Michael Froomkin reports and comments, quoting this story:
State police have charged a 15-year-old Latrobe girl with child pornography for taking photos of herself and posting them on the Internet.
Police said the girl, whose identity they withheld, photographed herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She then sent the photos to people she met in chat rooms. . . .
She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography. . . .
The girl’s behavior is not good, for a variety of reasons. The knowledge that there are sexually explicit pictures of her out there may end up hurting her emotionally in the future, which is one reason that child porn is prohibited (though I suspect it would hurt her less than if someone else had taken the pictures — sure, when she’s 20 she might feel very differently about this than when she’s 15, but I doubt that she’ll be that traumatized by the knowledged that there are those sexual pictures of her out there). Also, her actions might end up getting otherwise innocent people in trouble, if she sent the pictures to people who weren’t soliciting them. (If they did solicit them, it might still get them in trouble, but then they wouldn’t be innocent people.) Possessing child pornography isn’t quite a strict liability crime; if you accidentally get such a picture and promptly delete it, you shouldn’t be legally liable. But given that deleting it will probably still leave traces of it on your computer, you could certainly end up appearing quite guilty.
Nonetheless, it’s not clear to me that prosecuting her — especially for those crimes — is the right solution to this, just as prosecuting sexually promiscuous 15-year-olds who have sex with adults for “aiding and abetting statutory rape” doesn’t seem quite the right answer, either. If this is one of those scare-the-kid-a-bit prosecutions, that might be fine. But if the prosecutors are serious about throwing the book at her, and locking her up for years (the usual situation with people convicted of the crimes of which they’re accusing her), then it hardly seems to be much of a service to her — who is after all the supposed victim as well as the perpetrator — or to the fight against child porn more broadly. Nor do I think that the potential harm to the innocent recipients, though potentially a serious consideration, would be quite enough justification for a full-bore prosecution (again, consider the analogy to the statutory rape scenario).
In any case, though, it’s an interesting and complex case, perhaps more complex than it at first appears. If anyone has more factual details that might shed light on the prosecutors’ decision, I’d like to hear about them.
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