Sexting shouldn't be a felony, but it does have serious consequences

BOSTON — I am sure that Vermonters don't like the idea of teens sending sexy pictures from one phone to another. Nor do Ohio and Utah parents want their kids using cell-phone minutes to bare their bodies with their buddies.

Nevertheless, their state legislatures are among the first trying to sensibly ratchet down the penalties for sexting. They are backing away from laws that currently treat a teenager with a cell phone the same way they treat a child pornographer. They know there's a difference between truly dreadful judgment and a felony.

Over the last months, "sexting," that spicy combo of sex and texting, has created something between a moral panic and a reprise of "Trouble in River City." Parents who have barely begun to absorb the too-much-information on Facebook are now confronted with research suggesting that one in five teens has sent or posted scantily clad or nude pictures of themselves.

If sexting sends parents into a spiral, it pushes prosecutors into high gear. We've had Pennsylvania high-school girls threatened with child porn charges for posing. We have a middle-school boy in Indiana facing obscenity charges for sending a naked photo to his classmates. We even have an 18-year-old who sent nude photos of his girlfriend now listed as a sex offender alongside child rapists.

The panic not only erases the line between the stupid and the criminal, it dilutes the real horror of child pornography. If a 13-year-old taking a picture of herself is the equal of a predator taking a picture of children in sex acts, says Danah Boyd, at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, "we won't have the tools to go after the people we need to go after."

The mislabeling also hides the reality of this technological and social harm.

There is nothing particularly new about young people taking pictures of themselves. It's as old as the Polaroid. Nor is there anything new about the private going viral. It's older than the photos of a naked Jackie O on a Greek island. What's different now is that teenagers can be their own paparazzi and be vulnerable to the humiliation once reserved for celebrities.

As Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life Project says, "You have at your fingertips the ability to take pictures of a beautiful cherry tree or yourself in underpants. Teens are doing all that." Once you hit the send button, you've lost control. "Pixels," says Lenhart, "are devious and scurry out of your grasp."