A FRESH tsunami of panic has arisen over young people sending nude or sexy pictures of themselves on mobile phones or the internet, with fears that children are being charged with making, possessing or distributing child pornography.
On this practice of "sexting", the experts and adults march in lockstep: we need tighter controls, ever more vigilance and reporting to authorities. A picture of a naked body amounts to porn, and if the subject is under-age, that means child porn. It has to be stamped out, to protect the children who create and receive it, and to dry up the porn supply for paedophiles.
But in all of this anxiety, the action to eradicate the problem is more damaging than any consequence that would flow from the pictures without adult intervention.
Young people certainly get themselves into trouble when sending their naked image to a friend, never imagining it might be sent on to any number of people. So kids are well advised to avoid this caper. Adults perform a useful service in discouraging them.
Without adult intervention, other kids at school might smirk or snicker, which is probably fair punishment for doing something reckless. But it's unlikely the image will lead to sexual violence against the child. The history of sexual violence is much older than mobile phones and it hasn't escalated since SMS or the internet.
Even if the picture reaches a paedophile, it is unlikely to affect anyone else. Paedophiles overwhelmingly operate within families and target children who are close and trusting. The idea that these predators seek out the individuals they have seen in an image is more the narrative of films than reality.
The chances are the picture will do no harm to anyone in a secure home, beyond a few spasms of shame that the child will handle as part of growing up. The problems for the child escalate out of all proportion, however, when adults weigh in.
It's then that the child is really traumatised. The picture gets reported to the school, which might report it to the police, who might lay charges. The fear of the courts for a kid and his or her family is psychologically devastating. It's the worst outcome, repairs nothing and does nothing to guarantee safety.
So what about this fearsome threat that the children are guilty of child porn, the production of which might entail long jail terms? This menace of criminality is legal nonsense.
Child porn is against the law, but kids who send one another naughty pictures have no intention of producing such a thing. The idea these rash young people might be put on trial and punished for producing child porn is preposterous. Unfortunately, our society believes all images of naked youngsters are child porn, whereas sexting is clearly a type of self-expression, misguided and vulgar, perhaps, but without malicious intent and thus basically innocent.
It also belongs to an anxious political correctness to assume that the exhibitionist kids are humiliating and debasing themselves in order to win friends. We assume their actions are the product of some undignified hunger rather than spontaneous hedonism, albeit imprudent.
Without adult interference, the risks are tolerable, whereas once adults get involved, the damage is immense. As kids discover their erotic consciousness, we will be embarrassed one way or another by their exhibitionism; and new technologies sometimes augment the twinges. The big challenge for adults is not to increase the threats but to encourage decorum, just as we have done for thousands of years.
Robert Nelson is associate director, student experience, at Monash University.
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