It's been five years since I first recoiled in sarcasm at a case of a teenage girl arrested on child abuse and kiddie porn charges for taking a nude photo of herself. It was so preposterous on its face that I didn't even feel the need to say very much about it, but since then similar cases have proliferated in tandem with the technology for sharing digital pictures. Here's today's story out of New Jersey and a good article from yesterday's New York Times about a brave Pennsylvania girl who's fighting back.
It's obvious to Violet Blue what's going on here:
These kids aren't being sexually exploited; their sexuality is being criminalized. The people enforcing and deciding how to apply adult sexual laws to kids (across the nation, it seems) are like totally not paying attention that what kids have always done, is what they're doing now. It's like they've become so entrenched in ideology that intellectual honesty has been thrown out the window; baby, bathwater and all. They've forgotten about the kids they're trying to "protect." And that's losing far more than an argument about teens taking nudie pics of themselves, posting them online, or sending them to each other.
Generously searching for the most reasonable explanation for these prosecutions, Feministing can only come up with Ben Tre logic. It's necessary to destroy girls in order to save them.
Some folks are so determined to impose social control on young women's expression of sexuality that they are willing to turn a few girls into convicted sex offenders in order to terrify teenage girls everywhere into toeing their prescribed line. Responses to women's, and especially young women's, expressions of sexuality have always been hysterical (pardon the ironic use), and colored by both panicked reaction and drooling exploitation.
Down with panicked reaction and drooling exploitation!
Now let's see, what can I find on Google Images to go with a post about naked teens under arrest?
