Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

This assault on privacy is premised on a very flimsy concern over CP, which is a problem but is absolutely no reason (just as terrorism isn't) to deprive citizens of their rights. I'm just curious - first of all, what happened to the large amount of child pornography and the industry around it that existed in Denmark throughout the 1970s? The pendulum certainly swings both ways, but it's strange and interesting that the fact that it was legal to produce CP in swathes of Europe has simply been swept under the rug. I'd assume those images and films are now hashed and searched for, but I'd also assume there are hard copies of them laying around in a plurality of Danish households. How do you prosecute possession of something that was legal at the time? Secondly, just to keep using liberal ol' Denmark as an example, since the legal age of consent there is still 15 years old, how do you "harmonize" spying on adults there with spying on minors in the rest of Europe? It's okay to read every 15 year old's text messages and look at their photos because it might be illegal in some other country? What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?

Sexual assault is one thing, but it's worth taking a minute to realize how arbitrary and ridiculous some of these laws are before you start throwing children into jail for texting... let alone stripping away basic civil liberties on the basis of "some people are bad so we can't have nice things."

> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?

Yes.

When I was 15, I had nudes of a 17 year old. Age of consent is 16 in the UK but sexual images of people under 18 is illegal.

Having that content was illegal; and I have the criminal record to prove it.

> When I was 15, I had nudes of a 17 year old

Did you have those nudes with the consent & permission of the 17 year old in question?

Is there more to this story than you are letting on?

The law does not care if it is consenting. The law indicates that a 17 year old is unable to consent.

There are many stories like this; there are even cases where someone got convicted of child pornography for sending nudes of themselves to their {boy,girl}friend.

It's bonkers. But it happens. Unfortunately all of this has become something of a taboo, but teenagers having sex is ... kind of normal. What exactly is and isn't acceptable is very hard to decide as a general matter, and far too often any conversation is shot down with "pedophile apologist!" or, in this case, baseless "you must have done something wrong!" assumptions.

When I was 10, I found a bunch of that legal CP of naked 10 year olds from Denmark. They were not hardcore, but to me it was just pictures of kids my age naked which was more interesting than the adult pornography I had already seen. Now in retrospect, I don't know why adults would have interest in them, and it's pretty sick. At that age though, you don't think about what adults are up to. You're like oh so that's what that girl in my class would look like naked. So for the same reason, it's not right to prosecute a child for being a child pornographer, for reasons that would have been patently obvious to Franz Kafka, i.e. if you aren't capable of making a decision to consent to appear in pornography, how the fuck can you be held criminally responsible for taking a picture of your own dick? (or asking your girlfriend for a selfie)

> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?

In some countries, you can have sex at 14, but only do sexting at 18. Total mindfuck.

Reminds me of the kinder egg VS AR15 ownership thing in the US

Or drinking age and gambling age vs serving in military…

Which is fascinating, because when I was a kid the drinking age in some places in America was still 18. It had always been 21, but the protesters against the Vietnam draft made it a big point that they could be sent to war but weren't allowed to drink at home so states lowered the drinking age to 18 through most of the 1970s. When I turned 18, Las Vegas and New Orleans were the only places in America that still had that law in place, and since then they both reverted to 21.

Now can they have sex in public ? Cause I guess that s the rationale: an image on a phone, or a discussion is more shareable than two teens fondling under a quilt. Also, the abuse potential.

Find enough innocent to change the jurisprudence, but I d bet that you can find so many more quilty parties that the law had to go one way.

Now I have a daughter and I was 16 before mobile phone existed. I m thinking what I would do if I see her sexting: probably nothing after 16 and a soft warning between 14 and 16 and a very strict one before, just because consent can only exist with maturity. Now if the guy is 30 and she s 16, I d tell her she s being an idiot sending him anything: it's not like he cares about her as a person, most likely and she s going to suffer under my responsibility or at best put him in danger. But, 16, starts to be her choice to listen or not and difficult for me to enforce anything.

Glad she s still 3 :D

In some US states you can't buy porn until you're 21 years old, but you can ACT in porn as of 18.

Laws are far from being logical or always making sense.

