Meet Your Future Sexual Predator

Mention “sexual predator” and images of someone sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent, immediately come to mind. But then, that’s whom they want you to picture, because that’s the evil-doer for whom laws like the sex offender registry are intended. Not the 11-year-old boy caught in its web.  See how the mind plays games?

And then there’s teen sexting, one of those really poor ideas that has nonetheless caught fire, kids being kids, and which lovers of criminalization refuse to condemn, despite the natural and obvious consequences. Caught between inconsistent arguments of gender politics, they thread the needle between sexual agency, the right to do stupid things, and victim blaming, that no one is responsible for doing stupid things. The upshot is to criminalize the outcome, since someone must pay.

Amy Adele Hasinoff, in a New York Times op-ed, writes about the unanticipated criminal, the sexting teen.

TEENAGERS who sext are in a precarious legal position. Though in most states teenagers who are close in age can legally have consensual sex, if they create and share sexually explicit images of themselves, they are technically producing, distributing or possessing child pornography. The laws that cover this situation, passed decades ago, were meant to apply to adults who exploited children and require those convicted under them to register as sex offenders.

Child porn laws never anticipated the phenomenon of sexting, and some states are scrambling to undo their application to kids. The easy, and naïve, answer is to trust prosecutors not to charge teens with sexting. Advocates dismiss it as stupid and wrong, as if their saying so changes anything. The problem is that the text of the law clearly covers the conduct involved in sexting, and police and prosecutors who take the position that their job is to enforce the law, not legislate gender policy, apply the law as written.

But even the tweaks enacted in some states to alleviate the burden on teen sexting create their own problems.

These new laws may seem like a measured solution to the problem of charging teenage sexters with child pornography felonies. However, once they have the option of lesser penalties, prosecutors are more likely to press charges — not only against teenagers who distribute private images without permission, but also against those who sext consensually.

The fear is that one evil child porn defendant might get away, so they can’t go with a law that creates a “loophole,” even if it saves teens from a life as a criminal.  And if a misdemeanor conviction (no big deal, right?) wasn’t bad enough, then there’s the follow-up, the sex offender registry. After all, you can’t have sexual predators kidnapping and raping babies, and who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of sex offenders.  Better safe than sorry, the mothers say, as long as it’s not their child’s name on the registry.

But while Hasinoff focuses on one problem, she skirts others. It’s not merely decades-old laws that aim to destroy the lives of sexting teens, but new laws being promoted to thwart another evil.

The victim of a sexual privacy violation can be traumatized and humiliated, and is often blamed for his or her victimization. Unfortunately, the criminalization of sexting worsens this problem because teenagers know that if they report the incident they may be punished at school and possibly charged with the same offense as the perpetrator. In most jurisdictions, distributing a sexual image of a teenager is illegal, regardless of whether one is consensually sending a nude selfie to a partner or maliciously distributing a private photo of another person without permission.

Sound familiar? While there is no mention of the catchphrase, the description covers it. That’s right, revenge porn. As with sexual predator, the words evoke an image of the evil revenge porn websites like UGotPosted. But the laws being promoted and enacted aren’t limited to covering scum like Hunter Moore, but your little darling as well. And the corner bookstore. And Gawker and the New York Times.

Advocates deny this, preying on people’s ignorance of law, emotions and the weird American sense that law couldn’t possibly be that nuts. Except it can and often is, even though we keep telling ourselves that we’ve got the best system ever.

The comments to a post at Ars Technica addressing the MPAA’s opposition to Minnesota’s anti-revenge porn law are telling. While some understood, and others couldn’t get past their well-deserved hatred of the MPAA, many got caught up in the catchphrase, “revenge porn,” seeing only the application to the promoted evildoers and blind to the unintended targets also criminalized under the language of the law. And the notion of “chilling effect” is far too sophisticated to be understood or appreciated.

That protecting the innocent, unintended targets might let an evildoer escape is inconceivable.  Forget Blackstone’s ratio, as advocates are perfectly fine with some collateral damage if it means their hated targets can’t escape.  By “collateral damage,” I mean your children.

Why doesn’t Hasinoff include this in her otherwise thoughtful op-ed?  Beats me. Maybe she didn’t realize it, though it’s hard to imagine anyone focused enough on the issue to write a Times op-ed would be so clueless. More likely, it’s politically expedient to take on the forces of disfavored decades-old laws that fail to accommodate poor choices like sexting (which, notably, she doesn’t quite condemn) than to take up arms against current prohibitionist laws that enjoy the favors of gender-identitarian support. In other words, hate the outcome, but don’t buck the neo-feminists.

But it’s not like your kids, your friends’ kids, any kid you know, would ever do anything as foolish as send naked pics around, or show the unsolicited naked pics they receive to their eighth grade buddies, right?  They would never end up prosecuted for a crime and spend a decade, or maybe the rest of their lives, on a sex offender registry, right? That would never happen in America, because we can trust the system to use “common sense,” right? So what’s the big deal? After all, we must have a means of getting those evildoers we picture in our imaginations, and not one should ever get away.  That would never be your kid.

 

9 thoughts on “Meet Your Future Sexual Predator

    1. phroggie

      Nowadays, we’d lock up the little girls, as it’s arguably ambiguous whom had the bad intent.

  1. Michael Goodman

    This issue is little different from the problem of standard college/university practice in expelling students based upon mere accusation (or retroactive regret) of “nonconsensual” sexual behavior.

    1. SHG Post author

      It’s very thoughtful of you to put “nonconsensual” in quotes, so that I’m alerted to this novel concept. But no, it’s a little different. These involve actual criminal laws, not Title IX fantasies.

      1. Michael Goodman

        True, the universities’ actions are administrative in nature, not criminal.

        However a disciplinary notation on a transcript may have the effect of ruining chances for any further higher ed., even at another institution, hence severely impacting future earning power!

          1. Michael Goodman

            Yes, I’ve just gone through your columns on the subject.

            Unfortunately I live in the same city as UW-Madison top cop Susan Riesling!

            It’s high time to get universities out of the law enforcement business!

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