This week in “protect the children” hysteria

Kinky image from this explicit gallery, in honor of International Fetish Day (today). Because who will protect the kinky lesbians from themselves?

In yet *another* instance of teens facing child porn charges for erotic self-portraits — yes, this is getting insane — in Teens send nude pics to one other, face kiddie porn charges Jacqui Cheng reports,

(…) “It was a self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude,” Greensburg Police Department captain George Seranko told WPXI News. “Taking nude pictures of yourself, nothing good can come out of it.”

This might seem like a one-off story, but last month, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy released survey results that said 20 percent of all teens have sent a nude photo of themselves to someone else electronically. More than two thirds of those who have sent photos claim they sent them to a boyfriend or girlfriend, but 15 percent say they have sent them to people they only “know” from the Internet. And they’re not staying private, either—a quarter of teen girls and a third of teen boys said that they’ve had nude images originally meant for someone else shared with them.

Though the discovery was made several months ago, the Greensburg Police Department apparently decided to arrest and charge the teenagers this week. According to the police, the two girls are being charged with manufacturing, disseminating, or possessing child pornography, while the two boys are being charged with possession of child porn. (…read more, arstechnica.com)

Did you catch that bit about how nothing good can come from taking nude self-portraits as justification for filing charges that will ruin these kids’ adult lives? It’s… biblical. Never mind that there’s a difference between healthy erotic self expression and sexual exploitation — no, these things are one and the same for Captain Seranko. And the teens are doing it *by choice*. Which brings me to John Timmer‘s incredible piece, Report: biggest online threat to kids is other kids. The story was covered in the NYT (seen at The Sex Carnival) but the seriousness of how child predator hysteria is unsupported was summed up by Timmer:

(…) The analysis was organized by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the task force included relevant academics and advocates, as well as members from major players in the online world, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, various ISPs, social networking sites, and a number of security companies. Its members performed a literature review, examined security technology from a number of sources, and consulted with a variety of authorities from the relevant fields. The entire report has been made available online.

Overall, the report generally concludes that the general public may have an impression that the Internet is awash in predatory pedophiles, but that picture is simply unsupported by the research that’s available. Those risks that do exist don’t appear to be specific to the online world, as the report suggests, “the risks minors face online are complex and multifaceted and are in most cases not significantly different than those they face offline.” As one of the participants stated, “the truth is that there is no ‘Internet safety,’ there is simply ‘safety.'”

So, for example, when it comes to pornography and nudity, the majority of the exposure occurs offline, through traditional media such as TV and movies. A number of younger individuals do get exposed to images they find disturbing online, but the majority of those who view porn online are older adolescent boys who have actively sought it out. In a significant number of these cases, the images that disturb adolescents the most are the ones produced by their fellow adolescents; as the report notes, “there are also concerns about other content, including child pornography and the violent, pornographic, and other problematic content that youth themselves generate.”

(…) When it comes to sexual solicitation, the fraction of individuals targeted by adult strangers is quite small. Most of the youth targeted are older adolescents, and a large majority of those solicitations come from someone under 25; in many cases, they involve other adolescents. Many of those on the receiving end don’t view the solicitations they’ve received as inappropriate, and somewhere in the area of 98 percent of those targeted in this manner brush off the suggestions without giving it much further thought. Far from being innocent victims, the youth who choose to act on these solicitations generally know exactly what they’re doing, and their choice is often symptomatic of larger problems. “The psychosocial makeup of and family dynamics surrounding particular minors,” the report notes, “are better predictors of risk than the use of specific media or technologies.” (…read more, arstechnica.com)