I think what's more fucked up is that in Germany for example it's legal to have sex with a 14 year old if you're 30 as long as the parents consent. It gives a whole different perspective to when people talk about other "less developed" countries.

I actually think that there were other EU countries that had even lower age limits than Germany.

That's not true afaik.

Someone under 18 could have sex with someone over 14 (but also still under 18).

As soon as one of them is older than 18 it becomes child molesting, and the grown up is in serous trouble.

The law makes not sense of course. It was a more or less recent change. The old regulation may seem bizarre given that example of the parent, but it was more close to reality in most cases.

Before that a 18 year old was not in trouble when sleeping in consent with a slightly younger friend (which is a common situation in reality). Now you would automatically get prosecuted as child molester if authorities would find out; no matter a relationship and consent!

That's the outcome of the CP witch-hunt in Germany… Quite normal things are now outlawed and can ruin lives of young lovers quite substantially.

> That's not true afaik.

Can you look first into Wikipedia, online law publication to verify before spreading misinformation?

You are morally obligated to edit your post and correct it with the true facts.

You're wrong, the other commenter is actually correct in recommending the Wikipedia article. For some reason the German age of consent article is weirdly specific[0]. It references legislation that applies both for 14 year old and above 21 year olds.

It's somewhat related to determining whether the child was capable of "sexual self-determination". But typically the abuser will only get punished if both the child and its parents file a legal complaint(at least that's what the law says).

I'm going to leave my opinions on this at the front door, but given how easily this law can be abused it's almost comical how often the german government has used the excuse of "think of the children" when they passed mass surveillance laws.

By the way as others have pointed out while the 14 and 17 year old can have sex legally, sending any kind of nudes actually triggers another law that may lead to imprisonment[1]. Making any kind of "pornographical" material available to children under 18 is a felony. Who would have known that the porn my classmate shared in highschool on VCR, if shared on an iPhone nowadays could have led to him being sent to the juvenile detention center.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzalter#Schutzalter_14_Jah...

[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/184.html

I can't edit my post above any more.

The other child posts are correct, I'm wrong.

My confusion comes mostly form a not realized, but once planed change in this laws.

In the end the current legislation seems quite sane.

But this can't be said about the laws governing messaging intimate content between teens. That's the other source of my confusion.

Anyway, thanks to bmn__ and rjzzleep for pointing out my error!

That’s how it is in the US, the federal government criminalize electronic sexual communication with a minor, but in person seduction in many/most states A-OK. A hurdle, but imagining the malicious compliant person that understands the boundaries more than the minor gives me the shivers. “Hm they’re so distant over text but they’re always keen to meet up yay”

This sort of goes to how much society should or shouldn't step in as a parent for people who are shitty parents. The vast majority of underage sexual assaults in the US are committed by family members or family associates. Right there in the trailer park. And there ain't shit that breaking into everyone's email is going to do to change that.

> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?

No, but he would be. She would merely be in possession of it.

For the record, Denmark has, indeed, punished a large number of underage offenders for spreading child pornography through social media. It's mostly been regarding clips spread without the participants' consent though.

Not sure whether other countries go by the age of sexual consent, but I've personally never heard any other definition of child porn than "sexually explicit/suggestive content involving people under the age of 18". Assuming that's valid everywhere, then it would indeed be child pornography since the Dane was under 18.

EU-wide harmonization of such laws would be a welcome step to take before privacy-invading measures were to be taken, and such legislation definitely should address underage sexting.

In the US, the harmonization of legal ages of consent operates under what are called "Romeo and Juliet laws", which vary from state to state, but essentially aim to prevent minors from falling into the criminal justice system as a result of sex with someone within a few years of their own age. https://legaldictionary.net/romeo-and-juliet-laws/

> What if a 15 year old Dane sends a dick pick to a 17 year old girl in France? Is she a child pornographer?

It depends on what country they are, right now.

Age of consent in both France and Denmark is 15.

Age of consent threshold is different from child pornography threshold.

There are many exceptions to the laws.

For example in many countries age of consent threshold is not enforceable if both are minors and the age difference is at most 4 years.

A 15 years old sending nudes to a 17 years old girl would not be punished as CP.

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