The students were caught when the 13-year-old girl's cell phone rang in class, and her teacher confiscated it, according to a police report. The girl cried that she would get in trouble because a 12-year-old boy sent her a "dirty picture."
The girl and the boy are guilty of playing you-show-me-yours-i'll-show-you-mine—a game we all played as children—but with a tech assist. For that they were both arrested and charged with "child exploitation and possession of child pornography," both felonies." Which is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous: both will have to register as sex offenders if insanity prevails and they are tried and convicted for their "crime." Laws against child pornography are supposed to protect children from the trauma of being exploited by adult predators, not from themselves, and certainly not from games of you-show-me-yours-I'll-show-you-mine. These two children may wind up traumatized for life by the overzealous enforcement of laws designed to protect them. And it that wasn't enough to make your head explode, check out this quote:
Louis Kraus [is] head of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.... Boys sext because they're proud of their new, more mature bodies, while girls sext because a boy asks them to, he said. Girls want to develop the relationship and think sexting will help, Kraus said. But he warns that's no different than a girl who might be pressured into sex before she's ready.
Girls have no naturally occurring interest in sex, girls are never proud of their new, more mature bodies, girls have no sexual agency or desire or urges or impulses of their own. Girls only want relationships and boys—sex-crazed boys!—know it and use it against girls to get pictures of their bodies because there just aren't enough pictures of boobs available to boys with access to the Internet.
Has this Kraus guy ever met an actual teenage girl?
