No one’s saying don’t throw the book at pedophiles. They’re saying don’t sacrifice a child to the letter of a badly written law. By all means, prosecute actual pedos, which prosecutors would have more time to do if they weren’t trying to ruin the life of this girl.
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I know no one’s saying that. I’m just interested in how Maryland’s ruling will be handled on future basis and practical terms.
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We do live in the worst timeline 
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The girl is guilty of demonstrating agency and sexual desire. Plenty of places in the US still see this as a crime against god.
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If the “church” and the “fundamentalists” had their way…
Did the boy she sent the pic to get charged as well, for disseminating the image? I mean, if nothing else, that seems like it could fall under a revenge porn law, if Maryland has one.
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We can add heartless. Or maybe dickless.
I dont see any way to resolve this legal dilemna that doesnt have huge legal hole in it. Human beings are allowed to do whatever they want with their body, for whatever harmless purpose, unless the human in question is female, and unless the purpose is sexual. Then there is a whole lot of handwaving to make it the business of some men someplace just how badly one has fucked up by being horny and female.
In Germany (as of 30 years ago anyway) there were magazines aimed at teen readers with a nude centerfold, sold openly with everything else. The naked teen in the image is shown holding the bulb that triggers the shutter, to signify that she is an active participant in the project.
I cannot imagine what it would take to bring USia into that kind of a sensibility. But it cant happen soon enough.
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Only in some states.
That’s what I want to know, if dude is being charged, he’s distributing without her consent, at the very least its defamation
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Uhm… I don’t think a lot of people feel that this is a desired outcome, even if one doesn’t believe teens taking nude selfies and distributing them shouldn’t be charged as producers of child porn. Happy medium, maybe?
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Heck, in German class we got Stern and Bunte magazine, which were popular interest mags, and we had to mark out all the boobs and cartoon genitalia. I mean no one was under age, I don’t think, but at least a handful of boobs in every mag. I remember one had a ballsack with a guy shooting heroin up in in it. Ack. (Story about Heroin abuse, I think. I dunno. If only I could read German.)
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Its obviously wrong that there’s no distinction between self produced stuff and adults trafficking it. But I can definitely see a reasonable case for some sort of legal deterrent that impacts the child. There are definitely 16 year olds that are cagey enough to exploit themselves for their own gain. But they’re not mature enough to navigate the inherent coercion involved.
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More an effect of pinhead prosecutors who are motivated to maintain 90%+ prosecution rate at any cost, who are armed with draconian laws that have such high penalties almost everyone charged will plead rather than go to trial. They are never going to “give a pass” to someone who can easily bump their numbers. We need to change the incentives and the laws.
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Nobody much is in favor of leniency for child porn, but it is a little scary when you can go on trial for having anything that a prosecutor can look at and think is child porn, naked selfies included. There was a case many years ago where a mother was going to be charged for taking a photo of her naked child in the bath: as far as I know there was no evidence that she was ever planning to distribute said photo. The photo developer though saw it and called the cops.
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i think the problem is if you don’t criminalize it, older folks will coerce young folks to “self” produce this stuff.
ideally much like we have romeo and juliet laws for physical acts we can come up with some middle ground, but it’s harder since the pictures stick around.
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This may not have been conveyed fully by @anon47741163‘s post, but the magazine in question, Bravo, used to be by far the largest and most influential print medium for teenagers in the German language area, not some niche publication.
Besides pop culture, it featured articles about all kinds of topics regarding sex education and sexuality, including homosexuality, masturbation and many more, discourse that many readers would otherwise have had no access to. Bravo was highly influential for generations of teenagers from the late 1950s into the 90s.
The teen nude shots were not uncontroversial, but I would say they helped shape a healthy body image for teenagers who were otherwise confronted with the likes of Baywatch in popular culture.
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“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass - a idiot”.
As are the Justices; who are ironically titled.
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That’s all great, I’m just saying I’m not sure that in 2019 the mainstreaming of underage nude media would be an entirely healthy thing. Hard to imagine it being such.
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This looks like a shoot first and ask questions later scenario, and I think that it needs to be.
I think that something like the distribution of underage sexual imagery does need to be investigated to prevent the material from being distributed further. It also deters idiots from making their own and distributing it just to be “cool”, and if stuff was produced under coercion, I hope that it helps those people get rescued.
This girl is 16, and I think she falls under the idiot classification, but I think that most people (teens especially) shouldn’t be sending recorded sexual imagery of themselves over the internet unless they are comfortable with it being out there forever. Especially since the right kind of blackmailer can use those earlier images to convince kids to produce more sexual images or worse. There can never be anything like ethically sourced c.p.
If she is 16, and willingly aelf published, then hopefully this can get stricken off her record when she turns 18, but people should still not be allowed to push out their own underage sex pics of themselves even after they get to be over 18.
Remember that pedos use this sort of imagery, and it can get them to internally normalize their fantasies and make it easier for them to act on their urges in real life.
One thing i would like to add though is that the distributors are just as bloody. If she sent it to one person she was interested in, then that was a bad choice. If that “friend” sent it out to many other people, then that jackass should have the hammer come down on them way harder.
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