[swapfile]

Increasingly, the amount of CSAM being created is by children themselves.

> Of the 153,369 webpages actioned during 2020, almost half (68,000 or 44%) were assessed as containing self-generated imagery.[1]

I suggest starting there rather than my encrypted communications with friends and family.

[1]: https://annualreport2020.iwf.org.uk/trends/international/sel...

[tristor]

Unsurprising, because while it may bother the oldies in Congress (well the ones that weren't on Epstein's island), post puberty, all human beings engage in sexual behaviors up and to intercourse. In the age of social media, where everyone (presumably) over 13 is online and posting constant photos with their phone it should be completely unsurprising that much of this content is generates by the kiddos themselves.

It's especially absurd in some jurisdictions where it is explicitly legal for two teenagers to engage in intercourse, but if they share a photo of tits with each other other they've committed a federal crime. The fact we consider a photo criminal, when both parties are above the age of consent for one another, is a new level of absurdity, and things like the EARN IT act just make this situation worse.

I have a teenage daughter. I don't particularly relish the idea of her taking and sharing nude photos because I know that the Internet is forever and it will eventually get out and cause her harm. Nonetheless, there is very little I can do to stop it short of blocking her from using technology altogether. What I would like even less is if the company I buy her phone from decides to be a busybody and reports her to the feds for taking a nude photo of herself and then she ends up with a felony record and registered as a sex offender for the rest of her life for getting a bit too spicy in text messages with her boyfriend.

I don't understand how anyone could classify this as CSAM.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I’m the report it says these are primarily photos of 11 to 13 year olds. I don’t find an 11 year old sending nudes to be a healthy exploration of sexuality with one’s peers. I’m pretty sure that’s a dangerous situation that the 11 year old needs protection from.

[zamnos]

Is it? Their peers are equally new to the world and just as naive so that doesn't seem like that big a deal. It would be worse to raise sexually repressed, unhappy adults.

What we're dancing around though, is that there are actual pedophiles on the Internet that would like nothing more than to have the 11-year send them underwear, or even fully-nude pics. That's what the 11-13 year old needs protection from.

And keep in mind, pediatricians now recommend starting to talk to your kids about sex and consent starting at age five.

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/parenting/when-to-start-talki...

Punishing that 11-year old, charging them as a sex-offender, when they were the one that took the picture, makes zero sense though.

[YeBanKo]

This is some serious bullshit. There are also pediatricians that refer to transgender clinic as early as 3. It is pure insanity, medical field fell victim to political ideologies. The article you posted conflates different things in one, explaining consent for physical contact is not the same as talking about sex to a 5 year old. And is there study that shows what the appropriate age for conversations on sexual health is? The main motivation mentioned is that kids are being exposed to it earlier by incident. But because it happens this way, does not make it right or proves that it is optimal.

  > A child should be aware of their consent to being touched or handled — or their space being invaded — from age 5.

This seems too late. By the age of 3 kids can clearly know and communicate if they want to be hugged, kissed, tickled, etc. no reason to wait until 5 to respect their boundaries.

  > sexual health education has traditionally been timed to coincide with puberty

I don’t have kids of that age yet, but from personal experience growing up, these talks to be had before changes happen. And it seems to be a common understanding.

It seems like an attempt to inject a pediatrician with a book on sex ed in aspect of kids health, where common sense would suffice.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6855897/

[tristor]

I'm not comfortable with my 16 year old sending nudes, but it's also something I have no meaningful mechanism to control and is something that creating a federal case out of it doesn't help. This is one of those situations where the cure is worse than the disease. Treating children who take nude photos of themselves as criminals is not the right way to deal with this.

I would strongly suspect 11 year olds behaving in a sexual manner likely did not receive good parental instruction. On the other hand, we have an epidemic of broken homes in this country, so it's unsurprising that this is also the case. I do not think that it necessarily indicates a situation anymore dangerous than the norm, which is that many kids are neglected because they don't have active engaged parents, and they may be exposed to things which are inappropriate for their age due to the circumstances of poverty.

