Sexual relationships for minors is also illegal in most jurisdictions. Why do you need to allow minors to send erotic images of themselves when they're not allowed by law to engage in physical sexual activity?
Firstly, that's not exactly true. For example, the age of consent in 30 of the US states is 16 (as it is in many other countries), so many minors are in fact allowed to have sex (even with adults!) but still prohibited from sharing erotic pictures of themselves.
Secondly, that argument poses a false dilemma; the other option would be to change both laws.
Re the false dilemma claim, I didn't present it as an only option; changing both laws is, like you say, consistent and was in mind when I made the argument I did.
Whilst it would be consistent to change both laws that doesn't make it any the less inconsistent to specifically alter your laws to allow for relay of erotic images for those considered to be under the age of sexual maturity. Or do you disagree?
Only five countries in the world have the age of majority at 16. The vast majority set it at 18 or older. From a cursory look at the lists, most countries set their age of consent lower than their age of majority.
Whilst it would be consistent to change both laws that doesn't make it any the less inconsistent to specifically alter your laws to allow for relay of erotic images for those considered to be under the age of sexual maturity. Or do you disagree?
I think your framing of the question is misleading. Laws don't actually allow or disallow anything; they create incentives do perform certain behaviors. Since law or no law, kids will send pictures of themselves, I don't see exactly who are we helping by branding them as criminals.
Furthermore, I find the very idea of criminalizing such behavior to be obscene, and an insult to free speech.
>Laws don't actually allow or disallow anything; they create incentives do perform certain behaviors. //
That's just being linguistically obtuse. One can still do something that is not "allowed" by the law.
In your terms though the law is "disincentivizing" the relay of erotic images between minors. Why? Well I'd posit that maturer members of the community see that having naked sexually posed images of oneself available online is not especially helpful to the individual and may lead to negative attention, bullying, abuse and such. Making such actions illegal is saying that they are outside of the behaviour expected as morally normative.
>Since law or no law, kids will send pictures of themselves //
This is completely specious reasoning. Presumably then you're for anarchy as 'people break the law therefore it's wrong to have a law'. Great. But that doesn't speak to how to modify the law sensibly which is the locus of discussion.
>I find the very idea of criminalizing such behavior to be obscene //
This just seems like overly emotional speech; as if it's supposed to take the place of reasoned argument. Like "oh you find it obscene, now we must renormalise the societies laws to your personal preference".
Aside:
>The vast majority set [the age of majority] at 18 or older. //
I was quite surprised to find this. It's seem really strange to me not to treat a person over 16 as an adult. In my country they can leave home, vote, get married, have consensual sex, go to war, drink alcohol (with conditions), get tried in court as an adult, make medical consent decisions ... just not be called an adult, weird.
>"having naked sexually posed images of oneself available online is not especially helpful to the individual and may lead to negative attention, bullying, abuse and such. Making such actions illegal is saying that they are outside of the behaviour expected as morally normative."
So, behaving in an abnormal fashion that others label immoral... resulting in people targeting that person with abusive bullying...
Would this also reply to things like coming out of the closet as a homosexual, being a vegetarian, a pacifist, a male cheerleader, etc?
After all, we can't have children being bullied for being different, so we should criminalize it, or barring that, criminalize expressing that difference.
> Since law or no law, kids will send pictures of themselves, I don't see exactly who are we helping by branding them as criminals.
Doesn't this line of logic extend to any law that gets broken on a regular basis, which includes rape, murder.. basically all laws?
I've no idea if the law is effective at putting kids off taking pictures of themselves, but the fact that it isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it is 0%.
That's kind of one of the three legs of the article, that it shouldn't be rape for two 17 year olds to have sex and similarly it should not be a sexual crime for them to send each other pictures of themselves. Both of these "crimes" are clearly not the targets of their respective laws, so why are we creating "sex offenders" out of these people?
> Sexual relationships for minors is also illegal in most jurisdictions. Why do you need to allow minors to send erotic images of themselves when they're not allowed by law to engage in physical sexual activity?
In Scotland, 16 year olds can legally get married (without their parents' consent), and thus have a state-approved sexual relationship. They can perfectly legally take photos of themselves having sex, but the moment they show these photos to anyone else, they are evil child pornographers who must be punished.
