photo: Ayesha Walker - Youth Radio/ BY-NC-SA

Sexting, sending nude or provocative pictures to others via cellphone or the internet, is something that teens have grown up with and considered normal. However, according to the law, sexting is illegal.
Charging someone for child pornography or as a sex offender may sound like a stretch, but the reality is that kids are being charged as sex offenders because they are distributing child pornography.

According to Patrick Arthur, criminal defense lawyer in Pennsylvania, these charges are just a way to keep kids safe. “I can understand law enforcement. There are predators locating this crap!” Arthur says. “It's not innocent when an older person is picking up little Sally’s pictures. The whole notion of child pornography is to protect them.”

In the past, adults were the ones distributing child pornography, but now young people are the ones spreading their own pictures. Carrying a camera or a cell phone has become a habit. Young people are constantly trying to capture a YouTube moment or take pictures that they can put on Facebook or MySpace. What seems like an innocent activity can soon turn into a nightmare. Young people have full control when posting photos, but when they want to take them down, they no longer have the power to do it.

Teens can be hardheaded when it comes to their social media sites. They want things to run on their watch and on their terms. Just recently,  a friend heard about teen sexting charges and said, “What about freedom of speech?” Arthur says that young people will cite freedom of speech as important to them, but once a predator gets ahold of their pictures, freedom of speech becomes less important.
Arthur also mentions that child pornography is in high demand.
“If there wasn’t a market for this stuff than the production of this would go down,” Arthur says. “The stuff is getting on YouTube and there are child predators out there getting ahold of them.” What young people don't realize is that they're the ones feeding the market.

Young people can be naive about who they're actually sending their pictures to. They think their pictures are secure because they are sending them to people they trust -- friends, boyfriends, girlfriends. However, you can never be confident that that person is never going to spread your picture.

Before, predators had to work harder and go to different sites to obtain nude pictures. Now, all they have to do is go on different social media sites and copy and paste.

According to Arthur, young people still need adults to tell them or show them how they are harming themselves in the long run. “These kids go on these different pages and they have to realize that these pictures are out there forever," Arthur says. “These images can come back and haunt them. People are getting fired from their jobs because employers have come across those images. They are leaving footprints and fingerprints.” Hopefully, young people understand that by charging them as sex offenders or with the distribution of child pornography, it's not to pick on them, but to prevent them from becoming victims of sexual predators.