The NY Times today highlights a crazy case out of Pennsylvania where a girl was threatened with being charged for child pornography because someone took a photo of her in her bra on a cell phone. With the help of the ACLU-PA she's suing the DA. From the docket we learn this:

The district attorney has asserted that the girls were accomplices to the production of child pornography because they allowed themselves to be photographed. The district attorney has not, however, threatened to charge the individuals who distributed the photos.

This is a prosecutor projecting paranoia and shame onto an unsuspecting and innocent teen. Do they really think these kids were out to create child pornography? That by being photographed someone becomes a producer?

Understanding how new technology and media culture have changed the ways we deal with ourselves and our bodies is important. It's up to parents to instill beliefs in their children to honor themselves and their bodies and be conscious of its display. Law enforcement has no place equating the simple indiscression of a minor with the exploitation and abuse of children.

Feministing offers the perspective that what we have is deterrence through fear:

Some folks are so determined to impose social control on young women's expression of sexuality that they are willing to turn a few girls into convicted sex offenders in order to terrify teenage girls everywhere into toeing their prescribed line...

Let me say this loud and clear: charging young women with sex offenses for distributing photographs of themselves is social control by intimidation. It ruins young women's lives to make an example of them, to keep others in line. That is not conduct I can accept in the country I'm raising my daughter in.

On the Media dissects the statutes.

Finally, NPR covers a case in NJ where a 14 year old girl was accused of distributing child porn for posting nude shots of herself on MySpace. Deborah Jacobs from the ACLU-NJ is succinct.

"Teenagers need to know that there are serious consequences for sharing risque or compromising pictures of themselves, but trying to teach that lesson with heavy artillery like child-pornography charges — which can have lifelong consequences — is uncalled for. Who does it protect?" said Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey ACLU.