[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.