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Teens, Child Porn Prosecutions And The ACLU
By Gregory Sullivan, For The Bulletin
The two cases involving teenagers facing charges of child pornography for possessing nude or indecent photographs of themselves and making them available for public consumption on cell phones and the Web disclose the danger of combining astonishing technical adroitness with moral ignorance. The hip word for this new version of a very old corruption is “sexting.” Such prosecutions, though not without their problems, are necessary to reverse the accelerating trend of turning teenagers into apprentice pornographers.
The New Jersey case involves a 14-year-old girl who has been charged with possession and distribution of child pornography for posting nearly 30 nude pictures of herself on MySpace.com for her boyfriend to see. The one troublesome aspect of this case is that, if convicted, she could be designated a sex offender under Megan’s Law. Such a possibility illustrates that Megan’s Law reaches too far: The original purpose of that law — alerting homeowners to child molesters who are neighbors — has nothing to do with the pornographic habits of teenagers.
But leaving that issue to one side, there is no doubt that this prosecution (and similar cases from a number of other states) ensures a number of salutary consequences. These cases will force teenagers to examine their own sexual irresponsibility. In addition, as one official remarked: “We consider this case a wake-up call to parents.” Teenagers have great technological sophistication, and many parents are understandably in the dark about what is taking place. These prosecutions should end that naïveté.
Pennsylvania’s case does not yet involve formal charges, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed an action to have a court stop the county district attorney from threatening three teenage girls with child-pornography charges for allowing themselves to be photographed in a lascivious way, with the pictures finding their way to student cell phones. The district attorney is using the threat of charges to have the girls agree to attend an education program.
With its inerrant instinct for the wrong side in every public-policy dispute, the ACLU is seeking to thwart this legitimate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Its position is not really a legal but a policy objection. “Kids should be taught that sharing digitized images of themselves in embarrassing or compromised positions can have bad consequences, but prosecutors should not be using heavy artillery like child-pornography charges to teach them that lesson,” sermonizes Witold Walczak, Legal Director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
Actually, by bringing child-pornography charges in these cases, kids are being taught just that. So widespread is this problem becoming — some surveys disclose that 20 percent of teenagers have engaged in some form of sexting — that the criminal law must move forcefully and quickly just to begin curbing it. Highly publicized prosecutions are needed to bring the issue to public light and begin the imposition some order.
The ACLU, moreover, fails to discern the problem presented by this case. The real danger is pornography, which the ACLU views as either no big deal or protected by the first amendment. This country’s foremost legal scholar, Robert George of Princeton University, explains (in The Clash of Orthodoxies) the issue with arresting rigor: “Pornography, precisely by arousing sexual desires unintegrated with the human goods to which sexuality is morally ordered, induces in its consumers states of emotion, imagination, and sentiment that dispose them to understand and regard themselves and their bodies, and others and their bodies, as, in essence, instruments of sexual gratification — sex objects. Pornography corrupts by appealing to and heightening the tendency toward selfishness, which, even in the most virtuous among us, represents a danger to our integrity and to the precious relationships (husband-wife, parent-child, friendships) which depend, in part, on the proper integration of our sexuality into our lives.”
With some reflection, most would recognize the plain truth of this position and how difficult it is to sustain it. That difficulty is found in the fact that we have lost the vocabulary and moral confidence to assert it. Most people — and certainly almost all parents — know that pornography, particularly with a teenage daughter as a subject, is something that must be emphatically rejected. As professor George reminds us, pornography corrupts sexuality in a way that can have devastating consequences on the freedom of young adults. “The freedom pornography imperils,” Mr. George points out, “is freedom from a sexuality that is unintegrated, selfish, impulsive, depersonalized, disordered, out of control” — in other words, the sort of sexuality that is the degrading product of sexting.
A great deal is at stake, which is why the prosecution for child pornography is justified. The seductive combination of omnipresent technology and pornography must be checked by the force of the criminal law. Protecting us from others and ourselves, within the confines of prudence, is the purpose of government.
Gregory J. Sullivan is a lawyer who resides in Bucks County.
The New Jersey case involves a 14-year-old girl who has been charged with possession and distribution of child pornography for posting nearly 30 nude pictures of herself on MySpace.com for her boyfriend to see. The one troublesome aspect of this case is that, if convicted, she could be designated a sex offender under Megan’s Law. Such a possibility illustrates that Megan’s Law reaches too far: The original purpose of that law — alerting homeowners to child molesters who are neighbors — has nothing to do with the pornographic habits of teenagers.
