MONTPELIER, VT — Legislation passed by the Vermont Senate and pending in the state’s House would exempt from child pornography charges teens who engage in “sexting.”Sexting is the practice of sharing risqué photos via cell phone. The pastime has reached fad status among teenagers, according to news reports. Children in several states currently face a variety of criminal charges for engaging in the diversion. The most serious of the charges is distribution of child pornography, which in most cases carries not only mandatory prison time and steep fines, but also lifetime registration in sex-offender databases.
Parents, educators, mental-health workers and free-speech advocates are outraged that action they characterize as youthful rebelliousness, recklessness and foolishness can stamp a child with the label “pervert” for life.
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Vermont all have child-porn-related cases pending against teen sexters.
Vermont is the first state to attempt to clarify the issue in law. The state’s pending bill would exempt 13- to 18-year-olds on both the sending and receiving ends, so long as the offending images were of the sender and were sent and received voluntarily.
The bill would not provide an escape route for kids caught sending or receiving images of others, with or without their permission, and it would not legalize the practice altogether. Prosecutors still would be able to charge teens with lewd and lascivious conduct and to prosecute for obscenity where images fit applicable criteria.
“We felt that [sexting is] poor behavior and it’s not something we want to give our OK to,” Sen. Richard Sears [D-Bennington], who serves as the chairman of the Vermont Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Associated Press. “But at the same time, do we want a kid in jail? Do we want them tagged as a sex offender for the rest of their lives? And the answer is no.”
The debate in Vermont has been influenced by the case of Isaac Owusu, 18, who allegedly instructed two teenage girls to take explicit pictures or videos of themselves and send the images to him. In Owusu’s case, the directorial component is what makes the crime egregious, according to the prosecutor, although Owusu’s defense attorneys maintain the girls were willing participants.
Still, even the prosecutor agrees that most sexting episodes should not be subject to severe child-porn penalties.
“I don’t think it serves any public interest to paint those kids … as sex offenders,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan told the AP.
The president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said he sympathizes with the difficult position in which parents, teens, prosecutors and lawmakers find themselves in cases of sexting, but he worries exempting the practice from child-porn laws may have the unintended consequence of emboldening and to a certain extent immunizing genuine child predators.
“Our concern is that decriminalizing sexting is a blanket response that is too broad to a problem that is best handled on a case-by-case basis,” Ernie Allen told the AP.
Instead, Allen said he believes programs like NCMEC’s “Think Before You Post” awareness campaign may be a better answer. By educating kids about the dangers of sexting and posting racy images of themselves online, Allen said he believes the problem could be handled in a more appropriate fashion.
