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Combating Alleged Child Porn by Compelling a Minor to Drop His Pants?
It’s any teen’s worst nightmare: your girlfriend’s mother discovers the sexually-explicit video you sent to her phone and she reports it to the cops. That’s horrifying enough, but the cops in a recent incident are trying to take a 17 year old’s humiliation to the next level.
This week, a Manassas, Virginia teen was charged with distributing pornographic material in the form of a video of his own sexual endeavors. This in itself sounds a bit strange, to charge one for distributing material about him or herself. Doesn’t he have a right to that material, despite being 17?
Ready for the truly disturbing element of the story? Brace yourselves, especially my male readers.
In order to identify the teen in the video, the cops in charge of the investigation want to (ready for it?) induce him to have an erection for them all to observe via an injection in a hospital. I can see you all grabbing your crotches in terror now.
I would say “I’m left speechless,” because this is the kind of situation that that saying is generally reserved for, but I actually find I have heaps to say. My mind simply cannot fathom that conducting such an emotionally-scarring procedure is legal. Not to mention the legality of obtaining the video via a search of his phone in the first place. According to the Washington Post, only one individual has attested to seeing the alleged warrant that grants permission for this.
As noted by Carlos Flores Laboy, the teen’s appointed guardian, the cops’ desire to take photos of his erect penis more or less equates to trying to combat child pornography with child pornography. There’s some nice hypocrisy for you.
They’re using a statute that was designed to protect children from being exploited in a sexual manner to take a picture of this young man in a sexually explicit manner. The irony is incredible. As a parent myself, I was floored. It’s child abuse. We’re wasting thousands of dollars and resources and man hours on a sexting case. That’s what we’re doing.
-Flores Laboy
After obtaining the photos, analysts would need to use “penis to penis” software, or, as one man commented on the article, “penis identification hardware.” Get it?
Let’s take this case at face value — it is an attempt to wildly blow out of proportion a “sexting” conversation between a girlfriend and her boyfriend and morph it into a child pornography case that would instantly land the teen with two felonies and the requirement that he register as a sex offender. Lesson to all those lovers under age of 18 — don’t send sexy videos to each other. Just wait like, a couple of years. I really hope she doesn’t dump the poor guy for this…
It sounds almost like a police department soap opera. You’ve got drama, child pornography, underage lovers, and major hypocrisy. I feel pretty confident that the police department could spend its time doing something far more productive, like trying to nab legit sex offenders like the creepy old dudes that prey on little kids.
Thankfully someone other than just me came to that conclusion, as the department decided to forgo its forced-erection project. The public, expressing these strange things called logic and reason, seems to have convinced the cops planning to take the graphic photos of the teen’s privates to drop their perverted plan.
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Marisa Mostek (@MarisaJ44) loves globetrotting and writing, so she is living the dream by writing while living abroad in Japan and working as an English teacher. Marisa received her undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder and a certificate in journalism from UCLA. Contact Marisa at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.
Featured Image Courtesy of [Alton via wikimedia]
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