AFA of Indiana: Senate Addresses Teen “Sexting” with Indiana Law and Parents in Mind

The American Family Association of Indiana reports in its weekly email update:

Senate Addresses Teen “Sexting” with Indiana Law and Parents in Mind

Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Corrections, Criminal and Civil Matters held a hearing on a bill authored by Senator Jim Merritt regarding the dissemination of indecent material. The bill has been called the “sexting” bill because it mostly focuses on the problem of youth and teens sending and receiving sexually explicit mater in text, cell phone or electronic messaging.

I testified before the committee and was able to provide the committee with a summary of a new study from the Pew Research Center. Many of the media stories repeated these findings verbatim in their news reports. The study found that the number of teens with cell phones has jumped dramatically in the last few years with 58% of 12-year-olds owning a cell phone. Overall, 75% of teens now own a cell phone. That is a staggering number and important to understand the gravity of this next statistic. Pew found that 30% of 17-year-olds have received a nude or nearly nude images on their phones.

This is a significant problem for both youth and law enforcement. Distributing porn via cell phones is illegal particularly when it involves minors. However because this is a new arena, Indiana prosecutors are in a position of either charging a teen with severe felonies as if he or she is a child pornographer or totally ignoring the offense. Senate Bill 224 creates another option that addresses this problem. It sets a standard of expectation with a legal penalty, but it does not make a minor a lifelong felon and a possible registrant on the sex offender registry.

I expressed our support for the bill but warned that we do not want to open the door to allow a deviant youth to distribute child porn without serious charges. (This has been a problem with some efforts to address this matter in other states.) The real stroke of genius came from Senator Mike Delph who saw an opportunity to inject some parental responsibility into SB 224. Senator Delph pushed the bill into a subcommittee last week where they made some changes to allow a court to order the child and his parents to receive outpatient treatment or an educational program. (By the way, the Pew study found that sex messaging is a problem of near equal magnitude for both boys and girls.)

SB 224 passed out of the committee with unanimous approval (10-0) and should pass the Senate with ease. Fox 59 TV had a very good report on the committee hearing that you can view at this link:

http://www.fox59.com/news/wxin-sexting-bill-012610,0,1460006.story