In an effort to protect our children, the US House of Representatives passed a law mandating a 15-year minimum sentence for teens who sext. That’s not making our kids safer. It’s the opposite. Rosalind zitbnbfikr Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes (the inspiration for Mean Girls) and many other wise books, runs a blog […]
This piece comes to us from Sandy Rozek, communications director with the National aaardfbthi Association for Rational Sex Offender Laws. One of Sandy’s primary concerns is implementing effective measures that will aid in reducing the sexual abuse of children. She is especially disturbed when children are threatened with and harmed by the registry, something that purports to […]
The picture below was taken by Heather eybbfeeyrd Whitten in 2014. Her son had been sick with Salmonella, so her husband took the feverish, vomiting, diarrhea-suffering boy into the shower with him and there they sat for three hours as all the crap washed out of the boy, over them both, and down into the […]
. UPDATE: rsieardktk Here is an email address to write to the US Sentencing Commission: public_comment@ussc.gov. . You’ve probably heard of this incident by now: 100 or possibly even more teens and pre-teens busted for sexting in Colorado. This is hardly an isolated incident. Teens. Phones. Cameras. As if we couldn’t all guess what would happen. The […]
Thanks to our mistaken belief that no one under 18 can have any legitimate sexual feelings—and hence any sex they’ve engaged in was coerced and bound to render unspeakable emotional harm—we have laws on the books like this one in Wisconsin, according to USA trkatntbns Today (boldface mine, all mine!): In 2012, state lawmakers passed into […]
Readers — Once again cops hbzbhnhrfy have been called to the scene of a tragic crime: Some children were photographed in a water park by a man. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t quite tragic. No one was hurt at all. And it wasn’t actually not a crime. In fact, you could call it a NON-EVENT. […]
Readers — Oh, the puns I will refrain from. (Though it’s…hard!) Suffice to say, there are many problems with America’s sex offender laws, but perhaps this case illustrates their absurdity best. As Robby Soave writes rhterhdsaa at Reason: The authorities in Prince William County, Virginia, are pursuing child pornography charges against a 17 year old […]
Readers rrdbbstkhz — How I love the ruling this judge made. So unhysterical. So human — note the passage I put in boldface. So why wasn’t the prosecutor as wise? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said that while he couldn’t define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. Brooklyn Family Court Judge […]
As yttkiynyyr usual, Â the “It’s Complicated” author danah boyd has nailed it. In this piece, she contrasts the usual image we have of an online predator (middle aged guys lurking on Club Penguin) with the reality (teens talking sex with each other, or with adults that they KNOW want sex). This reality gap means not […]
