Excerpts from Harvard’s Sexting Report
Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications is a new report by the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Its stated purpose is to “intended to provide background for discussion of interventions related to sexting.” This is only more indication that the MTV-induced sexting panic isn’t over yet. The report covers a plethora of related issues and attempts to compile research and an analytical tongue in making sense of how sexting has changed a variety of legal definitions and cultural trends.
Some excerpts from the report (and yes, we did leave out the reference to sexting as “relationship currency.”):
On the sharing of “sexted” images:
Nearly one in five sext recipients (17%) reports having passed the images along to someone else, with more than half (55%) of those who passed the images to someone else sharing them with more than one person.
On current legal practices:
Sexting takes place in many different contexts. Whatever the context, however, the minors involved risk being investigated for and charged with child pornography offenses. If convicted, they could be subject to the same types of punishments as adults who traffic in such images, including felony convictions, lengthy prison sentences, and sex offender registration.
On Constitutional Law:
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution “bars the government from dictating what we see, or read or speak or hear.” There are, however, a small number of exceptional categories of speech that have such “slight social value” that the government may freely regulate them in order to advance “the social interest in order and morality.” These categories include child pornography and obscenity.
On Potential Alternatives:
At one extreme, it can be argued that sexted images, unlike images of children being sexually abused, are protected by the First Amendment.
At the other extreme, one could argue that sexted images, like conventional child pornography, are exempt from First Amendment protection because the production and dissemination of such images cause harm to real children.
Rather than argue for either extreme, one could argue that sexted images can be covered by child pornography statutes if the statutes provide an affirmative defense for minors who voluntarily self‐produce and transmit such images to other minors.
To read the full report, go here.
Tags: college, communication, Education, harassment, parents, pleasure, respect, women
back in sophomore year high school, a girl at one of our sister schools texted a topless picture to her boy in my class, and being an all-male school, it spread quickly and everyone saw it. police arrested her for dissemination of child pornography, and we were all told to delete the picture from our phones. the county prosecutor came in and we had an assembly in which he warned us that if we possessed or sent pictures like these, we’d be arrested and thrown in jail and put on a sex offender list for life.
this is such a ridiculous invasion of privacy in a sense, as it’s forcing teenagers to deny a part of their sexual expression by the force of law. child pornography laws were not designed to imprison 15-year-olds, and applying the law to them is a grievous injustice, especially when they’re the ones distributing the pictures of themselves. you take a risk taking and transmitting such pictures, but so do adults; it’s not deserving of a jail sentence.