Florida authorities are cracking down on 17-year-old girls seeing pictures of themselves naked:
A 17-year-old Cape Coral girl has been charged with child cruelty and possession of obscene material for depicting the sexual performance of a child after authorities found pornographic images of herself on her phone, computer and her MySpace page. The teen was charged Thursday.
Investigators found 42 photos with eight meeting the criteria for explicit sexual performance on the teen’s phone, according to Lee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman John Sheehan.
According to a Lee County Sheriff’s Office report:
On May 4, the South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received 11 Cybertips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children containing pornographic images of a female juvenile on MySpace. The female in the images appeared to take the pictures of herself in various stages of nudity.
On May 11, Investigators were able to determine the girl’s identity and the fact she is a student at Ida Baker High School through the Web site http://www.myyearbook.com and by consulting with school resource officers.
The teen told investigators she took several pictures of herself in different areas of her house and uploaded them to her MySpace account to lighten them. She then e-mailed the photos to her cell phone and sent them to her current boyfriend and two ex-boyfriends. Five photos of sexually explicit conduct were found on the teen’s computer.
On July 27, a 14-year-old North Fort Myers girl was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography and was later charged with cruelty to a child after deputies say they found pornographic photos of her on her cell phone.
Granting that the girls clearly intended to distribute the photographs, this strikes me as a victimless crime. Surely, the girls have seen themselves naked at some point. And, taking a leap of faith here, I’m guessing same is true of their boyfriends.
And, in any case, “child cruelty” seems a particularly odd charge here.
