Students leave campus at the end of the day at Cañon City High School on Nov. 9, 2015. Authorities last year announced a sexting scandal at the high school that reportedly involved hundreds of students. (Helen H. Richardson, Denver Post file)
Re: Colorado sexting bill gives DAs proper tools, April 5 editorial.
I agree with your editorial that many prosecutors are reasonable and will indeed only press charges against teen sexters who ve committed acts of harm. But let s not forget about the research on this topic: 7 percent of people arrested on suspicion of child pornography production in 2009 were teenagers who shared images with peers consensually. This tells us that we simply cannot trust all prosecutors to only press charges against people who share photos without permission or commit other acts of exploitation. If prosecutors truly don t want to charge consensual sexters, who in some cases are also victims of sexting-related abuses, the solution is simple: make sure laws against sexting don t give them that option.
We owe the utmost compassion to traumatized teen victims of privacy violations, and giving them that compassion means that our laws must exempt consensual sexters from being prosecuted alongside the perpetrators who violated their privacy.
Amy Adele Hasinoff, Denver
The writer is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado Denver.
This letter was published in the April 8 edition.
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