But leaving that issue to one side, there is no doubt that this prosecution (and similar cases from a number of other states) ensures a number of salutary consequences. These cases will force teenagers to examine their own sexual irresponsibility. In addition, as one official remarked: “We consider this case a wake-up call to parents.” Teenagers have great technological sophistication, and many parents are understandably in the dark about what is taking place. These prosecutions should end that naïveté.
Pennsylvania’s case does not yet involve formal charges, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed an action to have a court stop the county district attorney from threatening three teenage girls with child-pornography charges for allowing themselves to be photographed in a lascivious way, with the pictures finding their way to student cell phones. The district attorney is using the threat of charges to have the girls agree to attend an education program.
With its inerrant instinct for the wrong side in every public-policy dispute, the ACLU is seeking to thwart this legitimate exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Its position is not really a legal but a policy objection. “Kids should be taught that sharing digitized images of themselves in embarrassing or compromised positions can have bad consequences, but prosecutors should not be using heavy artillery like child-pornography charges to teach them that lesson,” sermonizes Witold Walczak, Legal Director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
Actually, by bringing child-pornography charges in these cases, kids are being taught just that. So widespread is this problem becoming — some surveys disclose that 20 percent of teenagers have engaged in some form of sexting — that the criminal law must move forcefully and quickly just to begin curbing it. Highly publicized prosecutions are needed to bring the issue to public light and begin the imposition some order.
The ACLU, moreover, fails to discern the problem presented by this case. The real danger is pornography, which the ACLU views as either no big deal or protected by the first amendment. This country’s foremost legal scholar, Robert George of Princeton University, explains (in The Clash of Orthodoxies) the issue with arresting rigor: “Pornography, precisely by arousing sexual desires unintegrated with the human goods to which sexuality is morally ordered, induces in its consumers states of emotion, imagination, and sentiment that dispose them to understand and regard themselves and their bodies, and others and their bodies, as, in essence, instruments of sexual gratification — sex objects. Pornography corrupts by appealing to and heightening the tendency toward selfishness, which, even in the most virtuous among us, represents a danger to our integrity and to the precious relationships (husband-wife, parent-child, friendships) which depend, in part, on the proper integration of our sexuality into our lives.”
With some reflection, most would recognize the plain truth of this position and how difficult it is to sustain it. That difficulty is found in the fact that we have lost the vocabulary and moral confidence to assert it. Most people — and certainly almost all parents — know that pornography, particularly with a teenage daughter as a subject, is something that must be emphatically rejected. As professor George reminds us, pornography corrupts sexuality in a way that can have devastating consequences on the freedom of young adults. “The freedom pornography imperils,” Mr. George points out, “is freedom from a sexuality that is unintegrated, selfish, impulsive, depersonalized, disordered, out of control” — in other words, the sort of sexuality that is the degrading product of sexting.
A great deal is at stake, which is why the prosecution for child pornography is justified. The seductive combination of omnipresent technology and pornography must be checked by the force of the criminal law. Protecting us from others and ourselves, within the confines of prudence, is the purpose of government.
Gregory J. Sullivan is a lawyer who resides in Bucks County.
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Jim H wrote on Apr 3, 2009 6:53 PM:
1. Simple nudity is not pornography, or the National Geographic would have been closed down long before the Supreme Court decisions of the 60s. In fact the "lascivious" poses reportedly whowed two of the girls in underwear and the third topless.
2. Child pornograpy laws are intended to protect children. Most of the sexting stories talk about nudity, not sex, and the children are not beoing exploited by adults; well, actually they are being exploited by grandsatnding prosecutros.
3. There are hazards involved with sexting, but there are few teens harmed by sexting as much as they are by prosecutors and people like Mr. Sullivan. If the polls are accurate and 20% of teens have engagged in sexting, the alleged lifetime stigma is going to diminish greatly in the near future.
4. Finally, Mr. Sullivan needs to look a bit more closely at history. The Victorians did not talk publicly about sexual matters, but that does not reflect what was going on in privatte. Example, Lewis Carrol had a hobby of photographing young girls, apparently including Alice Liddlel, the inspiration for his Alice in Wonderland, in the nude. with the full knowledge of their parents. Yes there were noicsy, and often ignorant, moral crusaders, but there are also examples like the Union commander who licensed the prostitutes of Nashville to reduce the STD rate among his troops (it worked).
If Mr. Sullivan gets so disturbed about this issue, I suggest he find a cave somewhere in which he can not be bothered by society and society will not be bothered by him. "