We can’t let the police ruin a silly boy’s life in a flash

THIS week we turn to the cautionary tale of Simon, 14 (not his real name). He was alone in his bedroom at his dad’s. As you do, he sent a Snapchat image of his undercarriage to a girl of the same age at his school.

His unsuspecting mum didn’t know what Snapchat was. (For those of you who don’t either, it’s a picture-sending app with the supposed USP that the image deletes itself after a few seconds – but the problem is that it’s still possible to take a screen-grab of the image and download it to your own phone, and then it’s yours – either to keep for private enjoyment or share for public consumption. Unfortunately, the girl Simon was attempting to charm chose the latter course.)

The next day Simon’s mum was informed her son had ‘taken and distributed indecent images of himself’, as if Simon had spammed the entire school community with naked images of his own privates.

Her son was interrogated by the assistant head (with a policeman taking notes) so forcefully that Simon could feel the teacher’s spittle on his cheeks. The boy confessed.

The incident was recorded on a police intelligence database as a crime of making and distributing an indecent image of a child. Furthermore, the file will remain live for at least ten years, so if Simon ever wants to work with children it will pop up if an advanced CRB check is carried out.

ALL this is very sad. Simon is now lurking in the library at lunchtime and braving the sneers of pupils who flash him the image on their iPhones. My heart also goes out to his mum. She says her son was ‘at best naive, at worst a teenager’ and went on: ‘It’s called sexting, apparently’ – as if this was the first she’d heard about it. ‘It happens all the time. It’s how teenagers flirt these days.’

Not just teenagers. According to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 123rd Annual Convention in Toronto, adults sext all the time too (88 per cent of a recent sample of 870 adults aged 18 to 82 had done so in the past year). ‘Sexting was definitely more prevalent in our sample than I expected it to be,’ revealed Emily Stasko, a specialist in adolescent sexual health.

This calls to mind (I’m so old I remember) for some reason the scandal of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, an aristo who featured in a series of salacious Polaroids, as did various of her lovers (in one set ‘Marg of Arg’ was pleasuring the so-called Headless Male, in a second set, another man was pleasuring himself to camera in a bathroom). It seems quaint now, in this age of traceable IP addresses and hacked Ashley Madison accounts, but the identities of the two men in question despite half a century of fevered gossip and speculation have still not been established.

It strikes me that those Polaroids from the 1960s are in many ways exactly the same as digital sexting now. Same old same old images, only the format is new. The key differences in the two cases are traceability and age of consent. Then, a Cabinet Minister (the Headless Man was rumoured to be Duncan Sandys, Minister of Defence) could get away with it. Now, politicians such as MP Brooks Newmark and US Congressman Anthony Weiner have had to fall on their swords for being caught sexting – though what they did was perfectly legal, both being well over the age of consent, just very, very silly.

But poor Simon, it turns out, had no idea that the image was either illegal or indelible, and said this explicit Snapchatting went on all the time.

The only thing that appals here is the heavy-handed response of the police and teachers to this typical clueless schoolboy episode.

The law needs to catch up with social-media values faster than you can send a Snapchat – and so do our schools.