“Police in Holbrook are investigating charges against three minors who allegedly created a video of two of them having sexual intercourse while the third recorded it, then distributed the video to junior high students. ‘The video depicts two minors engaging in sexual intercourse,’ Holbrook police officer Keysha Mitchell said. She said the person recording the scene was also a minor. The video was then distributed among students at Holbrook Junior-Senior High School, police said, and the charges that may be leveled against the teens are serious as the forwarding of such a video, also known as ’sexting,’ is a felony offense. ‘Some of the kids involved could be looking at possession of child pornography, dissemination of child pornography. There’s also the possibility of statutory rape and if there’s any audio discovered on the video there’s also the possible charge of wiretapping,’ Mitchell said. Police said the video was taken at a home, not at the school. The alleged victim, a girl under 16, told them she did not realize she was being captured on cell phone. She went to police with her parents when she realized the video was circulating.” — Boston Channel (US)

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Recently Furpo has sent in a few different links about “sexting,” which is what happens when sex meets texting or, more broadly, what happens when young people act out their biological impulses with technological gadgetry. Though in many ways it’s just another moral panic about the sexual behavior of teens, you can see the dilemma the whole phenomenon poses. On one hand, it is problematic to charge a teenager who creates a video of his or her nude body with child pornography. On the other hand, if the behavior isn’t criminalized, it opens up the possibility that real child pornographers can induce young people to create the pornography which it is illegal for adults to produce themselves.

By way of solution, police quoted in the article recommend that parents disable the video features of their children’s equipment in order to minimize the possibilities of them abusing it. This is like scooping out a bucket of water in the hopes you don’t have to build a dam. It is clear that society has entered into a state where recording technology is ubiquitous. It is impractical to suggest that cameras be kept from the hands of young people in an age when every electronic device has a built-in camera and microphone.

As PervScan wrote in reference to the bizarre story about The Simpsons and child pornography, society is undergoing a difficult transition in its moral conception of childhood. It used to be that children simply “played doctor,” and now they “play doctor” while recording it with their Disney Pix Max digital cameras or even their iPhones. Sorting out how to deal with the behavior is one thing. Sorting out how to deal with the images and their potentials for abuse is another thing. In either case, though, there is one fundamental. The purpose of legislation is to protect people from harm. If a person is harmed by another secretly taping him and distributing it without his consent, there are laws to deal with that. Piling child pornography charges on top of them seems, at least in this case, absurd.

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