Destroying the lives of young people

Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic,

It is extremely common for American teenagers to text one another naked photographs. Much less frequently, they get caught. If they’re discovered by a parent or teacher, they might get off with a stern lecture or a suspension from school. In an alarming number of cases, however, adult strangers get ahold of the images and proceed to systematically destroy the lives of the young people involved.

These destroyers are neither child pornographers nor pedophiles nor blackmailers. They are representatives of the criminal-justice system: police officers, prosecutors, and judges, often well-meaning, who prosecute kids as felonious sex-criminals, sometimes putting them on sex-offender registries for life.

...The result in many states is that it’s perfectly legal for two 17-year-olds to engage daily in unprotected sex with one another, but criminal for them to have a relationship in which they abstain from sex—but trade naked photographs.

...If it’s legal to have sex with an individual, it should be legal to consensually share explicit images with them.

Read more here.