While in DC we’ve got THE TEA PARTY & THE CIRCUS, in other news…
The NYTimes reports on a real problem that needs to be addressed, not criminalized:
In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.
But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Slate’s Emily Bazelon reported this week on a federal court rebuke of a district attorney who cracked down on three girls over seminude photos. It’s an area of interest for her. Earlier she had a piece asking when should sexting be illegal?
TechCrunch links to a Pew report finding that kids who buy their own phones are four times as likely to sext. And NYMagazine reminds us that older people do it too. Radley Balko had a January column on “the boneheaded logic behind treating ‘sexting’ teens as if they were child pornographers.”