Self Abuse

This time of year you might think this was an April Fool's gag. Sadly, it's not. An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (thanks, Don) describes how a 15-year-old girl is being charged with (among other things) sexual abuse of children, for taking sexually explicit photographs... of herself.

The charges of possessing and distributing child pornography almost make sense. She did have explicit photos of a minor, she did send them to people, and if you assume that the existence of such images pose an inherent danger to society no matter what (an assumption I don't buy) then that's a problem. Except that she's a minor, so charging her with a crime over that (even for trial as a juvenile) seems iffy.

Where this falls down the hole into wonderland is charging her with abusing... herself. OK, what she was doing used to be popularly known as "self abuse". But playing with yourself - even in front of a camera - is hardly criminal. It's practically a textbook definition of a victimless crime. Can't we deal with the notion that maybe this kid enjoyed it? The whole rationale behind statutory rape laws is the idea that you have an older person taking advantage of their power/influence/experience over the younger person's. Unless this girl has multiple personalities, that's impossible. The folks in Latrobe who are prosecuting this kid have been drinking far too much Rolling Rock.

I know for a fact that taking pictures of oneself like that is not sexually abusive. I did it myself. When I was this girl's age, maybe even a year or two younger, I took some black-and-white Polaroid photos of myself, also "in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts." I was just goofing around. The only trauma I experienced was the anxiety of wondering if my parents would find them, because that'd be embarrassing. As an exercise in adolescent sexual experimentation, it was harmless... and probably even beneficial, because it helped me get over some of my hang-ups about being nude. (e.g. In elementary school when we went to the high school to swim in the pool, I used to wrap a towel around my waist before taking off my underwear and putting on my swim suit, or vice versa.)

I'm not saying that what this girl did was smart. Sending naked pictures of yourself to strangers is pretty foolish, especially if you don't have a lot of life experience behind you to judge whether you're being safe about it or not. But that's all it is: unwise. Like so many other things teenagers do that you'd think they'd have the common sense not to do... but they do it anyways. There's a reason we have (or at least used to have) "juvenile" status for kids and teenagers: they have serious lapses in judgment. And that doesn't make them bad or evil or (for the most part) dangerous. In this girl's case, it simply means she's not ready to move out of her parents' house. Duh.

When I was young and foolish, I didn't have an internet available to tempt me into sending those photos of myself to strangers. I was painfully shy, so even the perceived anonymity of the internet wouldn't have persuaded me to share them. At least at the time. Now I really wouldn't care (personally) if nude photos of me as a teenager were available online. And why shouldn't I be allowed to make that choice? Am I not old enough to give consent for publication? But the authorities certainly would mind, and I know enough about how non-anonymous the internet really is to even consider publishing them... even if I still had them.

There is such a thing as sexual abuse of children. We need laws against it, and we ought to prosecute when it happens. But situations like this - when they accuse the "victim" of being her own "abuser" - show that the laws we have are way too broad.