that those images that they took, or posed for, will be available forever in cyberspace. It's inevitable that someday in the not too distant future people will stop caring if such images become ubiquitous. Maybe we should all just post nude photos of ourselves on the Internet now and get it over with.
Tags: nudism, naturism, nudist, nudists, naturist, naturists, nudity, nudes, bare, au naturel, nude, naked
2 comments:
Very astute observation.
Our society has absolutely no common sense at all when it comes to sexuality and "children". Indeed, over reaction and sensationalism are the norm. I think part of the problem is the advent of 24 hour news, and stories like this attract a lot of viewers, unfortunately, so the media actually benefits from the insanity, lack of common sense, and obsession that is the trademark of society these days.
Oddly, photos of violence and murder are accepted and perfectly legal, but a photo of a nude 16 year old girl or boy is considered frightening, or worse... abhorred and condemned as obscene.
Phrases like "child pornography" and "pedophile" are bandied about so recklessly as to water down their meaning. This is really a shame, because these should be powerful words, which cause the bile to rise up in the back of our throat. As it is, they have lost their punch.
As a resident of the area in which this is occuring, I was surprised and perplexed that the local law enforcement appears to be operating without search warrants in this case. I realize that privacy in schools has been taken away, but I find the coerced confiscation of the cell phones a bit drastic. It does appear that the district attorney is going after "low hanging fruit" in this case.
I did not check your post but the local paper covering it said that at least one of the images was of a "sex act" but that the others only involved nudity. If this is true, I find the child pornography label a bit hard to accept.
What is also very interesting is that, for the moment, the families involved are rolling over and accepting this intrusion. As none of the families have been identified, I wonder if the district attorney was careful to keep any family where adults were lawyers off his list.
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