[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.