NAKED INJUSTICE FOR A SILLY BOY
A 14-YEAR-old boy who sent a naked picture of himself to a girl at school has ended up on a police data base.
The crime of making and distributing indecent images has been recorded against the anonymous teen — and it could stay on his record for ten years. A rather serious outcome for a moment of madness, one for which this boy has effectively been criminalised.
Speaking about the consequences on Radio 4 this week, he said he thought it was ‘just annoying really’ that it could cast such a long shadow over his life. The boy, who is from the North of England, has had to come to terms with the fact that ‘something I did when I was 14 could reflect badly in the future’.
He is another teenager who has had to learn the hard way that images and words you post on the internet can have serious consequences. Details of his record could be disclosed to putative future employers, a black mark against his character before his life has really begun. It has been officially recorded as a crime although the police decided not to pursue prosecution. Yet once they had been officially notified, what else could they do? They’re required by law to record the crime.
There are times when one has to sympathise with today’s teenagers. As if adolescence and the sudden arrival of a bewildering smorgasbord of sexual feelings are not enough to contend with, they also have to deal with the minefield of social media and smart-phone etiquette. Modern technology has enhanced the capacity for social calamity by a thousandfold. Idiot kids read about footballers and models sexting and sending nude photographs of each other, and they want to do it, too, cos it’s cool, innit. They are full of hormones and chutzpah and hardly any common sense.
Even sadder, the boy only sent the photo to the girl because he thought she liked him. He took it by himself, in his own bedroom on an app called Snapchat. This automatically deletes images and messages after ten seconds, however, the girl saved it and sent it around to all her friends. So he can add total humiliation to his list of woes.
Her name has been added to the database, too, as has another teenager who was involved. So we can’t complain about harsh treatment on gender terms — even if the Criminal Bar Association has said the case highlights the dangers of needlessly criminalising children.
They are right. This has been a cavalcade of stupidity. The boy was silly to take and post the picture; the girl was sillier and perhaps even cruel to distribute it; did the teacher who interviewed the boy have to call the police? Did the police have to crack down with the kind of vigour and determination so often missing when pursuing real criminals?
No one comes out of it well. More’s the pity.