What is it about?
Youths, even ones who are of the age of consent in their state, are often charged with felony or misdemeanor child pornography crimes for sexting their similar-aged peers. I argue that, for many contextual reasons, youth sexts should be considered an all-together different kind of media than child pornography. This paper looks at four decisions about child pornography made by the Supreme Court of the United States and two lower-court cases about youth sexting in order to produce a different legal model for understanding sexting as a different kind of media.
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Why is it important?
This manuscript is important because it seeks to offer practical suggestions to legal practitioners and legislators on ways to prevent the needless over-criminalization of youth life. Real kids are put on sex offender lists, charged with crimes, and are arrested because of laws instituted to protect children. Yet, the effects of this criminalization do nothing to protect these children, and actually hurts them.
Perspectives
Child sexual abuse is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in a serious, but nuanced way. This paper does not argue that child pornography needs to be have fewer restrictions, nor does this paper argue about increasing or decreasing regulations of child pornography. This paper argues that youth's sexting images, consensually shared with their similar-aged peers, do not constitute child pornography based on my close-reading of related Supreme Court doctrine. This reading does not, in any way, intervene in the larger issue of regulating child pornography, but in the state intervention of a different media phenomenon.
Alvin Primack
University of Pittsburgh
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This page is a summary of: Youth sexting and the First Amendment: Rhetoric and child pornography doctrine in the age of translation, New Media & Society, November 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1461444817737297.
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