I didn't grow up well-to-do, and I got to be exposed to some pretty gnarly things at 10-11 that thankfully my daughter has never been exposed to, because I was able to provide a better life for her. Unfortunately there are many 11 year olds that will be exposed to horrible things, and that will have an impact on their life. I don't want these things to happen, and I have taken every step I can to make sure my own daughter is not exposed to the same things I was exposed to seeing, much of which was a simple consequence of growing up in poverty in a bad part of town (such as seeing someone OD and die at a bus stop on my way home from school).

That's all we really can do in this situation, is be better parents, there's no meaningful way that society can step in for children with disengaged parents unless we want to criminalize it and institutionalize the children. As someone who also got to experience "the system" for children in this country, it's actually far worse than having an overworked single parent who lets you use the internet unsupervised and wander around on your own while they're at work.

[WindyLakeReturn]

Is this age range the ones most commonly sending photos, or the one most commonly caught (as a photo sent by a 16 year old is more likely to pass as 18 and not be caught by any detection software or manual detection)?

At face value, the idea that this specific age group is sending more such photos than the older cohort is surprising enough I would reject it as bad data without further research into why it is happening. Selection bias seems a much more likely explanation.

[formerly_proven]

Protection by way of the cops searching his parents house and him being charged for a felony or three. That’ll teach him to keep it (the phone, I guess) in his pants!

[danaris]

This is just evidence that our absolutist classification of this is unhelpful—treating the nude selfies a 16-year-old texts to her boyfriend as no different from photos of a 6-year-old forced into it, especially when you find those texts on the phone of either the person who took it or the one who it was sent to, without any nonconsensual distribution, is preposterous.

Calling fully intentional, consensual nude selfies or even sex videos created by teenagers of themselves "child sexual abuse material" is so very clearly a misapplication of the term.

That said, if those selfies do, by whatever means, get distributed beyond where the subject originally intended them to go, they need to be treated as...well, at the very least as revenge porn, which is now (fortunately) banned in a number of jurisdictions. So I'm definitely not saying this is a black and white issue; quite the contrary, in fact.

[godshatter]

From the report these are mostly 11 to 13 year olds we're talking about, and overwhelmingly female.

I do agree that "children" is too broad a term and that we should segment that population into different groups and focus on the younger groups much more than the older ones.

[danaris]

I mean, it doesn't matter whether the person taking the nude selfies is 16, 11, or 6: despite what the law says, it is painfully obvious that we should not treat that as "production of child sex abuse material" and punish those children the same as we punish adults who force children into such things.

I can see a reasonable argument for "11-year-old girls shouldn't be sexting their boyfriends", but the way to address that problem isn't to treat them as sex offenders. It's to get the parents to be more healthily engaged in their children's lives so that they can productively teach them why that's not a good idea in a way that is likely to stick.

[xp84]

Awesome. So they are “abusing themselves” and as a result to “protect them” from that we all have to accept weakened protections.

[seanw444]

But did you think of the children though?

[askiiart]

As a teenager, I'm surprised that more of it isn't self-generated. Teens are real horny bastards.

[amalcon]

What does your suggestion of "starting there" actually mean? What sort of action could anyone but the children themselves take to reduce or eliminate this behavior[0]?

I do happen to think this kind of privacy is important, but I also recognize that non-actionable alternatives won't get much traction.

[0]- OK, there are some the parents can take, but asking hundreds of millions or billions of people to act individually is not an effective way to solve a systemic issue.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I don’t fully understand what this is supposed to mean. It’s unfortunately (disgustingly) easy to invite a child into taking explicit photos of themselves over encrypted messaging. The process of convincing a child to do this is known as grooming, which seems to be a now fairly well known term in the mainstream.

Edited to add: it also says in the report that the images are predominantly 11 to 13 year old girls. these are not horny 16-17 year olds sexting their partners.