Can You Sexually Abuse Yourself?

According to the state of Ohio, the answer is now apparently yes. Remember my post about sex offenders and Oprah? I discussed some of the local and state laws where I live in regards to registered sex offenders. Now comes the case of a 15-year-old girl in Licking Valley, Ohio, which is in a county adjacent to my own, and is garnering national attention. I first read about the story on Salon's women's issues blog Broadsheet (get it?), and they heard about the story from ABC.

What happened, apparently, is that the girl took naked pictures of herself and sent them to a bunch of people at her high school. Stupid, certainly. Probably deserving of some sort of punishment from some authority, yes. But does it make the girl a sex offender? Ohio law seems to says it does. The girl has been charged with "illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material" and "possession of criminal tools." (i.e. her cell phone) If she is convicted, she could be kept in juvenile detention until she's 21 and be forced to register as a sex offender (because she was caught distributing child pornography) for the next 20 years. Not only that, but charges may also be filed against the people she sent the photos to, since they were in possession of child pornography... a fifth-degree felony in Ohio. If the law is followed, they may all be forced to register as a sex offender for the next ten years, simply for, essentially, receiving a text message from one of their classmates.

This is not the first time kids sending sexy pictures to each other has made front page news around here. The Columbus Dispatch has regularly featured stories about local schools having trouble controlling the spread of sexually explicit material, usually taken by students of themselves, over cell phones. This is a culture where sexual images are readily available to anyone with an internet connection, but at the same time the age of consent is 18, by which time most teens have been dating for years. This is the first time I've heard of this level of charges being filed, however.

It's debateable when teenagers are truly able to make decisions regarding their own bodies for themselves in an adult manner, and of course it will vary from person to person. Obviously in this case the girl exercised extremely bad judgment, and is probably not ready for any of that. My position is that there's only so much control parents and schools have, in the end, and if the goal is to genuinely help the kids instead of simply control them, then the best solution is widespread sex education and availability of contraceptives. But that is only my opinion.

What this case does make clear is that our laws on this subject haven't kept up with changes in technology and resultant changes in our culture. To say that our culture is more sexualized may or may not be true (sure, girls didn't send naked pics over their phone in Little House on the Prairie days, but they did marry Almanzo from the next town over at age 16), but it is certainly true that more and more parts of ourselves are becoming public, and members of the digital generation need time to learn where to draw that line just as they need time to learn everything else. If my work in the state legislature has taught me anything, it's that when you make an arbitrary rule, it will have consequences you did not foresee... and usually not good ones.